Topic: FoMoGo FoMoCo long version

therunwaybehind	-- 05-06-2019 @ 4:56 AM
	Off the beaten child My father kept a maple yard stick with brass ferrules on the end hung up in the hall closet where the broom and the floor wax was kept in the house he had built in 1946. He would use it to correct any misbehaviors which my mother detected in day. The level was in her words when she threatened before anything happened, "until you can't stand up." Expensive toys My grand parents had at their house in East Williamson, New York, toys that my uncles had played with before they went off to join the Navy and Army Air Corps in WW-II. There was a red cast iron tractor with thickly nickel dipped wheels. The front wheels had a tall central ridge and the rears had lugs that were forbidden by signs on the public roads. I learned later it was probably an imitation of a Fordson. (Editor’s note: Some early multifuel Fordsons had a downstream vaporizing device to add air to a rich mixture after the engine had heated up enough to not need to burn from a tiny tank of gasoline. This early development may have trapped me later into some air leak events that were a disaster for my engine as well as riding on a grader behind a Drott dual fuel bulldozer.) There was also a red cast iron car or what my grandmother called an "auto." I later learned it was imitating a Desoto Airflow. It had white rubber tires. I ran them on the patterns in the living room carpet at my grandparent’s house pretending the rectangular corners were roads. Surprise My grandfather owned a general store he called "East Williamson Mercantile, Company, Incorporated, Henry Van Eenwyk & Sons, prop. In the back of the main store building was a shed with two large bays that served as a warehouse for stock until it was put on shelves in the main store building shelves. It had a large green truck in one bay one day when I was taken there. I can picture it in my mind now and would identify it as a Ford with dual rear wheels and a tall green stake rack unusual in height on a flatbed. The cab had a conventional nose and the grille was 1946-48 or late 40's with vertical bars of creme color. It had extra blinkers on the fenders and clearance lights on the cab top. Later my uncle explained it was not a 2-1/2 ton as I had thought from a brochure of the early 50's but in NYGVW a 7-ton with extra helper springs and a hydraulic dumper lift. That was in 1983 so maybe the GVW was less in the late 40's. This truck had 16.5 inch wheels not the 20 inch of bigger trucks of that era. My grandfather traded this truck every 6 years. It had an electric two speed rear to climb the Dugway hill on old New York 104 near Ironduquoit Bay that was being resloped by steam shovels for years. There was another truck also that my grandfather also traded every 6 years but on an alternate 3 year skip. I did not see this truck until later when my elder uncle gave me a ride in it to pickup floor covering in Rochester, NY. I would now say it was a 1951 with the wide bar grille with the protruding bumps and fenders better integrated with the main cab. It had only one seat and I had to hang onto "what!" to keep from sliding back to the rear door as my uncle pulled away from a stop sign or traffic lights. It was red and lettered on the sides of the panel rear section. Through the years it was not always a Ford. Sometimes it was a Dodge. The big truck was always a Ford. (Editor’s note: February 7, 1919 The Supreme court ruled that Henry Ford had to operate the Company for the benefit of the shareholders.) My grandfather owned a lot of Bethlehem Steel stock. History My grandmother subscribed to National Geographic and my grandfather bound up the year’s issues from 1915 at the end of the year and piled them into big boxes in the attic of his house. At some point after I could read, I began untying the twine and looking at the advertising in the magazines. I decided I liked the 1934 cars best with their vee windshields and grilles. I don't remember any Ford ads but I did notice the Lincoln. I also noted the early ads for all white tires. (Editor’s note: In 1912 tire makers began adding lampblack to the tire rubber and white tires with titanium dioxide disappeared. After that only sidewalls as an option were white.) Possession In 1953 my father decided to trade in the 1949 Plymouth my mother had coveted when they traded in the 1940 Chevrolet her father had given her to attend college in Albion, Michigan. He had had troubles getting the Plymouth six to start in extreme cold with it's automatic choke. His friend the principle of the grade school also had bought a 1949 Plymouth and both of them kept the dealer wrecker busy towing the cars in to sit in the warm dealer garage and start with no troubles. August seemed like a time to get a special order in at a good price. As a sponsor of high school classes my parents knew the Ford dealer's children. He also knew one of the salesmen for L.A. Talaski Ford sales. In the showroom I was bored. My father was in the closed glass surrounded office of the sales force. The dealer came over and handed me a an ivory colored plastic molded model of a 1953 Ford Tudor. He wound it up and showed me the key was underneath. Then he set it off across the floor. I was focused. When my father came out, the dealer made a show of giving it to me. I was a war baby, not one of those later called a Boomer who were one year after the War. I had very few toys. I remember specifically a red and green livery Railway Express truck that was not very authentic and had the top of the van stove in and the wheels wobbly from when my one year older sister tried to ride it. It was sheet metal. Lithographed sheet metal was a big part of toys of my era. The cab was a bit heavier metal and all red. Years later the Ford had warped from the sun coming in the South window in my upstairs bedroom and shining on some long plank shelves my father had laid into the sloping eaves of the attic that he had finished with knotty pine tongue and groove wood. I ran the Ford on the linoleum floor in my bedroom. There was also a sheet balsa wood Piper Cub model my father had assembled but not painted and wound the rubber band propeller drive and released it in the dining room to attract me from the living room some time before. The car and the airplane sat on the shelves. Neither of these toys was a Christmas or Birthday present. Later when I was kept home from school with respiratory ailments, I was given balsa and tissue paper models to build with an X-acto knife and Testor’s glue. I built them on a breadboard pinning the balsa after cutting out the die-cut formers and stringers to wax paper over the plans. My father also helped me build a Strombecker version of a B-24 “Liberator” bomber of preformed hard wood by sanding to smooth shapes and gluing with the enclosed yellowish-brown powder wood glue. It had plastic propellers I attached with enclosed pin brads. Under the nacelles was something I was curious about represented by decals. My father told me these were turbochargers for high altitude flight. I was impressed! (Editor’s note: The B-17 also had turbochargers and disk brakes, hardware that figured in automobile design in the future.) Full size Early Ford V-8 The car my father bought in 1953 was a Country Sedan station wagon with the V-8. The engine type was the last L-head design that Ford offered for sale. It had 110 horsepower. He took our family on a trip to the West Coast where we visited my uncle who lived in Fresno, California, at the time. He lived in an adobe house that he opened up every morning at 6 to gather the morning cool and use the thick adobe walls to keep it cool all day. He was married to my father's sister who had moved to the West Coast in WW-II. We also visited Chinatown in San Francisco. We stopped at a Chinese store and I bought a Soroban calculating abacus similarity and a plastic imitation ivory Rik-Sha. We ate egg foo jung for breakfast next door. Later we drove to Mare Island shipyard and Naval base but did not enter. My father had been in the Navy as an officer right after I was born barely avoiding a draft notice when my grandfather had sent him a telegram telling him to get off the train heading to report because Officer Candidate School had accepted him. We visited Sequoia where a picture of the Ford was taken in the Wenona Tunnel tree and then Yosemite where we swam in the chill Merced river and watched the firefall at night. The umbrella tent with rear extension that had been bought in the time of the Plymouth was our accomodation. We did not need a roof rack with the station wagon. This car later got coil helper springs and a welded on trailer hitch when in 1956 the family purchased a Holley 20 foot travel trailer. It was weighed at the Montana weigh station at one point and the total weight was 5000 lbs. with the canned goods and other gear. The hitch weight was checked by unhitching and placing the hitch dolly alone on the scales. That was on a later trip to Glacier National Park. The Ford had 6-ply tires from the beginning but they were Firestone and eventually weather checked very badly. In those days they had rayon cords which were better than the cotton cords of pre-War cars. The trailer had 8-ply US Royal tires provided by our neighbor who owned a tire store. It had come with 6-ply Mansfield trailer specific tires and one had blown out on the very first trip to the Smokey Mountains and a park near Knoxville and Oak Ridge where my father studied at the Oak Ridge Reactor School in a Summer school to introduce the Physical Science Study Series (PSSC) new texts and curriculum. I met the glove box and various film badges and dosimeters as well as the face of the solid carbon reactor at Oak Ridge. I bought a neutron irradiated dime that I kept for years until I gave it to a tree trimming crew from Asplundh in 1976. On the hill behind the drive inn theater at the trailer park where "And God Created Woman" starring Brigitte Bardot was playing a sound announced that a dark Merc had appeared. Bobbie who was with me knew the owner and we went up and the owner showed us the S.C.O.T supercharger equipped flathead in the car. Major Side track When I was in Junior High shop, I passed an Allison 1710 V-12 on a pallet that my father had purchased for $1 as surplus from the Battle Creek Surplus Center and had shipped C.O.D. to the freight depot in Bad Axe, Michigan to be used in instructing students in aviation just after WW-II. The cost was high to move it but eventually Russ LeCronier, the principal agreed to fund the purchase and freight. Exactly where the supercharger was on that one I did not really mark but blended it with the Potvin GMC Rootes installation on the Calvin Rice dragster that exceeded the German Mercedes and AutoUnion standing kilometer records of the 1930's. (Editor’s note: The Allison centrifugal supercharger was at the rear of the engine and had a two speed dampened drive.) The Allison had been disassembled and reassembled by classes that expected a boom in aircraft that did not manifest as they ended up in the Korean conflict. Jet aircraft made the piston inline vee engine obsolete. Somehow, I learned it had overhead camshafts driven by bevel-geared shafts up the back of the cylinders but not that it had 4 valves per cylinder. (Editor’s note: The Ducati motorcycle had a drive like this and also the Velocette Venom and the Norton Manx had dual overhead cams similarly driven) Civilians used the Allison in Unlimited Hydroplane races that occurred on the Detroit river and the Arfons Brothers used one in their dragster in Ohio. In 1957 a flathead Ford engine burning nitromethane fuel as well as a fuel burning Harley-Davidson motorcycle led the records and eliminations in NHRA competition. Then it was gone. Editor’s note: 1955 was the first NHRA National at Great Bend Kansas and Calvin Rice won later after a rain out with his flathead not the blown Chrysler.) Forensic Examination I got a reputation for fighting on the playground in grade school as girls in Kindergarten who were slightly older and bigger hit me on the head with wooden semi-trucks and later I needed glasses to see the blackboard after 4th grade. Sunday dinner with other members of the Trustees of the Presbyterian church one Sunday led to the County Coroner taking me into his coffin showroom for a private talk about overhead valve V-8 cars that were coming. The elders thought that this would lead to a rash of crashes. He described the spleen removal and liver lobe removal required to remedy the traumatic injuries that occurred when a car hit a tree on rural pavement by running off the road. I pictured the surgery as happening at Hubbard Memorial Hospital but kind of missed the point. I did not drive and had no expectation of ever owning a new car. A year or so later I walked behind Goebbel Brothers Chevrolet with the son of another trustee on the building committee who was raising pledges to reroof the church and brace the walls and add new pews. There was a 1955 Chevrolet there with an open driver's window and blood on the seat. Maybe six months later I saw a red 1955 Chevrolet coupe that belonged to the New Holland baler dealer's son and had dual exhausts. Was it a PowerPak? (Editor’s note: Bob Goebell had offered me a 1954 Corvette he had in his showroom when I was 10. I looked in in the open hood and thought it had 2 carburetors on it’s six cylinder engine. It actually had 2 air cleaners on 3 carburetors that year.) Seduction My Uncle August had been in the Army and had a shower in his basement. He took me for a tour of the limestone quarry and we rode down in the elevator and then we were on our own to avoid the huge Euclid quarry dump trucks on the surface once we got there. He took me over to look at one that was parked. Then avoiding the moving ones, we went over to look at where the current working face was. Ingersoll-Rand drills were preparing shot holes for dynamite. Back at his house that night he got my father and the rest of us to look at the beautiful chrome water fall front in his 1949 Desoto interior. The radio and heater and all other accessories were right there. I did not think about the day my father parked on the wrong side of the road coming back from dumping trash baskets at the City dump. He got out and got a shovel he prudently kept in the trunk of our maroon Plymouth four door sedan. Then he went over across the road where the city snowplow had surrounded a man's car with a snow bank and began to help him dig out. Meanwhile my sister and I sat in the car as it became cold. A blizzard was blowing snow over the top of the car. Then my sister and I saw a cloud of snow approaching slowly. It was the snow plow now plowing out the side we were parked on. It swerved when it saw us but too late it hooked the right front fender. Sitting in the middle of the rear seat I fell forward and hit my mouth on the ash tray in the middle of the front seat back. After, my father told me not to mention I had been injured as it would tie things up. I looked like Bogart from then on. My youngest uncle in New York rolled over my grandfather's blue four door Dodge driving back from visiting his girl friend when he fell asleep. That left my grandfather with only his green 1949 Dodge coupe which he offered to me in 1955 or 56. Another sedduction involved the new overhead vavble vee 8 Buick "Fireball" and the smooth "Dynaflow" transmission. The school business teacher who had a office products sales in his front porch and whose wife did book keeping for a fee got one in 1953. He invited us over on Sunday to look at it including the bank vault sound of closing the doors. He had a cruel scar in his face where non-safety glass had cut his face in the crash of a Packard years before. Then my uncle August replaced his Desoto with a similar Buick hardtop two door. Buicks were popping up nearby. Our neighbor across the street had owned Buicks for several years. They were the older straight eight types and in some ways were of the era of the Pontiac that the business school teacher drove. His wife was the new Buick owner. This wave of preference would hold off until 1956 to reappear in my other uncle's garage as a replacement for his 40 Ford. Meanwhile, the Ford dealer's older son was given a 1955 Ford Sunliner convertible in yellow and black colors. We never saw it but in Oak Ridge the trailer park owners daughters got an identical car. I saw them driving it with the top down under the trees and out of the park with one sitting on the tonneau in the back seat , feet on the seat like a parade car. Bobby, the boy I met took me to see another Merc in a new house garage. It was sitting on it's frame with no wheels with boxes of electric window lift kits and electric door kits from Honest Charley Speed Shop in Chattanooga on the floor beside it. I thought the Merc looked like something way too heavy to be my style. My mother bought me flannel lined Bell brand denims in the Winter in "Huskie" sizes. There had to be a way to escape. My father stood 5 foot 5 and 1/2 inch tall and had to get a waiver from President Roosevelt to get into Navy OCS. My driver's license when it came said 5 foot 6 and 150 pounds which was about 10 pounds heavier than my father. My mother had put on a lot of weight and my grandmother was taller and very heavy. I stopped looking at those sorts of statistics. I could climb trees and jump over a bamboo rod at a 3 foot height. Disaster The Ford dealer's son rolled over his car in broad daylight near the County Farm at a turn in the main road M-53. He survived. The car was taken to a place behind the East wall of the mechanical shop at the dealer ship. Time passed. Then , the next year, the dealer's daughter was given a 1956 Ford Crown Victoria with the chrome wrapover the top. The son borrowed it and promptly rolled this one over! At the same place! His dad was angry but undeterred. Both the Ford dealer and the two brothers who owned the Chevrolet dealership were very heavy men who sat a lot. I passed both dealerships every day going to grade school. By 1956 I could walk just a short ways to the high school built in 1951. To get there I had to pass the Lincoln-Mercury dealership and the next door Oliver tractor dealer. Minnick, the mercury dealer, was a fit man and a Catholic like Talaski. The Oliver dealer once gave me a cast aluminum tractor model. I hung out in the County garage through the years with the Austin-Western four wheel drive plows as well as the Walter dump trucks which got Vee plows and used the gravel road dressing under frame angle blades for snow removal. One smaller and rather dull Duplex dump truck remained in a bay. The mechanics called it the "morphendike." The Bad Axe Galion road grader with dual rear wheels and straight up front wheels sat at the other end of the garage. I avoided