What was your first car?

Once in a great while my father would remember that he had sons and actually try to spend a little time with us, or do something for us, be a father. He was the service manager in the Ford dealership and one day he had us go to Kellogg with him and mother in her car as she was going shopping or something. I think that I was about fourteen at the time. We spent three or four hours helping him sand a pickup that he was fixing to paint. Actually, now that I think of it we spent of lot of our youth as child laborers without pay.

Anyway, when we were done dad took us out to the parking lot where there was an Austin Bantam, and announced that it belonged to us, and that he would help us fix it up. Austin’s were about half the size of a full size car of the time. It was a piece of shit of course but we all piled into it and dad drove it back home, on the shoulder of the road because it would only go about twenty or twenty-five miles an hour. He parked it in the back yard and promptly forgot about it and us.

It didn’t have a generator on it but I found one somewhere and rigged up enough of a mounting system to run a fan belt to it. It didn’t charge but I did get it on there. I did manage to get some charge in the battery a few times and got the cranky little four cylinder motor running on three cylinders. Then we would hop in it and drive around for a while. A lady called dad at work one day complaining that I was hot rodding around town at fifty miles an hour terrorizing everyone. He just laughed at her, but came home and whipped my ass anyway.

After a few months I didn’t bother with it anymore, by then I had learned how to hot-wire the neighbors cars for joyrides. In 1958 dad came home with a brand new Ford with a police interceptor engine in it for mother. Dad also had a pickup and Terry camp trailer and they went on a little vacation for a few days. He, he, he, I was the only other person in the family that ever drove that car. In such a small town it’s a wonder that they didn’t find out, ah, I didn’t get a whipping I deserved. LOL

A bit more about my childhood. I was a very quite kid (You can thank a Dale Carnage course and years of being a service manager for my being a loud mouth now…LOL), and I spent a lot of time hiding from my parents and brother and sisters. I just wasn’t like them and if dad happened to notice one of us he always had a reason to give us a whipping. Not that it wasn’t justified at times I suppose, but I got a hell of a lot of whippings simply because I was there, collateral damage I guess you might say. My brother was always getting us in trouble, I never could figure out how I was involved when I wasn’t even with him. But to dad we where, umm, hell, I don’t know, but we both got whipped.

Anyway, that piece of shit car sat in the back yard until we moved to Utah a few years later, then dad towed it to the local garage and gave it to the man there.

You know what irritates me? Besides almost everything that is. LOL. Thank You notes and letters. The Food Bank was having it’s annual money drive a while back and it’s blabbed about on the radio all day long. They have people at the radio station on hand to take pledges and such. So when I was downtown I stopped by with a check. Yesterday I got a thank you letter from the food bank. Grrrrr…. I don’t do things for recognition and thank you’s, I do them because they need to be done. It bugs me that they waste money on paper, an envelope, a return address label and a stamp, I want the money spent on food. Not something I’m going to throw in the trash to become landfill material. What a wasteful country.

Venus is the only planet that rotates clockwise. Since Venus is normally associated with women,
what does this tell you!

The great successful men of the world have used their imagination... they think ahead and create their mental picture in all its details, filling in here, adding a little there, altering this a bit and that a bit, but steadily building - steadily building.

We haven’t heard from Dr. John for a while, I wonder what that old tit licker is up to these days. Busy passing around a collection plate I suppose. Gotta go, be peaceful everyone.