What do a 57 Ford, a 58 Rambler and a 61 Chevy have in common?
I will share the Ford story first and if you are nice I will share the other two stories.
It started out as playful fun. It was a Friday night and I was a teenager. Several of my buddies and I jumped in my sisters 57 2 door ford six banger with a stick and went to town. As usual everybody was cruising, honking horns and yelling at each other. Several cars gathered at a local parking lot. Casually teasing each other and goofing off. Someone happened to point out a car owned by a rival high school football jock. It was parked between a couple other cars with a space between them.
Smedlap said, “We should go pick up his car and put it sideways between those other two cars. Then when he comes out he can’t leave because he will be blocked in by the other cars”. As half the football team gathered to listen and discuss the idea, everyone cheered and agree it would be done.
For those of you that don’t understand look at diagram at the bottom of the note.
So a few from the team, plus a few other unsavory souls, surrounded the car, reached down where ever they could get a hold and picked the car up. We walked the car around until the passenger side tires were tight against the curb. Surprising how much a football team can lift.
Did I forget to mention some of the people involved just happened to own cars one and three. That fact made it a lot easier to position the cars so he could not get out. We moved the cars before we put car two up against the curb. Then we drove them back in place.
Now to wait for the guy to come back and try to leave. In the meantime, what should we do.
Alf said his big brother once told him about a trick they used to play. They would get a bunch of guys to stand behind a car and lift it while the driver put the car in gear and revved the engine. Then they would count to three and drop the car. The idea was to see what car could leave the longest black marks.
Things were going just fine as we had picked up and dropped several cars producing some rather impressive black marks. That is when I got a not so brilliant idea. I assumed that the higher the speed on the tires before you dropped the car the longer the black strip. “My turn I yelled”.
I proudly drove up with Connie’s green 57 ford stick shift. I pushed in the clutch, put the car in third gear, (high gear) in anticipation of the lift and started to depress the gas pedal. The car slowly rose as the guys picked it up and I continued to depress the gas pedal. I watched the speedometer go past 90 as I heard them say three. The signal to drop the car.
I heard a brief scream of the tires and that was followed with a loud clunk and an ever-revving engine. I had blown my sister transmission. Well not the whole transmission just third gear.
Now the issue became, - How do I get this home and how do I explain what happened?
Lesson learned, Use a lower gear the next time…..
Did I mention what happened with the parked car???
He struggled only a few minutes trying to decide how he could get out before he decided he couldn’t. We watched and heard him say he was going to call a tow truck. No cell phones in those days. After he left to make the call we moved the cars back the way they were originally. When he arrived in the tow truck we all had a big laugh. Made my personal pain a little better.