it. 1957 found the dealer's older son in a used car from the lot to the West of town by the radio station. It was a repainted black 1954 Tudor with the once new Y-block V-8. A nice easy to preserve choice was the idea. My mother had had some confrontations with this student at both the Junior and Senior prom about bringing alcohol into the gym. Senior Prom night was the end. News the next day said that the Bean Queen beauty and Jerry Talaski had been struck from behind by another car the previous night. Both cars ended up behind the East wall at the dealership. According to ( Huron News?, Huron Dailey Tribune?) not the Bay City times that I used to deliver, Jerry was not driving and the driver and his date from the front seat had survived. A 1957 Ford Fairlane 500 hardtop driven by a USAF sergeant from the Port Austin radar site had been coming down North Port Crescent from the North and at Filion crossroads had crashed and vaulted over the 1954 Ford turning onto that same road from the West. The back seat couple had died instantly. The front seat couple spent a long time in the hospital. (Editors Note: Ford Motor introduced standard features and an option package in 1956 they called Lifeguard Design that included a padded dash and sunvisors, a deep dish steering wheel, seat lap belts, double locks, safety rear view mirror. Seat belts were first and option in 1955. Cornell University did the testing.) I saw a 1946 Ford club coupe parked on the lawn in front of the Talaski home before that time. It was light gray and had the striped grille and side trim that differed from what I later learned was the 1947-48 model year. It also was leaner than the later car I learned was a Sedan coupe. I liked the tighter coupled look of the later car. This car belonged to L.A. Talaski’s younger son, Dwight or Dewey. It soon disappeared. At first I heard it drive up as I peddled newspapers. Later, saw it up on the lawn close to the house as I pedaled by on my bicycle. Deception When I actually owned a 1948 Ford coupe, I wanted to brag that it had a 59A V-8 and a Stromberg 97 carburetor. Uuhhh! Wait, try 59 A-B is that original and just as good? And the closest I came to a 97 were 4 Stromberg 48's a few years later and then 2 rebuilt 97's the rebuilder wanted to be free of in 1964. The 1948 I owned had a Chandler-Grove 94 which later was made by Holley. I helped a friend to buy all the spare Stromberg jets from Warshawsky/JC Whitney in a clearance of catalog parts before I left Michigan. My car had 3 hubcaps. Two had the multiple red slashes and one had the blue Ford in block letters. The rear bumper had an oval stamp with Ford script. The hood had shortened chrome strips. The emergency brake cable had been severed with bolt cutters or something in the driver's compartment near the actuator handle. The ignition switch was all boogered up. The trunk trim was not present and no holes for it were there. The title presented one fact, it weighed 3100 pounds. I hoped for something more like 2000 pounds. I didn't expect a weight like an Indy car but more like the weight of a Volkswagen beetle would have been nice. Was that possible in malleable iron, cast iron and rod iron sheet metal? One cool thing it did have was 1948 Mercury wheels with 15 inch diameter for newer tires. I even cleaned them up and put tubeless valves in them. Problems? Not in 10 years. No evidence of a Columbia 2-speed rear end the current owner said had been removed. No extra vacuum or electrical connections were in evidence anywhere. As far as a possible earlier Ford target for the iconic 59A V-8 I did not like the 1935 looks and the 1938 was so-so. Exactly how the springs and axles would work out I thought not so well but I could put the brakes on the earlier car also. The whole thing would have to happen in my family's back yard. I did not immediately go looking for a target and across the street from the grade school and elder lady backed out a 1937 Ford Tudor one day in an odd color. She was not interested in selling and I had no money to persuade her. A 1937 V-8 60 showed up one day when my friend and I were checking out an auction site at a farm that had many old vehicles. My friend eventually bought a 1939 Fordor with the 85 hp engine. He began to "make a dragstrip" next to his father's shopping center with a Drott dual fuel bulldozer and me on the former County towed hand wheel grader. That quickly turned into a pitching wave form. His father traded the 1936 Cord four door sedan where my friend had jammed the preselector gears to another collector for a blue metallic 1948 Lincoln Continental convertible that had a transplanted L-head V-8 replacing the V-12. I considered searching for a Lincoln Zephyr 3 speed set of closer ratio gears for my car but the Zephyr gears Warshawsky had fit into the regular Ford box and seemed maybe to be too weak. Later when the input shaft to the transmission in the Lincoln failed we learned it had been welded and the transmission was some bigger unknown. It’s V-8 was probably the larger truck V-8 of over 300 cubic inches. Why it had the welded input shaft as if no clutch disk could fit or the input shaft was too long I don’t know. Maybe the ¾ and 1 tons with a bigger 3 speed did not ever have the 337 as stock and the later Lincoln use was only with automatics. Restored to original condition Two Model T's showed up after the new Mackinaw bridge was completed. One was restored by a former Navy quad 20mm gunner that had faced Kamikazes in the Pacific. I had met him before when he delivered my Sears 3-speed bicycle in 1954. He was a peddler driver for Blair Transit that avoided the long haul and sat on a motor scooter tire tube for comfort. His brother had done the sheet metal work and painted the 1926 Model T roadster pickup. Before starting his own bump shop the brother was the body man for the Buick and Pontiac dealer. The owner of the T had sand blasted his frame and heavy irons and had even poured and scr*ped his own Babbitt bearings. He loved giving rides in the box to children around the neighborhoods. The other T was a 1923 Touring with electric lights. For a while he also gave rides and I took one. He worked as a general handy man for his family's Ace hardware after dropping out of McComb Junor college. English was his downfall. He was the favored soloist at the Methodist Church of the teacher who thought I was a bully and once gave me an assignment to write an essay on why half a loaf is better than none. I could not figure out where that was coming from. I wrote about a skid row bum who was very lazy and how that was better than starving to death. She reluctantly accepted the essay. I squeaked through English. The owner of the 1923 Touring hit a curb going around the corner just down the street from the empty grass he parked on. One of the wooden spoke wheels shattered and he took the whole car apart and stored it as parts in Miss Allen’s garage until he could have time and money to restore it totally. Two Model A's showed up owned by the son of the former Studebaker dealer. I had gotten to know him after he was sent away to Military School in Jersey City and then spent some time in Detroit. He had a photograph of he and his wife lowering a souped up flathead V-8 into a white 1932 Ford roadster with cycle and bobbed fenders in the Michigan style of about 1947. One of the Model A's was a 1931 Two door in faded red. The other was a clean and repainted blue 1928 Two door. One Halloween on Devil's night vandals pushed them across the main road and toppled them onto the front doors of the high school. The wooden body frames were destroyed. At this point I no longer had a picture of myself as the owner of an Early Ford V-8. Only recently have I turned my attention to such a project even in a research sense. Decades later I met some Fords of the early V-8 vintage at a gathering at a former T-Bird's drive-inn location that was used to build a branch of a 150 year old bank in Highland Park. That ended with a bank takeover by a Wisconsin bank and a rename as Talmer in 2008. The parking lot show after hours continued. These owners were different than in the 1950's. They bought their cars and one told me he would rather have a Buick. Wasn't that a jingle once? Ask the man who owns one? Packard flak! Ford family of fine cars? The Chinese restaurant next door was a destination for couples. A magazine that was going to feature cars that would be in the Woodward Avenue celebration was not interested in any of my digital modelling. After my friend gave me a Canon camera in 2010 I took some digital photographs of some of the cars to remind me of features that tested my memory. More recently I found some Ford V-8's at Dick's in San Marcos but he is closing after passing away. They also had magazines and AMT and JoHan models from the 50's. That library is going somewhere. San Francisco-Oakland airport terminal had a Ford V-8 used in an aircraft with propeller in 1998 when I visited my son who worked at MIPS. At last at the Edison Museum in Fort Meyers, Florida I saw a genuine 59A along with some description. I might have seen one in a 1940 Ford coupe at the Talmer get together but it had been replaced with an 8BA. I saw some stock 1932 Fords at the Henry Ford museum. I only write this to assure you that I was looking not as a secret passage to a treasure unknown to the public. Through the years folks have commented that they like my words better than my images so I have created this short historic page as a best contribution to the Early Ford Club now that I am a member. This is not "Just the facts Ma'am" nor is it a complaint. I hope it shows the character of those I knew and how I bounced off the less deeply involved. The current owners of these fine automobiles are appreciated for keeping them in my view. I sold my 1948 Ford to someone who had an old Graham at the Rose bowl swap meet in 1976. He was the only person who had a car there. I also gave him all my old magazines. (Editor’s note: I tried to explore automotive design in Troy, Michigan after I parked my car in 1987. New buildings held Efficient Engineering and Troy Design associates. Off to the East was Modern Engineering where the future head of American Motors and then Chrysler Jose Duderweiler from Brazil migrated from Canada as a French connection. I tried to make contact and eventually found that any work on the Cadillac Northstar 4 valve dual over head camshaft design had moved to the equivalent Lincoln. Falconer was bringing technology from England via Canada and I looked instead at KITPLANES magazine and I learned about the Papa Mustang and it’s V-12. The Outboard Marine designed corvette V-8 moved to Arizona and then faded out. Both Ford and Chevrolet developed roller camshafts with hydraulic lifters for what was coming to be called small blocks. Pushrods held for a time. Fours and v-6’s dominated sales. The Fog One day while taking the shorter way to Birmingham from Troy at night in 1964 I was passing by the GM Milford Proving Grounds. My headlights picked up a shape off to the side of the road and then it jumped into the road and hit my front end just off center. The hood flew up as the latch was destroyed. The engine began to overheat as the radiator had burst. I tried to see if I could creep on and then stopped. Within moments a State Police car appeared. As usual he was totally outraged as his car had two stags in confrontation on the door seal. Eventually, he went on and I was left to get my friend's car following me to tow my car back to Troy where a test driver lived. I found parts for the grille and had the test driver weld the cracks in the fender after bumping it out roughly. No hammer welding with a 1/4 inch strip of copper left rough ragged breaks. The hood was reformable and a used latch mechanism made it stay down. The only other body damage to the vehicle in the time I had it was when a pheasant in flight crashed through the passenger windshield near the Ann Arbor airport. I replaced both panels with tinted safety glass. Well there was the time I had taken the rear bumper guards off and an attempt to push the car to start it crunched the lower right trunk edge. That I filled with Black Knight filler. Getting the car body sanded and painted and some minor rust repair set this all up. At sale it was worth $600.00 after 10 years growing from my payment of $100.00 in the beginning. It did not have an engine number on the title but used the number on the firewall. As near as I know it is still in the Inland Empire of Southern California. Eleven years later,I sold off my last car in 1987 and stopped driving. Women had run into my car in California and Michigan in what seemed to be deliberate acts by owners of Chrysler and American Motors cars, specifically three different Dodge Darts and an AMC Pacer as well as a Dodge van. With my last car gone I walked out to Army Tank and Automotive Command in Warren to look at the bid room specifically related to anything that might prevent a Bradley from being airlifted by a C-17. The YC-15 prototype I had witnessed the first flight of couldn't fully fill out the CXHLS goal of 1965 set for building 13 in Long Beach. I went on to Prratt & Whitney and in 1980 specified the clipped fan JT-9 that became the F-117 fan for AMST. Now after Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom I have no questions. In 1962 the Iranian ambassador to the US's son lived next door to me in the residence hall and borrowed my typewriter for a year. When he returned it the tab was broken off the zipper. An Iraqi in the English as a second language across the street program lived on the floor below and was teased a lot taking it with good humor. Good News for the Ford L-head V-8 The local dealer received several very nice trades of 1953 Ford V-8 sedans and he saw them as an opportunity to support the local football team. He set a bargain price to compensate any reluctance to obtain a technology that was being left out of the new cars. The boy across the street bought one and used it to deliver the Detroit Free Press mornings. He became quarter back of the high school team. He was two years older than I. A boy down the street who lived closer to the dealer also bought one. He used it to deliver the Detroit News in the after noon. He became center of the football team. He was my age. Who my age became the quarterback? A farm boy who managed to practice even without a bus ride also became the boy friend of the girl I thought was the prettiest and brightest in the school became quarterback in my Senior year. The dealer shop manager loaned me the king pin reamer so I could replace the bushings in my '48. I also replaced the tie rod ends and the spring shackle bushings both the rubber ones and the hard fiber filled ones. With an alignment by the new recapping shop I was ready for two new tires. My father had traded his 1953 V-8 two tone Saddle Tan and (Antelope Beige?) Country Sedan with three seats for a 1957 gray (he loved gray, he painted everything he could grey unless it needed aluminum silver.) Country sedan with two seats and a six. Even with the addition of the travel trailer 120 horsepower was more than 110 hp so why not go with the OHV six? In 1962 at Christmas I codrove a residential hall dish machine coworker's 1954 Ford six TuDor to Miami with retread front tires. There we met the Intercoastal Waterway bridge keeper's daughter and her newly purchased and painted black 1954 Ford OHV V-8. I painted the wheels for her with the glass jar of touchup paint she had been supplied. The engine in my father's trade-in had to have new main bearings replaced and then was put right on the lot West of town. I took Driver Training from a former truck driver at the high school in a 1959 Plymouth with an OHV V-8 and dual controls with a three speed column shift. I did drive my father's 1957 on the narrow concrete roads of the upper penninsula of Michigan near Tacquamenon Falls worrying about the 4 inch drop to the soft shoulder and swamp. That car developed a whooping, whutting rear axle bearing failure that the mechanics studied by lying on the floor in the back as he drove. The 1959 six he traded for was alos a country Sedan in gray and fated to have the same rear axle bearing failure. What didn't fail was the engine screaming down the hills in second gear on the newly openned TransCanada Highway , above Lake Superior in Ontario, with the trailer pushing it. I was no longer living at home in 1962 when my father dropped the station wagon body style opting for a four door to carry a single ended canoe on a roof rack and chose the big engine (almost) a green painted 352 cubic inch version of the new for 1958 Interceptor with a single two barrel Holley carburetor and a long and lanky shifting 3-speed transmission. At least the linkage was very sturdy looking. A cotter key had fallen out of the transmission end of the one in the 1959 in the middle of a turn in an intersection in the middle of Ontario on the way to New York leaving the car locked in two gears. I had to crawl under the low belly avoiding the hot exhaust to assertain the fault. Then I walked over to a garage I saw to buy a cotter key. Typically for the lean operations in Canada they had none. I did obtain a nail which I bent to temporarily get us on our way. Reliability? How about all the Buicks we saw in Colorado in the 1950's steaming beside the road? Rabbit Ears pass and the Trail Ridge Road sorted them out. But how about that Ford 3-speed synchromesh transmission? I put a pre-1935 straight-cut floor shift in my 1948. My friend the Studebaker dealer's son knew where to get them and always had one. I blew the reverse out by frying the rear tires in the gas station driveway when I first got my car running again in 1959 when I was old enough to drive on the street and had finished driver training. It made several local trips jumping quietly out of gear in 3rd unless I held it in with my leg. One day past Ubly headed for Cros-Lex a rival in football in dropped the cluster and case bottom and I had to turn it around and rive home in high all the way. The next three speed had helical low/reverse. It lasted until a run at the new Ubly Dragway. The clutch linkage was worn and just did not give a clean shift into second. The main drive bearing failed and whut-whut-whut I coasted rapidly to the turnaround road. I replaced that one with a strange looking object that the REA diesel supervisor in Ubly had in his basement. It was converted at the rear to early Ford but the front input leaked even with a new slinger and new leather seal. Maybe it was for a different rotation and the helical gear acted as an oil pump instead of evacuating the area? That ended the use of the Ford torque tube rear end that had brand new axles I had bought at an auction the school kids in Dexter had featuring obsolete parts donations from the local dealers. it rained that day and I was the only bidder once the sale closed. Even those rare 15 inch 5-1/2 inch bolt circle wheels, with tubeless tire valves, had to leave to give a common spare. I suppose it was only half an Early Ford in terms of ride and vibration that headed down the US 112 and then the Ryan Expressway past Joliet Prison to join Us Highway 66 in 1965. Arriving in Canoga Park where my father's sister lived it took up a new search for a less vocational life style. Every day choose a new target reception area or guard and a maybe a personnel department from the student activities supplied book of research locations. Hughes Thousand Oaks, Hughes Pepperdine, Rocketdyne Canoga Park, Lockheed's new Rye Canyon, Douglas Santa Monica Clover Field, North American Sabreliner Division, Air Research on Sepulveda, Hughes Space Division got an interview to develop code for the TV camera on the surveyor moon lander with someone who my father had worked with on radar at MIT and now a Phd, then an insider, my uncle had had an assistant manager who had a fraternity brother who now worked in Personnel at Douglas Long Beach production facility. The news was without an actual engineering degree only Technician jobs were available and Santa Monica wanted a B average and impending Master's degree. The ceiling later in salary would be $800.00. Just loaning your Complex Variables book to a roomate or tutoring another roomate to a B+ in LaPlace transforms and loaning him the book made them engineers and even one on to grad school and an Automotive Engineering professorship at U of M Dearborn. Production was a risk with the flight testing of the DC-9 begun but Long Beach and a move away from my aunt and uncle looked better than a lower salary and job managing code for scheduling and task times at Rocketdyne. I still have a memory of my Ford sitting at the guard shack at Gate 6 with the chain link topped by triple strand barb wire fence and gate and the few visitor slots. In a month I would be in the huge parking lot to the Southeast and Building 13, the former C-133 production line location would be my post at a wide drafting table with someone's abandonned drafting machine and some rolls of vellum. In the next two years, both of the men I had loaned books would come and live in my apartment until they found jobs. Another man who had worked on the dish machine came out but found his own way to a job at Santa Monica setting up Digital Machining paper tapes. He had worked for Ford Rawsonville one summer measuring flow rates on the new Motorcraft 2 barrels and attaching the little tin flow tags. Another room mate one summer worked full time nights while going to school at the Ford transmission plant where both his mother and father worked. He installed the greased ring of roller bearings in the input main drive. His father was a millwright and set up the wood block floors for new machines at line yearly changeover. The only hot rod folks I met in california was at Reath automotive behind Douglas on Cherry Street. I was looking for a bellhousing for the New Process wide ratio transmission that I thought was similar to one in a 1946 Ford 3/4 ton owned by the REA supervisor. (He also had a 1934 Ford V-8 Tudor sedan with plumbing pipe exhaust and Gambles glass packs. He had chopped down a maple tree in his front yeard to make the bird's eye maple dash insert in his Ford.) Both instances of trying to use this transmission gave brushes with NC maching advertised as giving a surface finish of 1/10000. Sadly the surface was as much as 1/2 inch inaccurate in position necessitating a visit to more conventional mill, maybe a Bridgeport once, so precision, yes, accuracy, no. Shortening the torque tube and driveshaft worked better in the U of M Engineering Mechanics Laboratory where the two guys I loaned books to worked after the dish machine. In the 1990's I took a written test administered by the Michigan Secretary of State on Heavy Maintenance and passed to receive a license for a year. The only thing I had not done hands on was set the pinion clearance. The announcement of Mr. Goodwrench crate engines came soon after. Folk wanted packaged OEM. I would say that not building an engine where dust could fall or installing one after building it in the Winter cold and then in a very hot day putting it in and starting it avoids risks spinning a bearing in a large displacement V-8. I considered each year going to the SAE show in Detroit but the closest I came was walking over to the SAE headquarters and talking to the receptionist, twice. The state had my niche and it wasn't as an engineer much less a professional one. Atlantic Research once told me so. Fitting in Test pilots accept me as a digital predecessor. Combat pilots wish I could bend the rules a bit. I once had all the Douglas Commercial transport manuals DC-9, DC-10 and DC-8 all dash numbers as the stretches came. Only airlines got these. I had the bird farm report of the line positions for every assembly and subassembly each day as it was issued. I had the KC-135A and B as my first flight manuals. The C-132 mockup loomed in the storage area behind the plant as a reminder of what might have been in large cargo. The A-4F was my first Flight manual as my boss insisted I check the graphs made by Aero Performance and they insisted I not let my results be seen outside as they decided what width pencil was used. The A-4 had come from El Segundo and then went to Palmdale to build what would not be in inventory when Desert Storm began. I attended Tailhook in 2010. I flew the the F-18 simulator and the F-135 simulator but not the C-2. What I expected to find at Early Ford V-8 People who were familiar with the St. Paul, Minnesota facility. I was there in 1984 before I decided to go further West taking a copy of the St. Paul paper to deliver to the USN facility at Monterrey. Huh! Music? Spy Stuff? old Spanish trace? Wells-Fargo Pony Express? A quiet voice as I crossed the Twin Bridges over the Potomac in 1983 had suggested St. Paul. The second reinforced toothed timing belt failure woulr end that trip just outside Grand Rapids, Michigan. My parents were in Europe on a tour when I called and I walked to Grand Haven to the West headed for Chicago. I remembered one of my cousins worked for K-Mart there as I approached. A week later with a new belt installed I was headed to Saginaw and then to Troy again supporting cargo on Eastern Airlines to Managua until 1987 and neither a rebuild kit nor a rebuilt carburetor could keep the car on the road. A possible road trip to Nicaragua with goods for Nicaragua Medical Relief I had found in a Detroit Free Press article fortunately was avoided before this. The gasohol was not the friend of someone dry since 1981. I need to be careful of friends. Eighty-five in a Sixty Five This makes sense as the horse power rating of the first Ford V-8 and the later one that diverged from the smaller V-8 of sixty horse power. Another way would be 21A rods in a 59A block. That is more about 21 vs. 24 hours in the sense of the studs holding the heads on. The intrigue of this came from the City police man with his gun and gun belt and his lock up separate from the next door County Jail. It was a the Boy Scout Leader of a troop sponsored by the public school that he was going to move from his own car where he believed that the Spicer rear end locked in a realtionship to speed that he could use to find any speeders in secret. The Salisbury rear end of a Chevrolet was not open ended in this. These were for the newer 50's cars. The older ones had Hotchkiss or spiral bevel. He believed he could easily run down any of those lesser ones and they would not dare to try. I did not see his actual car until the boy who I raced in Phys. ed and discovered that by applying my openning I could chase him down to eventually let him pass the finish line in a 1/4 mile dash first. That boy bought the car and showed it to me after the police chief died of a heart attack in his fifties. The police chief had run the school bus at top speed in the hills on the way to the Boy Scout Camp near Bear lake. He said he had taken the governor off because he had to get back to the city before dark to protect it. The city had a state police unit headed by a Sargeant on the West city limits and a County sherrif's office on the court house square but he patrolled mostly the east end near the railroad tracks. The idea of no governor perhaps played to the Governor General of Canada which I saw later when Mikael Gorbachev reviewed the Royal guard with fixed bayonets just before he was deposed. This was decades before that event of course. 1955 was going to lead to a racing ban by the Automobile Manufacturing Association in 1956 and hark in my subconscious to the 1940 Ford with moon tank that the lady friend of the boy I met in Tennessee said her husband still had. NASCAR had begun in 1948 with a 1940 Ford driven by Red reigning as champion. When my father told me I could not build a hot rod I understood him to mean no California parts. Anything from the dealer seemed to be covered. My plan to build with a Mercury crank and bored and stroked 3/8 from there with a ported and relieved 59A block seemed out of the question even if I could find a way to do it. Floyd Clymer's book kept me company with bullies on the playground. I had no ready answers for the tough older high school boys on the way home who claimed my father caused them to get bad gradses and get drafted. Washing my face and my sister's face with snow in the winter or throwing frozen ice balls at us caused her to go across the street to wait them out and me to go to the County garage. I had been almost choked out by the grade school principal's son in the tall grass near the woods when I was four. He was two years older. His brother one year older called him off, saying "You failed let him go." The younger son explained he could execute me if I resisted in anyway. How much did a 85/65 ticket on US 23 near Brighton cost in 1963? I think it was about $3 a mile and a need for a personal appearance before the Justice of the Peace. At some point with the points assigned for infractions I was scheduled for an interview in Lansing but I skipped it before I went to California. The Ford dealer had tried to plead his son's car no contest but had failed. I was not going to get trapped there. In 1984 I successfully did plead no contest to 45/25 and get a sentence of one day in the county jail when I had no money for bail and a Russian bible in my winter coat pocket. It wasn't the motorcycle that was subject to this ticket it was the overhead camshaft. The marks on the road were for an airplane to use a stop watch. Only Indianapolis cars had over head camshafts in the early Ford V-8 days. Some Ford V-8's had contested but none ever won. The supercharged Novi's never won either with their V-8 form. Four cylinder cars ruled the paved oval track. Was a Model T 25 horse power and a Model A 45? Later the Baptists deacons seemed to class women in T and A categories. When the substitute preacher who owned aused furniture store had a heart attack in the pulpit I thought "He had a Model T one ton." I knew nothing about steroids like testosterone and androsterone until I began looking up molecular weights in my Handbook of Chemistry and Physics. Then I made a t-shirt in red letters with "Flat Rate 288" to signal a Motor's Handbook kind of work and later "Blue Flame 292" to cover the big six I had missed. It wasn't to make a hideout or a sleeper that I put the 6 emblem off a spare car the wrecker driver gave me to get a new fender onto my car. Nope, it was to celbrate all the good miles my father's sixes had run after the V-8 of 1953 was traded in in 1957. When custom back hoe showed up to "hand dig" my pool hole in the 70's it was powered by a Ford six not the tractor four. The operator was proud of his machine. When folks wanted to call my father to account they came to me. He was not responsible for anything. He had insurance. Chemistry is the media I was the Chemistry laboratory assistant for the year I was in Chemistry as a student. Maybe I protected the girls from unwise impulses that had injured one in a class several years before, appealing to the janitor as the keeper of the properties of strong chemicals had not served her well when she ran out into the hall. I knew acetone, toluene, banana oil, turpentine from model airplanes as well as ether from plastic assemblies. Ethyll alcohol from shop for sh*llac was added to my household though the grade school principal used that. Hydrochloric acid and Ammonia openned together in the fume hood combined in the lab stock room to give a powder on all the bottles. It wasn't immediately apparant. I had to spend several days wiping all the bottles. The farm boy who pushed me down from behind and crushed my coronet bell as I hit the ground while walking to the shool bus to take us to the new band room at the new high school had a younger brother. I threw him into the tuba case some time later and he did not come back. My father made the younger brother his chemistry lab assistant. I ignored the snub. A farm boy who worked with chores was no match for a boy who lifted an engine block and moved it from the basement two floors to set on his bedroom floor after thoroughly cleaning it. How did I get it into the basement as a dirty thing? I don't remember just that Wisk was better than Tide and GUNK had begun the outside but now it was vulnerable after being boiled with caustic and bored out. At this point keep track of the 59A-B block as being the host of a 3/4 race grind camshaft and no longer in my possesion though the new owner wants to sell it back and give me a chance to restore my car. This is the jumping off point for me joining the Early Ford V-8 Club if you allow for a time jump from 1965 to 2018. Computer coding folks think that a picture is worth fractions of a tenth of cent. Photographers would like it to be a digital negative and copies worth about $10.00. I have to build a model to replace the metal image I have as held in my hands. I found it takes months to do that from photographs in a Floyd Clymer book and the computer with two video cards in SLI costs over $3000.00 and the graphics software as cheap as I can get it is $500.00 and several iterations of previous computers and software had to occur in order to be at 2010. As someone who took a lot of Teramycin for respiratory illnesses and had stay with the grade school principal's two sons to recuperate from measels, and chicken pox to give my father assurance he would not get sick and miss work I needed more than one carburetor for my car. A four barrel was two expensive and complicated and only maybe a Lincoln had one. I took my father's yard stick away from him and put it up when I was 14 but it was years later that I went past where the first 35 Ford 3-speed dropped it's cluster and checked out a report of manifolds and multiple carburetors in a gas station in Peck at a cross roads. Tattersfield had four just for racing. Barney Navarro had three for large displacement. With a 3/4 race camshaft the REA manger had two though I don't remember the builder of his manifold. His heads were shaved to approximate the Denver high altitude heads that fit Floyd Clymer's locale. My car could not get a parking or storage pass even for my first year at college so it was put up on cinder blocks with the water drained. Did I find all the water? Would it be still be whole when I returned after summer recess? I had run a mile at my full speed and went though my wall on a 1/10th mile cork elevated track in the old Waterman Gymnasium. I had lifted 250 pounds over my head in Phys ed. I had volunteered for an Exercycle ergometer study for a coach and put out over 1-1/3 horsepower. Now, where was my car level. After the 1964 drag race transmission failure I welded reinforcement onto the new clutch linkage and used the 1948 gears with brass synchronizers in the final 1939 case my friend would sell me. I needed this one to last. It didn't. I blew it out when I jumped on it at a crossing street and a car appeared at the top of the hill on state street. Bud-do and a quick coast across the street. That is how I came to be looking fof the odd ball the REA manger had in his basement. It was drilled for what looked like a Ford rear bearing retainer and I bought a new one at the Dexter auction the day I bought the new axles to clean up the threads on their ends. There is one other part I put on my car that altered it's Ford configuration and that was some NASCAR type 60/40 valved shock absorbers for teh rear end that were discounted by Ford's Autolite factory in Saline when they had to divest to complete a merger and bring out Motorcraft and the older Prestolite brands. What does this mean to the police chief's belief that the he could find any violator? Today I conceived of the idea that the dealer tried to plead "no contest" to any moving violations by his son's car but law enforcement in it's secret police form as set out by the county coroner refused to accept it. By eliminating my own car the ... well, you tell me? Sometime in 1966/1967 a Dana rear had 3/4 floating like the Ford torque tube years without the taper and keys with a nut at the axle end in common with Chrysler. My native thought says that the secret police in this was to find "top of the tooth" usage that indicated very high speed. Taxi cabs of Chrysler products growled more from odometers way beyond 150,000 miles. This was "revenue sound". As time passed the court rooms began to accept any police intuition about speed. There was no acceptable contradiction of a police decision to pusue and arrest. Looking at the Early Ford V-8 News photos I am sure I would be boggled at so many just Fords in a point of view. How they escaped from the John Dillinger notoriety I don't know. Maybe it was just an update in the mid fifties to more strongly accomplish law enforcement in a land of rebels. The Early Ford V-8 Sound In my art studies when I was searching out topics for drawing and painting in the 1980's I found that my mind was dark until my hand moved and when my hand moved it sought out what I later identified as sounds. Now after getting new hearing aids I can definitely establish the early Ford V-8 as a recognizable sound for the most distinguished cars as I approached driving age. Think about a 1950-52 Ford two door with dual exhausts where the pipes angled in a bit at the back and the mufflers were steel packs. Leaving the high school parking lot and turning onto M-53 headed into town on the main street in the late fall, the vapor from the pipes twirled opposite to each other out of the pipes as the crescendo of the sound rose. Looking for this car later I only identified a 1950 Victoria with the fabric top that hung around Neeb's Mobil station. Someone said it was Ford Pariseau's car. Later I met him as the Ford garage wrecker driver. The final time I saw him he gave me his 1947 Tudor with a G-series six that had frozen. That was after I had been to the Ubly dragway and watched an F class dragster with a TuffBlok resin filled water passage maximum over bore Flathead of 400 cubic inches burning fuel contest Top Eliminator in the summer of 1964. The sound does not particularly register with me. Was it a slingshot? Did the driver's elbows hang out by the wheels like on a Midget with a V-8 -60 I had seen running on alcohol at the 1/4 mile Owendale track? I have already commented on the 1955 scene near Oak Ridge where my father's car drove through a rocky ford at Cade's Cove and a supercharged Mercury appeared at dusk. Marty Ramsayer's 1951 Ford coupe had two sounds as I rode in it one with the worn out Fordomatic and one with the replacement 3-speed standard shift we put in it in a pit near Ubly. The engine did not differ only the spectrum of sound and the run up and down in gears. How about a 1/4 mile dragstrip series of runs in N stock with a 1939 Ford fordor that had a fouled plug maybe from a blown piston and would occasionally fire into the oil pan creating a lot of smoke. It's timing slip? 60 mph and 20 seconds I was driving and shifting the gears. I knew that transmission very well by then. 1963, was it? The cars I have seen recently were not running. They were either in the impromptu car shows where a 1949 Olds could not be told from a 351 Cleveland Ford V-8 or they were in a museum and only the Lincoln Continental had it's hood open. I did see one 8BA in a 1940 Ford where the owner had replaced the 3-speed with a Mustang II four speed and adapted the floor shift lever from a 1939 Ford. I talked with the owner several times but never heard it run. If rain was predicted the owners wanted to get how to avoid getting the under carriage dirty. I had walked about 3/4 of a mile to the lot so I had to leave about 15 minutes before the cars to avoid getting wet. I usually had some photo prints either of other caars or of renders I had made and did not want to risk ruining them even in a rai coat or with an umbrella. There was a dealer in town that began to sell 1946-48 Ford convertibles that had overhauled engines with aluminum heads and dual Chandler-Grove 94 carburetors but he advertised them as having Stromberg 97's. Were the 1947 and 1946 Maroon cars I saw at the impromtu show bought there? Shhh! I don't want to know. Years earlier as I was peddling papers I heard a unusual Ford V-8 start up and leave the dealer's house before I was in range to see it as I was blocked by trees fora sightline. Maybe two months later it was parked by the house I an I could see it was a gray 1946 with the longer trunkline of what I thought was a club coupe. I didn't try to buy it as it was too soon for me to drive and he probably wanted more money that someone who averaged $5.00 per week could afford. Even saving it all for a year would only be about $250 with starts and stops and contests on a route that averaged 30 customers weekly and more on Sundays. By six months that car was gone and I did not meet the owner until he was President of the Gambler's Car Club in 1959. I was introduced to him by Ken Cook who was an amateur magician and gave me his seats out of the customized 1947 white convertible he eventually took the body off to free the engine to put into his primered 1949 Mercury. The back seat was incompatible with a Sedan coupe. Dewey was kind of haunted by his brother's death and hard to get near. Subchaser The next story is a bit of an octopus and involves a 1953 Ford convertible, Weiderhold Freight line and Pontiac and Hydramatic. One arm is my neighbor across the street who drove for Weiderholdt for years until he got a dislocated disc in his back. Then he drove a 1959 GMC V-6 van with Grumman body for New Era potato chips as a driver/salesman. Another arm is the gas station across from the high school where I eventually worked as a 15 year old with a work permit. The previous young assistant station attendent and the leasee took on a job the previous Summer changing any flat tires on a group of gravel trains which are diesel tractors with a double set of dump trailers and a dolly between the trailers. Some were 30 wheelers. At some point after I had my car running adversaries began to try to set up a race between my car and the 1953 Ford that belonged to Barry Weiderhold the son of the freight line owner. Somewhere along the way he included an Autocar tractor and gravel train to his fleet. I never took up this challenge. I saw the transmission as a possible failure that would end my driving career. After some years after a boy who was older and had hit a car head-on with his Cuchman motor scooter and had facial injuries returned from DeVry Technical Institue and the Navy. He had become Torpedoman First and while training in Arizona had bought a 1958 Packard Hawk. After racing with Robert Greene who had been to Lake Orion Dragway with his father's Jeep station wagon with snow tires he wanted to not just go fender to fender with a 1958 Chevy, he heard that Barry Weiderhold was back in town and wanted to sell the Ford convertible. Dave Armstrong asked me to go with him to look at the car. The day was a typical Winter blizzard day and at the Weiderhold house a dumptruck with the box filled with coal for traction was in the driveway. The father's wife ahd died and he was very depressed and Barry had come home to restore the gravel train to continue the family business. The Ford was something extra now. We looked at it under the hood and saw it had a small 2 barrel and by color maybe was a GMC version of the Pontiac. What year? Was it a 284 or a 389? Whoa! I knew nothing about Pontiacs. We go it started and the oil pressure guage waved it hand at us and then settled down to about 40psi steady. Hmm! Not great but GM has different values than Ford. Dave really wanted it and he took out his wallet and made the purchase on the spot. A few weeks later Dave called me and had me come look as he had it up on the rack at Ramey Swackhammer's Texaco with the oil pan off. One of the rod journal was wrapped with what looked like shim stock. The early Ford free rotating rod bearing had bit him. He was disgusted and that was the end of our friendship until my former boss at teh Standard Station told me that he thought Dave had taken his ratchet and 3/8 socket set. He confronted Dave and Dave showed him he had painted it black over the green and indeed had it. Was Dave making a gravel train guilt connection? Later Barry Weiderhold fell asleep driving the Autocar and ran off the road and the truck caught fire. He burned to death. End of story? I said this was an octopus. In 1981 after my analytical career was over I took a ride on my motorcycle up to Port Ste. Lucie Nuclear Power plant. I wanted to talk to them about running the backup diesels continuously and burning soft nuclear waste like rags and paper and clothing in the exhaust and bubbling it into water to concentrate the wastes and make them easier to separate by activity level. Two reactors were running and two were being built so I had a hard time finding a place to park but eventually I walked up to the gate and asked to see the health physicists. I knew of them from Oak Ridge in 1955. We talked for awhile and they suggested I go the FP &L Headquarters in Miami. On the way back home it began to rain a light rain and I had experienced a defraying throttle cable so I was very cautious. Approching the traffic light in Tequesta I noticed a FINA gasolin station and turned off and ran up to the pumps. I remembered a female attendant at a FINA in Fort Pierce who put the nozzle in my tank and filled it so I was playing a bit. Just then I heard a crash behind me and off to the left! I looked back an saw a black man in a pink t-shirt that said South County Supply stumbling out of the near side of a white van with an Internaional cab. The truck was in the ditch partway and the fuel tank was ruptured and leaking fuel. It had run into the back of a blue Chevrolet Citation. I waited a while and then left. Tequesta had a police officer but no station. I called them later to report what I had seen including the fact I was the missing man in the set up. In Miami I couldn't find a place to park and the proposal was beginning to cool. 1984 found me in a Pinto running across Grasslands National Monument beside some trucks from the nuclear facility in South Carolina. I assumed they were going to Richland, Washington. With this I'm ready to stop unless someone wants to see a story about passing a car on a day with heavy snow after the banks beside the road had been raised up by the Austin-Western plows. When I got beside the car I was passing the engine in my car began to make a popping sound and lost a lot of power. A car came around the bend headed toward us and I could not get back with a car beside me. So knowing the Austin-Western had a jib plow that tossed the top of the berm way back I took to the shoulder on the far side. Snow began flying over the hood which on a 1948 Ford is pointed like a boat as E.T. Gregorie made it. Soon I had slowed down enough to mae a safe u-turn and I returned sheepishly realizing that the chilled iron lifter I had substituted for the 1956 solid lifter required had maybe failed. I had heard that popping sound in the 1937 Ford TuDor that the former ambulance driver for MacAlpine had bought with a swap OHV. Fortunately, it was 1959 and a new 1956 replacemtn part was available and I could use a new 1959 camshaft with them. They cost $1.89 each. The ambulance driver went on to found the largest wholesale embalming practice in Detroit after attending Ferris State and getting a degree in mortuary science. Oh! Whatever I've been holding in that I followed Calvin Rice and the "Glass Slipper" and how they took over the Mercedes and Auto-Union records and yeah! Don Garlits and how he took his 8 Stromberg equipped dragster to the Kern Timing Association meet got sent home and came back with a bigger GMC blower than they had and won the meet. My mind had slipped from a 3/8 by 3/8 flathead with the Merc crank and 1/8 stroke, ported and relieved, with a full race cam and 10-1/2 to one aluminum heads. How many carburetors? Three on a Navarro manifold or four on a Tattersfield? My car had burned twice. Once in front of Pioneer high school on the hottest day of the Summer it coughed and I saw the tell-tale brown spot begin in ythe hood. Soon there was more flames out the edges of the hood. I ran to a school bus and commandeered the fire extinguisher in the door way and put out the flames then openning the hood to make sure just as the fire truck drove up and wanted to blast it with the high pressure hose. That time I got off with new neoprene hoses to the carburetors from the fuel block on the fire wall. I had to reprime the hood. I did not yet know that with wear the needles and seats let the fuel leak at idle and the excess leaked out the sides of the throttle shafts now not fitting all that well to puddle on the mainfold. I should have done better. I bought a new fire extinguisher to mount on the floor boards. I had the school fire extinguisher filled by Chet Lash who was the volunteer fire chief. He had been a customer for my new delivery route years before. He took the additional death and dismemberment insurance sold by the Bay City Times. Exactly when the next fire happened escapes me except by then a new disk type float valve ahd been announced by Don Garlits and I bought four of them. This time I was fire proof. With the new hoses installed I headed out M-53 toward the big curve past the Coral Gables motel. As I past Charlotte Braden's Fleet wing gasoline and heating fuel operation I saw way behind me a car coming up fast. I let my car rollout until the closure held at zero. That would not do for the follower. So I had to open mine up. At 100 mph the vent windows blew closed and it became warm inside. The I began to hear the tell-tale "shooting ducks" of a lean situation. I might burn a piston. I backed off a little. I was able to hold off the car behind which I now saw was a black 1957 Ford. It began to dawn on me that this was not one of the Brown girls. Dwight Talaski had repaired the death car that killed his brother and painted it black. Now four years later here he was chasing my little 1948 Ford Sedan Coupe. My coupe had once had a 1957 Duntov camshaft in a 1956 Chevrolet truck engine out of a farm to market milk truck. I was able to bore it 1/8 and install the 10-1/2 to one pistons of a fuel injected Corvette in it. On top was a Weiand staggered four manifold with four Stromberg 48's. I had had a choice of three Rochesters on a three two manifold. I now had two 180 degree joined Y headers running into Daytona pipes mounted under the running boards with mufflers inboard the frame. An AC/Delco electric pump fed fuel through a 3/8 fuel line from the tank to the fuel block. We were approaching the curve where Dwight's brother had rolled over two new Fords two years in sequence. He backed off and I made a U-turn. Back in town I found one of the carburetors had a chunk of neoprene that had fallen off the hose as it was cut. It partially blocked one jet out of eight. I heard you before The big radio stations I knew in those days were, CKLW Windsor, Ontario which you could hear in Hialeah, Florida strong and clear and Wolfman Jack from Mexico which at night in the Tennesse Hills on the way to Florida filled the airwaves. I went with Kurt Brinker one day in his sister's Catalina convertible to pickup a check from his dad at the County Fair Grounds and then a check from Charlotte Braden and deliver them to TJ in the CJ, night DJ at WLEW, the local radio station. He was busy filling his reel to reel tape recorders high up on shelves on the wall from a bank of microphones and a table of turntables. Then at University of Michigan I met the son of a WXYZ DJ who had become a witness in the Payola scandal. Our own house in the residence hall had Harvey Kabaker from Chicago as President. He was a DJ for the radio station on campus. I cannot remember the call sign of the Flint station that competed with WLS, the Chicago station at night. In the thumb of Michigan these were the stongest signals. Thomas McKenzie became a roomate when we moved out to Whitmore Lake the last year. He was the DJ's son. He also was a friend of a test driver at GM Proving Grounds. In the Summer of 1964, I helped him order parts from the Chevrolet dealer in Saline and the Vic Hubbard in Hayword, California. I identified a 327 short block for a 1964 fuel injected Corvette and the heads for a 1961 283 version now in cast iron with bigger valves than the 1964. To this I added an Iskenderian 555 roller camshaft, (Polydyne-5-cycle?) with 320 degrees of duration, a gear drive set and Rev-Kit. We spent several weekends polishing the crank and added a windage kit. We had the block align bored and semi finished bearings honed to fit. He had a 350 horsepower AFB- D series spread-bore carburetor from his friend Darryl. The manifold was only a 4 barrel for a 230 hp 283. That led to a big defect for me. He wanted the 4 Strombergs off my car and two more to go on an Edelbrock X cross ram with six positions. That led to maybe 450 horsepower for him and me sputtering and barking down the road with the secondary bores hanging off the sides of the manifold he traded me. I eventually got him to take me to Gratiot and buy an adapter to hopefully fit the big spreadbore on the small 283 manifold. By that time my exhaust had some blue smoke. I had burned a piston and eventually I found a whole upper compression ring missing! No time to fuss now school was out and I had to get to California before the hiring window closed. On campus interviews were not broad enough for me. When is a HI-Po 271 Not a 289? Look over there! Right beside us on Telegraph is a (not Woodward?) Maple is the dangerous crossing where tanker trucks burn coming down the hill. A new Mustang hardtop and it has a --the light just turned green I did not see the emblem on the left front fender. 2.20 low on the 1963 rebuilt Borg-Warner 4 -speed might be a bit tall. Then second gear is just right. Third and he is just back a bit. Fourth!--what is this 4th? So I guess I won't see a Mustang as a step up. Maybe it was a 260 with the Motorcraft 2 bbl? Beauty Is What Beauty Does Buck in Monroe had a 1961 Galaxy 500 convertible with white leatherette bucket seats. It had a 406 cubic inch/402 horsepower engine with the 3-Holley 2-bbls and the long tail shaft version of a Borg-Warner T-10 4-speed. In spite of himslelf he sold it and bought a 1957 Chevrolet black hardtop with a 270 horsepower bual 4-bbl engine. This car had a reputation on the streets of the County where the "hood lifting contest" was held each weekend in a shopping center. A sure winner was better than breaking or sullying. Stadium Boulevard On Stadium Boulevard in Ann Arbor the rumored king was a red Ventura hardtop with a Hydramatic. He hung out at a drive-inn. We took McKenzie's rusted out 2 door 1955 Chevrolet statioin wagon that once belonged to Darryl. Now it had the 450 hp 327 and a iron case Borg-Warner 4 speed with 2.54 gears. Tom was uncertain. When he turned off the key the engine just went- uhhh. Still a bit tight. On the freeway you could punch it in 3rd and it would just roar under the hood with reverse flow mufflers making minimal noise. Back at the Dead End in Whitmore Lake a 1961 White Ford came looking. Proffesional Pause One Saturday my roomate Dave Lynch and I took his Volkswagen to a Royal Pontiac Open house. We took pamphlets and looked at a Bobcatand a Banker's Special with the yellow air box for a Paxton blower on a 421 in a Grand Prix body. Scotty bought one of those after he got into embalming full time. Was this in 1962 or 1963? Smoke If You Have Them I didn't have time to install the fender I took off the 1947 Tudor to replace the one the deer crushed and Darryl welded the crack on. I did have time to get new Daytona pipes made for the ones that were now rusted after several winters. My build was 8 years old in a 8 year old in the beginning car. Going through the rocky cuts in Missouri I could see the smoke rolling out as I went up the next hill. I would have to check the oil and in spite of the hot state the water. In California near Needles the oil showed a milkey emulsion but the water was OK. It was using a lot of oil. The road (US 66) in those days crossed a lot of Arryoyos so you were constantly going whoopdee-doo up a rounded ridge and down into another arroyo. The little stores and gas stations had no service bays and no mechanical repairs seemed likely. Bright Lights Big city Rolling onto the San Bernadino Freeway the lights of the city went on and on. My ammeter began jumping and I realized that the wires that got burned when the rear 4-bar suspension was installed were not tied up by the black tape as oil had loosened them. Under the car by the side of the road was no way to get the tail lights solid. I tried to place the wires as best as I could. Maybe an hour in traffic and I saw Topanga Canyon exit in the Valley. I pulled up in front of my Uncle and Aunt's ranch house in Chattsworth. My Conestoga had gotten me here but no time to sell it as I would need it to find a job and begin my first days. I was facing a due date in six months when the rear plate expired and I had the wrong emergency brake cable for the one severed in the cab. Slot Car My Aunt had a white Falcon with white bucket seats. It purred along with it's Fordomatic. She took me over teh Los Angeles River and the railroad yards to where the overlapping crossovers merged to bring all the freeways into the "Slot Car" track as she called. My uncle took me in his car to Westminster where 7th street out of Long Beach and the 405 San Diego Freeway ended 4 lane forms. These then were the carrot to stay. My uncle had steamed some plywood in his shower to build a bass viol and once owned a Lloyd automobile. He had a bright red USMC ring. Greg my cousin took me to the ice rink at Topanga Canyon Mall and bought me an Orange Julius. The Ventura Freeway went beyond. Pepperdine University was way down the curving track of Topanga Canyon through a tunnel and on the PCH, the Pacific Coast Highway. I was to learn that Sepulveda connected to PCH somehow on the near coast next to Los Angeles. Santa Monica was just a ways down the coast from Malibu. The road to Malibu was one exit nearer LA than Topanga Canyon. The old actors home was in Woodland Hills even closer to Hollywood and LA. The pivot to the San Diego Freeway was at Encino. There was an airport near here but I never went there. I only found Burbank, LAX, and Long Beach. El Toro came later. Ralph Williams the world's largest Ford dealer was in Encino but I did not know that until I got a color TV. Parkwood Chevrolet would go bankrupt one year after I bought a new SS-396 Chevelle from them. It had the 360 hp engine and single exhaust. The transmission was an aluminum case Muncie 4-speed with 2.54 low. The mechanics like to dynotune it when I brought it in. From the odometer they also did road testing. I hated the fake hood vents and eventually knocked out part of them and removed the cast decor. White with bucket seats was my fate. No black convertible with a bench in 1965. I was too late and a demonstrator white hard top was found. My credit was ridiculous and a big baloon payment was scheduled to up my 10% down payment. My money put into the bank in Williamson New York by my grandfather was still holding and in Bank of America. Where? Van Nuys is a well known neighborhood but I only passed through for a month after I had taken a job. Then I decide to leave the one hour coming home each night and moved to Lakewood. I was almost out in dairyland across from the Dutch Village shopping center. Wes Godfrey drew up the insurance policy that moved me from 10-10 PL-PD to 100-200 with collision and miscellaneous. The dealership wanted another policy that I cancelled once I saw it did not cover war and I had life insurance at a defense contractor that did. I rented a Ford Mustang for one month and could not renew it. I was walking daily to and fro down South to Lakewood and then straight past the Parkwood Chevrolet dealership where I eventually bought the Chevelle and on to the plant gate. The heat of summer gave way to the rains of November once I had gotten past new car introduction and was washing my car in the carport. I had filled in for two months with a green Nova 194 six and automatic that had 13 inch wheels and put me almost sliding on my butt to get in. Where was the Ford dealer in Long Beach? I later found Murphy Lincoln Mercury and Circle Volkswagen and even in the seventies Longo Toyota to understand my land lord. The SS was expendable. I took it to Mexico as far as Ensenada past Tijuana and San Felipe on the other coast of Baja. I left it in the President's parking spot one day at 6 AM to get a proposal signed for 25 C-9's at $3 million each. The visitor spots had disappeared and my signer had a flightto catch and I had to pick it up from presentations where it was printed. Not a hot job held me up for over an hour and when I got back the guard had moved it to a Vice President spot. Mac MacGowen left when McDonnell merged and began his retirement in a winery. That did not last and he built the DC-8 80 series in Tulsa with CFM 56 engines from SNECMA/GE. I took my car home and replaced it in early 1967 after the Parkwood dealer had closed. George seemed a good buy until the closer tore up the deal and made a new one for $100.00 more. That wasn't the end. His curse in front of my wife was. I bought my last American car or truck. Trying to salve the bruise in 1987 with the new SATURN Corp was when I began to do art for real. I had an IBM 704 and a 709T4 behind me when I was given a ABS by McDonnell that ran in FORTRAN on a CDC 6400. Amphibious Capable I didn't want to be disqualified for military service so I applied for Navy Officer Candidate School. You take the same physical tests as draftees and follow the same colored footsteps on the floor. 10 pushups, 10 pullups and 10 situps and you are not 4F. When the offer came it did not mention pay or transportation but had a contract to sign. I pondered if the shoulder separations I had gotten trying to surf in Biscayne Bay a few years before would make me a liability to those under my command or my fellow officers. Eventually, I decide that a 2A at a contractors was the best I could do for my country. If the later draft lottery included me I was as ready as I could be. Now enlisted are not tolerant of me. I spent my years with at least lieutenants though at Eglin AFB I did eat with the non-commisioned officers mess. Off the beaten child My father kept a maple yard stick with brass ferrules on the end hung up in the hall closet where the broom and the floor wax was kept in the house he had built in 1946. He would use it to correct any misbehaviors which my mother detected in day. The level was in her words when she threatened before anything happened, "until you can't stand up." Expensive toys My grand parents had at their house in East Williamson, New York, toys that my uncles had played with before they went off to join the Navy and Army Air Corps in WW-II. There was a red cast iron tractor with thickly nickel dipped wheels. The front wheels had a tall central ridge and the rears had lugs that were forbidden by signs on the public roads. I learned later it was probably an imitation of a Fordson. (Editor’s note: Some early multifuel Fordsons had a downstream vaporizing device to add air to a rich mixture after the engine had heated up enough to not need to burn from a tiny tank of gasoline. This early development may have trapped me later into some air leak events that were a disaster for my engine as well as riding on a grader behind a Drott dual fuel bulldozer.) There was also a red cast iron car or what my grandmother called an "auto." I later learned it was imitating a Desoto Airflow. It had white rubber tires. I ran them on the patterns in the living room carpet at my grandparent’s house pretending the rectangular corners were roads. Surprise My grandfather owned a general store he called "East Williamson Mercantile, Company, Incorporated, Henry Van Eenwyk & Sons, prop. In the back of the main store building was a shed with two large bays that served as a warehouse for stock until it was put on shelves in the main store building shelves. It had a large green truck in one bay one day when I was taken there. I can picture it in my mind now and would identify it as a Ford with dual rear wheels and a tall green stake rack unusual in height on a flatbed. The cab had a conventional nose and the grille was 1946-48 or late 40's with vertical bars of creme color. It had extra blinkers on the fenders and clearance lights on the cab top. Later my uncle explained it was not a 2-1/2 ton as I had thought from a brochure of the early 50's but in NYGVW a 7-ton with extra helper springs and a hydraulic dumper lift. That was in 1983 so maybe the GVW was less in the late 40's. This truck had 16.5 inch wheels not the 20 inch of bigger trucks of that era. My grandfather traded this truck every 6 years. It had an electric two speed rear to climb the Dugway hill on old New York 104 near Ironduquoit Bay that was being resloped by steam shovels for years. There was another truck also that my grandfather also traded every 6 years but on an alternate 3 year skip. I did not see this truck until later when my elder uncle gave me a ride in it to pickup floor covering in Rochester, NY. I would now say it was a 1951 with the wide bar grille with the protruding bumps and fenders better integrated with the main cab. It had only one seat and I had to hang onto "what!" to keep from sliding back to the rear door as my uncle pulled away from a stop sign or traffic lights. It was red and lettered on the sides of the panel rear section. Through the years it was not always a Ford. Sometimes it was a Dodge. The big truck was always a Ford. (Editor’s note: February 7, 1919 The Supreme court ruled that Henry Ford had to operate the Company for the benefit of the shareholders.) My grandfather owned a lot of Bethlehem Steel stock. History My grandmother subscribed to National Geographic and my grandfather bound up the year’s issues from 1915 at the end of the year and piled them into big boxes in the attic of his house. At some point after I could read, I began untying the twine and looking at the advertising in the magazines. I decided I liked the 1934 cars best with their vee windshields and grilles. I don't remember any Ford ads but I did notice the Lincoln. I also noted the early ads for all white tires. (Editor’s note: In 1912 tire makers began adding lampblack to the tire rubber and white tires with titanium dioxide disappeared. After that only sidewalls as an option were white.) Possession In 1953 my father decided to trade in the 1949 Plymouth my mother had coveted when they traded in the 1940 Chevrolet her father had given her to attend college in Albion, Michigan. He had had troubles getting the Plymouth six to start in extreme cold with it's automatic choke. His friend the principle of the grade school also had bought a 1949 Plymouth and both of them kept the dealer wrecker busy towing the cars in to sit in the warm dealer garage and start with no troubles. August seemed like a time to get a special order in at a good price. As a sponsor of high school classes my parents knew the Ford dealer's children. He also knew one of the salesmen for L.A. Talaski Ford sales. In the showroom I was bored. My father was in the closed glass surrounded office of the sales force. The dealer came over and handed me a an ivory colored plastic molded model of a 1953 Ford Tudor. He wound it up and showed me the key was underneath. Then he set it off across the floor. I was focused. When my father came out, the dealer made a show of giving it to me. I was a war baby, not one of those later called a Boomer who were one year after the War. I had very few toys. I remember specifically a red and green livery Railway Express truck that was not very authentic and had the top of the van stove in and the wheels wobbly from when my one year older sister tried to ride it. It was sheet metal. Lithographed sheet metal was a big part of toys of my era. The cab was a bit heavier metal and all red. Years later the Ford had warped from the sun coming in the South window in my upstairs bedroom and shining on some long plank shelves my father had laid into the sloping eaves of the attic that he had finished with knotty pine tongue and groove wood. I ran the Ford on the linoleum floor in my bedroom. There was also a sheet balsa wood Piper Cub model my father had assembled but not painted and wound the rubber band propeller drive and released it in the dining room to attract me from the living room some time before. The car and the airplane sat on the shelves. Neither of these toys was a Christmas or Birthday present. Later when I was kept home from school with respiratory ailments, I was given balsa and tissue paper models to build with an X-acto knife and Testor’s glue. I built them on a breadboard pinning the balsa after cutting out the die-cut formers and stringers to wax paper over the plans. My father also helped me build a Strombecker version of a B-24 “Liberator” bomber of preformed hard wood by sanding to smooth shapes and gluing with the enclosed yellowish-brown powder wood glue. It had plastic propellers I attached with enclosed pin brads. Under the nacelles was something I was curious about represented by decals. My father told me these were turbochargers for high altitude flight. I was impressed! (Editor’s note: The B-17 also had turbochargers and disk brakes, hardware that figured in automobile design in the future.) Full size Early Ford V-8 The car my father bought in 1953 was a Country Sedan station wagon with the V-8. The engine type was the last L-head design that Ford offered for sale. It had 110 horsepower. He took our family on a trip to the West Coast where we visited my uncle who lived in Fresno, California, at the time. He lived in an adobe house that he opened up every morning at 6 to gather the morning cool and use the thick adobe walls to keep it cool all day. He was married to my father's sister who had moved to the West Coast in WW-II. We also visited Chinatown in San Francisco. We stopped at a Chinese store and I bought a Soroban calculating abacus similarity and a plastic imitation ivory Rik-Sha. We ate egg foo jung for breakfast next door. Later we drove to Mare Island shipyard and Naval base but did not enter. My father had been in the Navy as an officer right after I was born barely avoiding a draft notice when my grandfather had sent him a telegram telling him to get off the train heading to report because Officer Candidate School had accepted him. We visited Sequoia where a picture of the Ford was taken in the Wenona Tunnel tree and then Yosemite where we swam in the chill Merced river and watched the firefall at night. The umbrella tent with rear extension that had been bought in the time of the Plymouth was our accomodation. We did not need a roof rack with the station wagon. This car later got coil helper springs and a welded on trailer hitch when in 1956 the family purchased a Holley 20 foot travel trailer. It was weighed at the Montana weigh station at one point and the total weight was 5000 lbs. with the canned goods and other gear. The hitch weight was checked by unhitching and placing the hitch dolly alone on the scales. That was on a later trip to Glacier National Park. The Ford had 6-ply tires from the beginning but they were Firestone and eventually weather checked very badly. In those days they had rayon cords which were better than the cotton cords of pre-War cars. The trailer had 8-ply US Royal tires provided by our neighbor who owned a tire store. It had come with 6-ply Mansfield trailer specific tires and one had blown out on the very first trip to the Smokey Mountains and a park near Knoxville and Oak Ridge where my father studied at the Oak Ridge Reactor School in a Summer school to introduce the Physical Science Study Series (PSSC) new texts and curriculum. I met the glove box and various film badges and dosimeters as well as the face of the solid carbon reactor at Oak Ridge. I bought a neutron irradiated dime that I kept for years until I gave it to a tree trimming crew from Asplundh in 1976. On the hill behind the drive inn theater at the trailer park where "And God Created Woman" starring Brigitte Bardot was playing a sound announced that a dark Merc had appeared. Bobbie who was with me knew the owner and we went up and the owner showed us the S.C.O.T supercharger equipped flathead in the car. Major Side track When I was in Junior High shop, I passed an Allison 1710 V-12 on a pallet that my father had purchased for $1 as surplus from the Battle Creek Surplus Center and had shipped C.O.D. to the freight depot in Bad Axe, Michigan to be used in instructing students in aviation just after WW-II. The cost was high to move it but eventually Russ LeCronier, the principal agreed to fund the purchase and freight. Exactly where the supercharger was on that one I did not really mark but blended it with the Potvin GMC Rootes installation on the Calvin Rice dragster that exceeded the German Mercedes and AutoUnion standing kilometer records of the 1930's. (Editor’s note: The Allison centrifugal supercharger was at the rear of the engine and had a two speed dampened drive.) The Allison had been disassembled and reassembled by classes that expected a boom in aircraft that did not manifest as they ended up in the Korean conflict. Jet aircraft made the piston inline vee engine obsolete. Somehow, I learned it had overhead camshafts driven by bevel-geared shafts up the back of the cylinders but not that it had 4 valves per cylinder. (Editor’s note: The Ducati motorcycle had a drive like this and also the Velocette Venom and the Norton Manx had dual overhead cams similarly driven) Civilians used the Allison in Unlimited Hydroplane races that occurred on the Detroit river and the Arfons Brothers used one in their dragster in Ohio. In 1957 a flathead Ford engine burning nitromethane fuel as well as a fuel burning Harley-Davidson motorcycle led the records and eliminations in NHRA competition. Then it was gone. Editor’s note: 1955 was the first NHRA National at Great Bend Kansas and Calvin Rice won later after a rain out with his flathead not the blown Chrysler.) Forensic Examination I got a reputation for fighting on the playground in grade school as girls in Kindergarten who were slightly older and bigger hit me on the head with wooden semi-trucks and later I needed glasses to see the blackboard after 4th grade. Sunday dinner with other members of the Trustees of the Presbyterian church one Sunday led to the County Coroner taking me into his coffin showroom for a private talk about overhead valve V-8 cars that were coming. The elders thought that this would lead to a rash of crashes. He described the spleen removal and liver lobe removal required to remedy the traumatic injuries that occurred when a car hit a tree on rural pavement by running off the road. I pictured the surgery as happening at Hubbard Memorial Hospital but kind of missed the point. I did not drive and had no expectation of ever owning a new car. A year or so later I walked behind Goebbel Brothers Chevrolet with the son of another trustee on the building committee who was raising pledges to reroof the church and brace the walls and add new pews. There was a 1955 Chevrolet there with an open driver's window and blood on the seat. Maybe six months later I saw a red 1955 Chevrolet coupe that belonged to the New Holland baler dealer's son and had dual exhausts. Was it a PowerPak? (Editor’s note: Bob Goebell had offered me a 1954 Corvette he had in his showroom when I was 10. I looked in in the open hood and thought it had 2 carburetors on it’s six cylinder engine. It actually had 2 air cleaners on 3 carburetors that year.) Seduction My Uncle August had been in the Army and had a shower in his basement. He took me for a tour of the limestone quarry and we rode down in the elevator and then we were on our own to avoid the huge Euclid quarry dump trucks on the surface once we got there. He took me over to look at one that was parked. Then avoiding the moving ones, we went over to look at where the current working face was. Ingersoll-Rand drills were preparing shot holes for dynamite. Back at his house that night he got my father and the rest of us to look at the beautiful chrome water fall front in his 1949 Desoto interior. The radio and heater and all other accessories were right there. I did not think about the day my father parked on the wrong side of the road coming back from dumping trash baskets at the City dump. He got out and got a shovel he prudently kept in the trunk of our maroon Plymouth four door sedan. Then he went over across the road where the city snowplow had surrounded a man's car with a snow bank and began to help him dig out. Meanwhile my sister and I sat in the car as it became cold. A blizzard was blowing snow over the top of the car. Then my sister and I saw a cloud of snow approaching slowly. It was the snow plow now plowing out the side we were parked on. It swerved when it saw us but too late it hooked the right front fender. Sitting in the middle of the rear seat I fell forward and hit my mouth on the ash tray in the middle of the front seat back. After, my father told me not to mention I had been injured as it would tie things up. I looked like Bogart from then on. My youngest uncle in New York rolled over my grandfather's blue four door Dodge driving back from visiting his girl friend when he fell asleep. That left my grandfather with only his green 1949 Dodge coupe which he offered to me in 1955 or 56. Another sedduction involved the new overhead vavble vee 8 Buick "Fireball" and the smooth "Dynaflow" transmission. The school business teacher who had a office products sales in his front porch and whose wife did book keeping for a fee got one in 1953. He invited us over on Sunday to look at it including the bank vault sound of closing the doors. He had a cruel scar in his face where non-safety glass had cut his face in the crash of a Packard years before. Then my uncle August replaced his Desoto with a similar Buick hardtop two door. Buicks were popping up nearby. Our neighbor across the street had owned Buicks for several years. They were the older straight eight types and in some ways were of the era of the Pontiac that the business school teacher drove. His wife was the new Buick owner. This wave of preference would hold off until 1956 to reappear in my other uncle's garage as a replacement for his 40 Ford. Meanwhile, the Ford dealer's older son was given a 1955 Ford Sunliner convertible in yellow and black colors. We never saw it but in Oak Ridge the trailer park owners daughters got an identical car. I saw them driving it with the top down under the trees and out of the park with one sitting on the tonneau in the back seat , feet on the seat like a parade car. Bobby, the boy I met took me to see another Merc in a new house garage. It was sitting on it's frame with no wheels with boxes of electric window lift kits and electric door kits from Honest Charley Speed Shop in Chattanooga on the floor beside it. I thought the Merc looked like something way too heavy to be my style. My mother bought me flannel lined Bell brand denims in the Winter in "Huskie" sizes. There had to be a way to escape. My father stood 5 foot 5 and 1/2 inch tall and had to get a waiver from President Roosevelt to get into Navy OCS. My driver's license when it came said 5 foot 6 and 150 pounds which was about 10 pounds heavier than my father. My mother had put on a lot of weight and my grandmother was taller and very heavy. I stopped looking at those sorts of statistics. I could climb trees and jump over a bamboo rod at a 3 foot height. Disaster The Ford dealer's son rolled over his car in broad daylight near the County Farm at a turn in the main road M-53. He survived. The car was taken to a place behind the East wall of the mechanical shop at the dealer ship. Time passed. Then , the next year, the dealer's daughter was given a 1956 Ford Crown Victoria with the chrome wrapover the top. The son borrowed it and promptly rolled this one over! At the same place! His dad was angry but undeterred. Both the Ford dealer and the two brothers who owned the Chevrolet dealership were very heavy men who sat a lot. I passed both dealerships every day going to grade school. By 1956 I could walk just a short ways to the high school built in 1951. To get there I had to pass the Lincoln-Mercury dealership and the next door Oliver tractor dealer. Minnick, the mercury dealer, was a fit man and a Catholic like Talaski. The Oliver dealer once gave me a cast aluminum tractor model. I hung out in the County garage through the years with the Austin-Western four wheel drive plows as well as the Walter dump trucks which got Vee plows and used the gravel road dressing under frame angle blades for snow removal. One smaller and rather dull Duplex dump truck remained in a bay. The mechanics called it the "morphendike." The Bad Axe Galion road grader with dual rear wheels and straight up front wheels sat at the other end of the garage. I avoided it. 1957 found the dealer's older son in a used car from the lot to the West of town by the radio station. It was a repainted black 1954 Tudor with the once new Y-block V-8. A nice easy to preserve choice was the idea. My mother had had some confrontations with this student at both the Junior and Senior prom about bringing alcohol into the gym. Senior Prom night was the end. News the next day said that the Bean Queen beauty and Jerry Talaski had been struck from behind by another car the previous night. Both cars ended up behind the East wall at the dealership. According to ( Huron News?, Huron Dailey Tribune?) not the Bay City times that I used to deliver, Jerry was not driving and the driver and his date from the front seat had survived. A 1957 Ford Fairlane 500 hardtop driven by a USAF sergeant from the Port Austin radar site had been coming down North Port Crescent from the North and at Filion crossroads had crashed and vaulted over the 1954 Ford turning onto that same road from the West. The back seat couple had died instantly. The front seat couple spent a long time in the hospital. (Editors Note: Ford Motor introduced standard features and an option package in 1956 they called Lifeguard Design that included a padded dash and sunvisors, a deep dish steering wheel, seat lap belts, double locks, safety rear view mirror. Seat belts were first and option in 1955. Cornell University did the testing.) I saw a 1946 Ford club coupe parked on the lawn in front of the Talaski home before that time. It was light gray and had the striped grille and side trim that differed from what I later learned was the 1947-48 model year. It also was leaner than the later car I learned was a Sedan coupe. I liked the tighter coupled look of the later car. This car belonged to L.A. Talaski’s younger son, Dwight or Dewey. It soon disappeared. At first I heard it drive up as I peddled newspapers. Later, saw it up on the lawn close to the house as I pedaled by on my bicycle. Deception When I actually owned a 1948 Ford coupe, I wanted to brag that it had a 59A V-8 and a Stromberg 97 carburetor. Uuhhh! Wait, try 59 A-B is that original and just as good? And the closest I came to a 97 were 4 Stromberg 48's a few years later and then 2 rebuilt 97's the rebuilder wanted to be free of in 1964. The 1948 I owned had a Chandler-Grove 94 which later was made by Holley. I helped a friend to buy all the spare Stromberg jets from Warshawsky/JC Whitney in a clearance of catalog parts before I left Michigan. My car had 3 hubcaps. Two had the multiple red slashes and one had the blue Ford in block letters. The rear bumper had an oval stamp with Ford script. The hood had shortened chrome strips. The emergency brake cable had been severed with bolt cutters or something in the driver's compartment near the actuator handle. The ignition switch was all boogered up. The trunk trim was not present and no holes for it were there. The title presented one fact, it weighed 3100 pounds. I hoped for something more like 2000 pounds. I didn't expect a weight like an Indy car but more like the weight of a Volkswagen beetle would have been nice. Was that possible in malleable iron, cast iron and rod iron sheet metal? One cool thing it did have was 1948 Mercury wheels with 15 inch diameter for newer tires. I even cleaned them up and put tubeless valves in them. Problems? Not in 10 years. No evidence of a Columbia 2-speed rear end the current owner said had been removed. No extra vacuum or electrical connections were in evidence anywhere. As far as a possible earlier Ford target for the iconic 59A V-8 I did not like the 1935 looks and the 1938 was so-so. Exactly how the springs and axles would work out I thought not so well but I could put the brakes on the earlier car also. The whole thing would have to happen in my family's back yard. I did not immediately go looking for a target and across the street from the grade school and elder lady backed out a 1937 Ford Tudor one day in an odd color. She was not interested in selling and I had no money to persuade her. A 1937 V-8 60 showed up one day when my friend and I were checking out an auction site at a farm that had many old vehicles. My friend eventually bought a 1939 Fordor with the 85 hp engine. He began to "make a dragstrip" next to his father's shopping center with a Drott dual fuel bulldozer and me on the former County towed hand wheel grader. That quickly turned into a pitching wave form. His father traded the 1936 Cord four door sedan where my friend had jammed the preselector gears to another collector for a blue metallic 1948 Lincoln Continental convertible that had a transplanted L-head V-8 replacing the V-12. I considered searching for a Lincoln Zephyr 3 speed set of closer ratio gears for my car but the Zephyr gears Warshawsky had fit into the regular Ford box and seemed maybe to be too weak. Later when the input shaft to the transmission in the Lincoln failed we learned it had been welded and the transmission was some bigger unknown. It’s V-8 was probably the larger truck V-8 of over 300 cubic inches. Why it had the welded input shaft as if no clutch disk could fit or the input shaft was too long I don’t know. Maybe the ¾ and 1 tons with a bigger 3 speed did not ever have the 337 as stock and the later Lincoln use was only with automatics. Restored to original condition Two Model T's showed up after the new Mackinaw bridge was completed. One was restored by a former Navy quad 20mm gunner that had faced Kamikazes in the Pacific. I had met him before when he delivered my Sears 3-speed bicycle in 1954. He was a peddler driver for Blair Transit that avoided the long haul and sat on a motor scooter tire tube for comfort. His brother had done the sheet metal work and painted the 1926 Model T roadster pickup. Before starting his own bump shop the brother was the body man for the Buick and Pontiac dealer. The owner of the T had sand blasted his frame and heavy irons and had even poured and scr*ped his own Babbitt bearings. He loved giving rides in the box to children around the neighborhoods. The other T was a 1923 Touring with electric lights. For a while he also gave rides and I took one. He worked as a general handy man for his family's Ace hardware after dropping out of McComb Junor college. English was his downfall. He was the favored soloist at the Methodist Church of the teacher who thought I was a bully and once gave me an assignment to write an essay on why half a loaf is better than none. I could not figure out where that was coming from. I wrote about a skid row bum who was very lazy and how that was better than starving to death. She reluctantly accepted the essay. I squeaked through English. The owner of the 1923 Touring hit a curb going around the corner just down the street from the empty grass he parked on. One of the wooden spoke wheels shattered and he took the whole car apart and stored it as parts in Miss Allen’s garage until he could have time and money to restore it totally. Two Model A's showed up owned by the son of the former Studebaker dealer. I had gotten to know him after he was sent away to Military School in Jersey City and then spent some time in Detroit. He had a photograph of he and his wife lowering a souped up flathead V-8 into a white 1932 Ford roadster with cycle and bobbed fenders in the Michigan style of about 1947. One of the Model A's was a 1931 Two door in faded red. The other was a clean and repainted blue 1928 Two door. One Halloween on Devil's night vandals pushed them across the main road and toppled them onto the front doors of the high school. The wooden body frames were destroyed. At this point I no longer had a picture of myself as the owner of an Early Ford V-8. Only recently have I turned my attention to such a project even in a research sense. Decades later I met some Fords of the early V-8 vintage at a gathering at a former T-Bird's drive-inn location that was used to build a branch of a 150 year old bank in Highland Park. That ended with a bank takeover by a Wisconsin bank and a rename as Talmer in 2008. The parking lot show after hours continued. These owners were different than in the 1950's. They bought their cars and one told me he would rather have a Buick. Wasn't that a jingle once? Ask the man who owns one? Packard flak! Ford family of fine cars? The Chinese restaurant next door was a destination for couples. A magazine that was going to feature cars that would be in the Woodward Avenue celebration was not interested in any of my digital modelling. After my friend gave me a Canon camera in 2010 I took some digital photographs of some of the cars to remind me of features that tested my memory. More recently I found some Ford V-8's at Dick's in San Marcos but he is closing after passing away. They also had magazines and AMT and JoHan models from the 50's. That library is going somewhere. San Francisco-Oakland airport terminal had a Ford V-8 used in an aircraft with propeller in 1998 when I visited my son who worked at MIPS. At last at the Edison Museum in Fort Meyers, Florida I saw a genuine 59A along with some description. I might have seen one in a 1940 Ford coupe at the Talmer get together but it had been replaced with an 8BA. I saw some stock 1932 Fords at the Henry Ford museum. I only write this to assure you that I was looking not as a secret passage to a treasure unknown to the public. Through the years folks have commented that they like my words better than my images so I have created this short historic page as a best contribution to the Early Ford Club now that I am a member. This is not "Just the facts Ma'am" nor is it a complaint. I hope it shows the character of those I knew and how I bounced off the less deeply involved. The current owners of these fine automobiles are appreciated for keeping them in my view. I sold my 1948 Ford to someone who had an old Graham at the Rose bowl swap meet in 1976. He was the only person who had a car there. I also gave him all my old magazines. (Editor’s note: I tried to explore automotive design in Troy, Michigan after I parked my car in 1987. New buildings held Efficient Engineering and Troy Design associates. Off to the East was Modern Engineering where the future head of American Motors and then Chrysler Jose Duderweiler from Brazil migrated from Canada as a French connection. I tried to make contact and eventually found that any work on the Cadillac Northstar 4 valve dual over head camshaft design had moved to the equivalent Lincoln. Falconer was bringing technology from England via Canada and I looked instead at KITPLANES magazine and I learned about the Papa Mustang and it’s V-12. The Outboard Marine designed corvette V-8 moved to Arizona and then faded out. Both Ford and Chevrolet developed roller camshafts with hydraulic lifters for what was coming to be called small blocks. Pushrods held for a time. Fours and v-6’s dominated sales. The Fog One day while taking the shorter way to Birmingham from Troy at night in 1964 I was passing by the GM Milford Proving Grounds. My headlights picked up a shape off to the side of the road and then it jumped into the road and hit my front end just off center. The hood flew up as the latch was destroyed. The engine began to overheat as the radiator had burst. I tried to see if I could creep on and then stopped. Within moments a State Police car appeared. As usual he was totally outraged as his car had two stags in confrontation on the door seal. Eventually, he went on and I was left to get my friend's car following me to tow my car back to Troy where a test driver lived. I found parts for the grille and had the test driver weld the cracks in the fender after bumping it out roughly. No hammer welding with a 1/4 inch strip of copper left rough ragged breaks. The hood was reformable and a used latch mechanism made it stay down. The only other body damage to the vehicle in the time I had it was when a pheasant in flight crashed through the passenger windshield near the Ann Arbor airport. I replaced both panels with tinted safety glass. Well there was the time I had taken the rear bumper guards off and an attempt to push the car to start it crunched the lower right trunk edge. That I filled with Black Knight filler. Getting the car body sanded and painted and some minor rust repair set this all up. At sale it was worth $600.00 after 10 years growing from my payment of $100.00 in the beginning. It did not have an engine number on the title but used the number on the firewall. As near as I know it is still in the Inland Empire of Southern California. Eleven years later,I sold off my last car in 1987 and stopped driving. Women had run into my car in California and Michigan in what seemed to be deliberate acts by owners of Chrysler and American Motors cars, specifically three different Dodge Darts and an AMC Pacer as well as a Dodge van. With my last car gone I walked out to Army Tank and Automotive Command in Warren to look at the bid room specifically related to anything that might prevent a Bradley from being airlifted by a C-17. The YC-15 prototype I had witnessed the first flight of couldn't fully fill out the CXHLS goal of 1965 set for building 13 in Long Beach. I went on to Prratt & Whitney and in 1980 specified the clipped fan JT-9 that became the F-117 fan for AMST. Now after Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom I have no questions. In 1962 the Iranian ambassador to the US's son lived next door to me in the residence hall and borrowed my typewriter for a year. When he returned it the tab was broken off the zipper. An Iraqi in the English as a second language across the street program lived on the floor below and was teased a lot taking it with good humor. Good News for the Ford L-head V-8 The local dealer received several very nice trades of 1953 Ford V-8 sedans and he saw them as an opportunity to support the local football team. He set a bargain price to compensate any reluctance to obtain a technology that was being left out of the new cars. The boy across the street bought one and used it to deliver the Detroit Free Press mornings. He became quarter back of the high school team. He was two years older than I. A boy down the street who lived closer to the dealer also bought one. He used it to deliver the Detroit News in the after noon. He became center of the football team. He was my age. Who my age became the quarterback? A farm boy who managed to practice even without a bus ride also became the boy friend of the girl I thought was the prettiest and brightest in the school became quarterback in my Senior year. The dealer shop manager loaned me the king pin reamer so I could replace the bushings in my '48. I also replaced the tie rod ends and the spring shackle bushings both the rubber ones and the hard fiber filled ones. With an alignment by the new recapping shop I was ready for two new tires. My father had traded his 1953 V-8 two tone Saddle Tan and (Antelope Beige?) Country Sedan with three seats for a 1957 gray (he loved gray, he painted everything he could grey unless it needed aluminum silver.) Country sedan with two seats and a six. Even with the addition of the travel trailer 120 horsepower was more than 110 hp so why not go with the OHV six? In 1962 at Christmas I codrove a residential hall dish machine coworker's 1954 Ford six TuDor to Miami with retread front tires. There we met the Intercoastal Waterway bridge keeper's daughter and her newly purchased and painted black 1954 Ford OHV V-8. I painted the wheels for her with the glass jar of touchup paint she had been supplied. The engine in my father's trade-in had to have new main bearings replaced and then was put right on the lot West of town. I took Driver Training from a former truck driver at the high school in a 1959 Plymouth with an OHV V-8 and dual controls with a three speed column shift. I did drive my father's 1957 on the narrow concrete roads of the upper penninsula of Michigan near Tacquamenon Falls worrying about the 4 inch drop to the soft shoulder and swamp. That car developed a whooping, whutting rear axle bearing failure that the mechanics studied by lying on the floor in the back as he drove. The 1959 six he traded for was alos a country Sedan in gray and fated to have the same rear axle bearing failure. What didn't fail was the engine screaming down the hills in second gear on the newly openned TransCanada Highway , above Lake Superior in Ontario, with the trailer pushing it. I was no longer living at home in 1962 when my father dropped the station wagon body style opting for a four door to carry a single ended canoe on a roof rack and chose the big engine (almost) a green painted 352 cubic inch version of the new for 1958 Interceptor with a single two barrel Holley carburetor and a long and lanky shifting 3-speed transmission. At least the linkage was very sturdy looking. A cotter key had fallen out of the transmission end of the one in the 1959 in the middle of a turn in an intersection in the middle of Ontario on the way to New York leaving the car locked in two gears. I had to crawl under the low belly avoiding the hot exhaust to assertain the fault. Then I walked over to a garage I saw to buy a cotter key. Typically for the lean operations in Canada they had none. I did obtain a nail which I bent to temporarily get us on our way. Reliability? How about all the Buicks we saw in Colorado in the 1950's steaming beside the road? Rabbit Ears pass and the Trail Ridge Road sorted them out. But how about that Ford 3-speed synchromesh transmission? I put a pre-1935 straight-cut floor shift in my 1948. My friend the Studebaker dealer's son knew where to get them and always had one. I blew the reverse out by frying the rear tires in the gas station driveway when I first got my car running again in 1959 when I was old enough to drive on the street and had finished driver training. It made several local trips jumping quietly out of gear in 3rd unless I held it in with my leg. One day past Ubly headed for Cros-Lex a rival in football in dropped the cluster and case bottom and I had to turn it around and rive home in high all the way. The next three speed had helical low/reverse. It lasted until a run at the new Ubly Dragway. The clutch linkage was worn and just did not give a clean shift into second. The main drive bearing failed and whut-whut-whut I coasted rapidly to the turnaround road. I replaced that one with a strange looking object that the REA diesel supervisor in Ubly had in his basement. It was converted at the rear to early Ford but the front input leaked even with a new slinger and new leather seal. Maybe it was for a different rotation and the helical gear acted as an oil pump instead of evacuating the area? That ended the use of the Ford torque tube rear end that had brand new axles I had bought at an auction the school kids in Dexter had featuring obsolete parts donations from the local dealers. it rained that day and I was the only bidder once the sale closed. Even those rare 15 inch 5-1/2 inch bolt circle wheels, with tubeless tire valves, had to leave to give a common spare. I suppose it was only half an Early Ford in terms of ride and vibration that headed down the US 112 and then the Ryan Expressway past Joliet Prison to join Us Highway 66 in 1965. Arriving in Canoga Park where my father's sister lived it took up a new search for a less vocational life style. Every day choose a new target reception area or guard and a maybe a personnel department from the student activities supplied book of research locations. Hughes Thousand Oaks, Hughes Pepperdine, Rocketdyne Canoga Park, Lockheed's new Rye Canyon, Douglas Santa Monica Clover Field, North American Sabreliner Division, Air Research on Sepulveda, Hughes Space Division got an interview to develop code for the TV camera on the surveyor moon lander with someone who my father had worked with on radar at MIT and now a Phd, then an insider, my uncle had had an assistant manager who had a fraternity brother who now worked in Personnel at Douglas Long Beach production facility. The news was without an actual engineering degree only Technician jobs were available and Santa Monica wanted a B average and impending Master's degree. The ceiling later in salary would be $800.00. Just loaning your Complex Variables book to a roomate or tutoring another roomate to a B+ in LaPlace transforms and loaning him the book made them engineers and even one on to grad school and an Automotive Engineering professorship at U of M Dearborn. Production was a risk with the flight testing of the DC-9 begun but Long Beach and a move away from my aunt and uncle looked better than a lower salary and job managing code for scheduling and task times at Rocketdyne. I still have a memory of my Ford sitting at the guard shack at Gate 6 with the chain link topped by triple strand barb wire fence and gate and the few visitor slots. In a month I would be in the huge parking lot to the Southeast and Building 13, the former C-133 production line location would be my post at a wide drafting table with someone's abandonned drafting machine and some rolls of vellum. In the next two years, both of the men I had loaned books would come and live in my apartment until they found jobs. Another man who had worked on the dish machine came out but found his own way to a job at Santa Monica setting up Digital Machining paper tapes. He had worked for Ford Rawsonville one summer measuring flow rates on the new Motorcraft 2 barrels and attaching the little tin flow tags. Another room mate one summer worked full time nights while going to school at the Ford transmission plant where both his mother and father worked. He installed the greased ring of roller bearings in the input main drive. His father was a millwright and set up the wood block floors for new machines at line yearly changeover. The only hot rod folks I met in california was at Reath automotive behind Douglas on Cherry Street. I was looking for a bellhousing for the New Process wide ratio transmission that I thought was similar to one in a 1946 Ford 3/4 ton owned by the REA supervisor. (He also had a 1934 Ford V-8 Tudor sedan with plumbing pipe exhaust and Gambles glass packs. He had chopped down a maple tree in his front yeard to make the bird's eye maple dash insert in his Ford.) Both instances of trying to use this transmission gave brushes with NC maching advertised as giving a surface finish of 1/10000. Sadly the surface was as much as 1/2 inch inaccurate in position necessitating a visit to more conventional mill, maybe a Bridgeport once, so precision, yes, accuracy, no. Shortening the torque tube and driveshaft worked better in the U of M Engineering Mechanics Laboratory where the two guys I loaned books to worked after the dish machine. In the 1990's I took a written test administered by the Michigan Secretary of State on Heavy Maintenance and passed to receive a license for a year. The only thing I had not done hands on was set the pinion clearance. The announcement of Mr. Goodwrench crate engines came soon after. Folk wanted packaged OEM. I would say that not building an engine where dust could fall or installing one after building it in the Winter cold and then in a very hot day putting it in and starting it avoids risks spinning a bearing in a large displacement V-8. I considered each year going to the SAE show in Detroit but the closest I came was walking over to the SAE headquarters and talking to the receptionist, twice. The state had my niche and it wasn't as an engineer much less a professional one. Atlantic Research once told me so. Fitting in Test pilots accept me as a digital predecessor. Combat pilots wish I could bend the rules a bit. I once had all the Douglas Commercial transport manuals DC-9, DC-10 and DC-8 all dash numbers as the stretches came. Only airlines got these. I had the bird farm report of the line positions for every assembly and subassembly each day as it was issued. I had the KC-135A and B as my first flight manuals. The C-132 mockup loomed in the storage area behind the plant as a reminder of what might have been in large cargo. The A-4F was my first Flight manual as my boss insisted I check the graphs made by Aero Performance and they insisted I not let my results be seen outside as they decided what width pencil was used. The A-4 had come from El Segundo and then went to Palmdale to build what would not be in inventory when Desert Storm began. I attended Tailhook in 2010. I flew the the F-18 simulator and the F-135 simulator but not the C-2. What I expected to find at Early Ford V-8 People who were familiar with the St. Paul, Minnesota facility. I was there in 1984 before I decided to go further West taking a copy of the St. Paul paper to deliver to the USN facility at Monterrey. Huh! Music? Spy Stuff? old Spanish trace? Wells-Fargo Pony Express? A quiet voice as I crossed the Twin Bridges over the Potomac in 1983 had suggested St. Paul. The second reinforced toothed timing belt failure woulr end that trip just outside Grand Rapids, Michigan. My parents were in Europe on a tour when I called and I walked to Grand Haven to the West headed for Chicago. I remembered one of my cousins worked for K-Mart there as I approached. A week later with a new belt installed I was headed to Saginaw and then to Troy again supporting cargo on Eastern Airlines to Managua until 1987 and neither a rebuild kit nor a rebuilt carburetor could keep the car on the road. A possible road trip to Nicaragua with goods for Nicaragua Medical Relief I had found in a Detroit Free Press article fortunately was avoided before this. The gasohol was not the friend of someone dry since 1981. I need to be careful of friends. Eighty-five in a Sixty Five This makes sense as the horse power rating of the first Ford V-8 and the later one that diverged from the smaller V-8 of sixty horse power. Another way would be 21A rods in a 59A block. That is more about 21 vs. 24 hours in the sense of the studs holding the heads on. The intrigue of this came from the City police man with his gun and gun belt and his lock up separate from the next door County Jail. It was a the Boy Scout Leader of a troop sponsored by the public school that he was going to move from his own car where he believed that the Spicer rear end locked in a realtionship to speed that he could use to find any speeders in secret. The Salisbury rear end of a Chevrolet was not open ended in this. These were for the newer 50's cars. The older ones had Hotchkiss or spiral bevel. He believed he could easily run down any of those lesser ones and they would not dare to try. I did not see his actual car until the boy who I raced in Phys. ed and discovered that by applying my openning I could chase him down to eventually let him pass the finish line in a 1/4 mile dash first. That boy bought the car and showed it to me after the police chief died of a heart attack in his fifties. The police chief had run the school bus at top speed in the hills on the way to the Boy Scout Camp near Bear lake. He said he had taken the governor off because he had to get back to the city before dark to protect it. The city had a state police unit headed by a Sargeant on the West city limits and a County sherrif's office on the court house square but he patrolled mostly the east end near the railroad tracks. The idea of no governor perhaps played to the Governor General of Canada which I saw later when Mikael Gorbachev reviewed the Royal guard with fixed bayonets just before he was deposed. This was decades before that event of course. 1955 was going to lead to a racing ban by the Automobile Manufacturing Association in 1956 and hark in my subconscious to the 1940 Ford with moon tank that the lady friend of the boy I met in Tennessee said her husband still had. NASCAR had begun in 1948 with a 1940 Ford driven by Red reigning as champion. When my father told me I could not build a hot rod I understood him to mean no California parts. Anything from the dealer seemed to be covered. My plan to build with a Mercury crank and bored and stroked 3/8 from there with a ported and relieved 59A block seemed out of the question even if I could find a way to do it. Floyd Clymer's book kept me company with bullies on the playground. I had no ready answers for the tough older high school boys on the way home who claimed my father caused them to get bad gradses and get drafted. Washing my face and my sister's face with snow in the winter or throwing frozen ice balls at us caused her to go across the street to wait them out and me to go to the County garage. I had been almost choked out by the grade school principal's son in the tall grass near the woods when I was four. He was two years older. His brother one year older called him off, saying "You failed let him go." The younger son explained he could execute me if I resisted in anyway. How much did a 85/65 ticket on US 23 near Brighton cost in 1963? I think it was about $3 a mile and a need for a personal appearance before the Justice of the Peace. At some point with the points assigned for infractions I was scheduled for an interview in Lansing but I skipped it before I went to California. The Ford dealer had tried to plead his son's car no contest but had failed. I was not going to get trapped there. In 1984 I successfully did plead no contest to 45/25 and get a sentence of one day in the county jail when I had no money for bail and a Russian bible in my winter coat pocket. It wasn't the motorcycle that was subject to this ticket it was the overhead camshaft. The marks on the road were for an airplane to use a stop watch. Only Indianapolis cars had over head camshafts in the early Ford V-8 days. Some Ford V-8's had contested but none ever won. The supercharged Novi's never won either with their V-8 form. Four cylinder cars ruled the paved oval track. Was a Model T 25 horse power and a Model A 45? Later the Baptists deacons seemed to class women in T and A categories. When the substitute preacher who owned aused furniture store had a heart attack in the pulpit I thought "He had a Model T one ton." I knew nothing about steroids like testosterone and androsterone until I began looking up molecular weights in my Handbook of Chemistry and Physics. Then I made a t-shirt in red letters with "Flat Rate 288" to signal a Motor's Handbook kind of work and later "Blue Flame 292" to cover the big six I had missed. It wasn't to make a hideout or a sleeper that I put the 6 emblem off a spare car the wrecker driver gave me to get a new fender onto my car. Nope, it was to celbrate all the good miles my father's sixes had run after the V-8 of 1953 was traded in in 1957. When custom back hoe showed up to "hand dig" my pool hole in the 70's it was powered by a Ford six not the tractor four. The operator was proud of his machine. When folks wanted to call my father to account they came to me. He was not responsible for anything. He had insurance. Chemistry is the media I was the Chemistry laboratory assistant for the year I was in Chemistry as a student. Maybe I protected the girls from unwise impulses that had injured one in a class several years before, appealing to the janitor as the keeper of the properties of strong chemicals had not served her well when she ran out into the hall. I knew acetone, toluene, banana oil, turpentine from model airplanes as well as ether from plastic assemblies. Ethyll alcohol from shop for sh*llac was added to my household though the grade school principal used that. Hydrochloric acid and Ammonia openned together in the fume hood combined in the lab stock room to give a powder on all the bottles. It wasn't immediately apparant. I had to spend several days wiping all the bottles. The farm boy who pushed me down from behind and crushed my coronet bell as I hit the ground while walking to the shool bus to take us to the new band room at the new high school had a younger brother. I threw him into the tuba case some time later and he did not come back. My father made the younger brother his chemistry lab assistant. I ignored the snub. A farm boy who worked with chores was no match for a boy who lifted an engine block and moved it from the basement two floors to set on his bedroom floor after thoroughly cleaning it. How did I get it into the basement as a dirty thing? I don't remember just that Wisk was better than Tide and GUNK had begun the outside but now it was vulnerable after being boiled with caustic and bored out. At this point keep track of the 59A-B block as being the host of a 3/4 race grind camshaft and no longer in my possesion though the new owner wants to sell it back and give me a chance to restore my car. This is the jumping off point for me joining the Early Ford V-8 Club if you allow for a time jump from 1965 to 2018. Computer coding folks think that a picture is worth fractions of a tenth of cent. Photographers would like it to be a digital negative and copies worth about $10.00. I have to build a model to replace the metal image I have as held in my hands. I found it takes months to do that from photographs in a Floyd Clymer book and the computer with two video cards in SLI costs over $3000.00 and the graphics software as cheap as I can get it is $500.00 and several iterations of previous computers and software had to occur in order to be at 2010. As someone who took a lot of Teramycin for respiratory illnesses and had stay with the grade school principal's two sons to recuperate from measels, and chicken pox to give my father assurance he would not get sick and miss work I needed more than one carburetor for my car. A four barrel was two expensive and complicated and only maybe a Lincoln had one. I took my father's yard stick away from him and put it up when I was 14 but it was years later that I went past where the first 35 Ford 3-speed dropped it's cluster and checked out a report of manifolds and multiple carburetors in a gas station in Peck at a cross roads. Tattersfield had four just for racing. Barney Navarro had three for large displacement. With a 3/4 race camshaft the REA manger had two though I don't remember the builder of his manifold. His heads were shaved to approximate the Denver high altitude heads that fit Floyd Clymer's locale. My car could not get a parking or storage pass even for my first year at college so it was put up on cinder blocks with the water drained. Did I find all the water? Would it be still be whole when I returned after summer recess? I had run a mile at my full speed and went though my wall on a 1/10th mile cork elevated track in the old Waterman Gymnasium. I had lifted 250 pounds over my head in Phys ed. I had volunteered for an Exercycle ergometer study for a coach and put out over 1-1/3 horsepower. Now, where was my car level. After the 1964 drag race transmission failure I welded reinforcement onto the new clutch linkage and used the 1948 gears with brass synchronizers in the final 1939 case my friend would sell me. I needed this one to last. It didn't. I blew it out when I jumped on it at a crossing street and a car appeared at the top of the hill on state street. Bud-do and a quick coast across the street. That is how I came to be looking fof the odd ball the REA manger had in his basement. It was drilled for what looked like a Ford rear bearing retainer and I bought a new one at the Dexter auction the day I bought the new axles to clean up the threads on their ends. There is one other part I put on my car that altered it's Ford configuration and that was some NASCAR type 60/40 valved shock absorbers for teh rear end that were discounted by Ford's Autolite factory in Saline when they had to divest to complete a merger and bring out Motorcraft and the older Prestolite brands. What does this mean to the police chief's belief that the he could find any violator? Today I conceived of the idea that the dealer tried to plead "no contest" to any moving violations by his son's car but law enforcement in it's secret police form as set out by the county coroner refused to accept it. By eliminating my own car the ... well, you tell me? Sometime in 1966/1967 a Dana rear had 3/4 floating like the Ford torque tube years without the taper and keys with a nut at the axle end in common with Chrysler. My native thought says that the secret police in this was to find "top of the tooth" usage that indicated very high speed. Taxi cabs of Chrysler products growled more from odometers way beyond 150,000 miles. This was "revenue sound". As time passed the court rooms began to accept any police intuition about speed. There was no acceptable contradiction of a police decision to pusue and arrest. Looking at the Early Ford V-8 News photos I am sure I would be boggled at so many just Fords in a point of view. How they escaped from the John Dillinger notoriety I don't know. Maybe it was just an update in the mid fifties to more strongly accomplish law enforcement in a land of rebels. The Early Ford V-8 Sound In my art studies when I was searching out topics for drawing and painting in the 1980's I found that my mind was dark until my hand moved and when my hand moved it sought out what I later identified as sounds. Now after getting new hearing aids I can definitely establish the early Ford V-8 as a recognizable sound for the most distinguished cars as I approached driving age. Think about a 1950-52 Ford two door with dual exhausts where the pipes angled in a bit at the back and the mufflers were steel packs. Leaving the high school parking lot and turning onto M-53 headed into town on the main street in the late fall, the vapor from the pipes twirled opposite to each other out of the pipes as the crescendo of the sound rose. Looking for this car later I only identified a 1950 Victoria with the fabric top that hung around Neeb's Mobil station. Someone said it was Ford Pariseau's car. Later I met him as the Ford garage wrecker driver. The final time I saw him he gave me his 1947 Tudor with a G-series six that had frozen. That was after I had been to the Ubly dragway and watched an F class dragster with a TuffBlok resin filled water passage maximum over bore Flathead of 400 cubic inches burning fuel contest Top Eliminator in the summer of 1964. The sound does not particularly register with me. Was it a slingshot? Did the driver's elbows hang out by the wheels like on a Midget with a V-8 -60 I had seen running on alcohol at the 1/4 mile Owendale track? I have already commented on the 1955 scene near Oak Ridge where my father's car drove through a rocky ford at Cade's Cove and a supercharged Mercury appeared at dusk. Marty Ramsayer's 1951 Ford coupe had two sounds as I rode in it one with the worn out Fordomatic and one with the replacement 3-speed standard shift we put in it in a pit near Ubly. The engine did not differ only the spectrum of sound and the run up and down in gears. How about a 1/4 mile dragstrip series of runs in N stock with a 1939 Ford fordor that had a fouled plug maybe from a blown piston and would occasionally fire into the oil pan creating a lot of smoke. It's timing slip? 60 mph and 20 seconds I was driving and shifting the gears. I knew that transmission very well by then. 1963, was it? The cars I have seen recently were not running. They were either in the impromptu car shows where a 1949 Olds could not be told from a 351 Cleveland Ford V-8 or they were in a museum and only the Lincoln Continental had it's hood open. I did see one 8BA in a 1940 Ford where the owner had replaced the 3-speed with a Mustang II four speed and adapted the floor shift lever from a 1939 Ford. I talked with the owner several times but never heard it run. If rain was predicted the owners wanted to get how to avoid getting the under carriage dirty. I had walked about 3/4 of a mile to the lot so I had to leave about 15 minutes before the cars to avoid getting wet. I usually had some photo prints either of other caars or of renders I had made and did not want to risk ruining them even in a rai coat or with an umbrella. There was a dealer in town that began to sell 1946-48 Ford convertibles that had overhauled engines with aluminum heads and dual Chandler-Grove 94 carburetors but he advertised them as having Stromberg 97's. Were the 1947 and 1946 Maroon cars I saw at the impromtu show bought there? Shhh! I don't want to know. Years earlier as I was peddling papers I heard a unusual Ford V-8 start up and leave the dealer's house before I was in range to see it as I was blocked by trees fora sightline. Maybe two months later it was parked by the house I an I could see it was a gray 1946 with the longer trunkline of what I thought was a club coupe. I didn't try to buy it as it was too soon for me to drive and he probably wanted more money that someone who averaged $5.00 per week could afford. Even saving it all for a year would only be about $250 with starts and stops and contests on a route that averaged 30 customers weekly and more on Sundays. By six months that car was gone and I did not meet the owner until he was President of the Gambler's Car Club in 1959. I was introduced to him by Ken Cook who was an amateur magician and gave me his seats out of the customized 1947 white convertible he eventually took the body off to free the engine to put into his primered 1949 Mercury. The back seat was incompatible with a Sedan coupe. Dewey was kind of haunted by his brother's death and hard to get near. Subchaser The next story is a bit of an octopus and involves a 1953 Ford convertible, Weiderhold Freight line and Pontiac and Hydramatic. One arm is my neighbor across the street who drove for Weiderholdt for years until he got a dislocated disc in his back. Then he drove a 1959 GMC V-6 van with Grumman body for New Era potato chips as a driver/salesman. Another arm is the gas station across from the high school where I eventually worked as a 15 year old with a work permit. The previous young assistant station attendent and the leasee took on a job the previous Summer changing any flat tires on a group of gravel trains which are diesel tractors with a double set of dump trailers and a dolly between the trailers. Some were 30 wheelers. At some point after I had my car running adversaries began to try to set up a race between my car and the 1953 Ford that belonged to Barry Weiderhold the son of the freight line owner. Somewhere along the way he included an Autocar tractor and gravel train to his fleet. I never took up this challenge. I saw the transmission as a possible failure that would end my driving career. After some years after a boy who was older and had hit a car head-on with his Cuchman motor scooter and had facial injuries returned from DeVry Technical Institue and the Navy. He had become Torpedoman First and while training in Arizona had bought a 1958 Packard Hawk. After racing with Robert Greene who had been to Lake Orion Dragway with his father's Jeep station wagon with snow tires he wanted to not just go fender to fender with a 1958 Chevy, he heard that Barry Weiderhold was back in town and wanted to sell the Ford convertible. Dave Armstrong asked me to go with him to look at the car. The day was a typical Winter blizzard day and at the Weiderhold house a dumptruck with the box filled with coal for traction was in the driveway. The father's wife ahd died and he was very depressed and Barry had come home to restore the gravel train to continue the family business. The Ford was something extra now. We looked at it under the hood and saw it had a small 2 barrel and by color maybe was a GMC version of the Pontiac. What year? Was it a 284 or a 389? Whoa! I knew nothing about Pontiacs. We go it started and the oil pressure guage waved it hand at us and then settled down to about 40psi steady. Hmm! Not great but GM has different values than Ford. Dave really wanted it and he took out his wallet and made the purchase on the spot. A few weeks later Dave called me and had me come look as he had it up on the rack at Ramey Swackhammer's Texaco with the oil pan off. One of the rod journal was wrapped with what looked like shim stock. The early Ford free rotating rod bearing had bit him. He was disgusted and that was the end of our friendship until my former boss at teh Standard Station told me that he thought Dave had taken his ratchet and 3/8 socket set. He confronted Dave and Dave showed him he had painted it black over the green and indeed had it. Was Dave making a gravel train guilt connection? Later Barry Weiderhold fell asleep driving the Autocar and ran off the road and the truck caught fire. He burned to death. End of story? I said this was an octopus. In 1981 after my analytical career was over I took a ride on my motorcycle up to Port Ste. Lucie Nuclear Power plant. I wanted to talk to them about running the backup diesels continuously and burning soft nuclear waste like rags and paper and clothing in the exhaust and bubbling it into water to concentrate the wastes and make them easier to separate by activity level. Two reactors were running and two were being built so I had a hard time finding a place to park but eventually I walked up to the gate and asked to see the health physicists. I knew of them from Oak Ridge in 1955. We talked for awhile and they suggested I go the FP &L Headquarters in Miami. On the way back home it began to rain a light rain and I had experienced a defraying throttle cable so I was very cautious. Approching the traffic light in Tequesta I noticed a FINA gasolin station and turned off and ran up to the pumps. I remembered a female attendant at a FINA in Fort Pierce who put the nozzle in my tank and filled it so I was playing a bit. Just then I heard a crash behind me and off to the left! I looked back an saw a black man in a pink t-shirt that said South County Supply stumbling out of the near side of a white van with an Internaional cab. The truck was in the ditch partway and the fuel tank was ruptured and leaking fuel. It had run into the back of a blue Chevrolet Citation. I waited a while and then left. Tequesta had a police officer but no station. I called them later to report what I had seen including the fact I was the missing man in the set up. In Miami I couldn't find a place to park and the proposal was beginning to cool. 1984 found me in a Pinto running across Grasslands National Monument beside some trucks from the nuclear facility in South Carolina. I assumed they were going to Richland, Washington. With this I'm ready to stop unless someone wants to see a story about passing a car on a day with heavy snow after the banks beside the road had been raised up by the Austin-Western plows. When I got beside the car I was passing the engine in my car began to make a popping sound and lost a lot of power. A car came around the bend headed toward us and I could not get back with a car beside me. So knowing the Austin-Western had a jib plow that tossed the top of the berm way back I took to the shoulder on the far side. Snow began flying over the hood which on a 1948 Ford is pointed like a boat as E.T. Gregorie made it. Soon I had slowed down enough to mae a safe u-turn and I returned sheepishly realizing that the chilled iron lifter I had substituted for the 1956 solid lifter required had maybe failed. I had heard that popping sound in the 1937 Ford TuDor that the former ambulance driver for MacAlpine had bought with a swap OHV. Fortunately, it was 1959 and a new 1956 replacemtn part was available and I could use a new 1959 camshaft with them. They cost $1.89 each. The ambulance driver went on to found the largest wholesale embalming practice in Detroit after attending Ferris State and getting a degree in mortuary science. Oh! Whatever I've been holding in that I followed Calvin Rice and the "Glass Slipper" and how they took over the Mercedes and Auto-Union records and yeah! Don Garlits and how he took his 8 Stromberg equipped dragster to the Kern Timing Association meet got sent home and came back with a bigger GMC blower than they had and won the meet. My mind had slipped from a 3/8 by 3/8 flathead with the Merc crank and 1/8 stroke, ported and relieved, with a full race cam and 10-1/2 to one aluminum heads. How many carburetors? Three on a Navarro manifold or four on a Tattersfield? My car had burned twice. Once in front of Pioneer high school on the hottest day of the Summer it coughed and I saw the tell-tale brown spot begin in ythe hood. Soon there was more flames out the edges of the hood. I ran to a school bus and commandeered the fire extinguisher in the door way and put out the flames then openning the hood to make sure just as the fire truck drove up and wanted to blast it with the high pressure hose. That time I got off with new neoprene hoses to the carburetors from the fuel block on the fire wall. I had to reprime the hood. I did not yet know that with wear the needles and seats let the fuel leak at idle and the excess leaked out the sides of the throttle shafts now not fitting all that well to puddle on the mainfold. I should have done better. I bought a new fire extinguisher to mount on the floor boards. I had the school fire extinguisher filled by Chet Lash who was the volunteer fire chief. He had been a customer for my new delivery route years before. He took the additional death and dismemberment insurance sold by the Bay City Times. Exactly when the next fire happened escapes me except by then a new disk type float valve ahd been announced by Don Garlits and I bought four of them. This time I was fire proof. With the new hoses installed I headed out M-53 toward the big curve past the Coral Gables motel. As I past Charlotte Braden's Fleet wing gasoline and heating fuel operation I saw way behind me a car coming up fast. I let my car rollout until the closure held at zero. That would not do for the follower. So I had to open mine up. At 100 mph the vent windows blew closed and it became warm inside. The I began to hear the tell-tale "shooting ducks" of a lean situation. I might burn a piston. I backed off a little. I was able to hold off the car behind which I now saw was a black 1957 Ford. It began to dawn on me that this was not one of the Brown girls. Dwight Talaski had repaired the death car that killed his brother and painted it black. Now four years later here he was chasing my little 1948 Ford Sedan Coupe. My coupe had once had a 1957 Duntov camshaft in a 1956 Chevrolet truck engine out of a farm to market milk truck. I was able to bore it 1/8 and install the 10-1/2 to one pistons of a fuel injected Corvette in it. On top was a Weiand staggered four manifold with four Stromberg 48's. I had had a choice of three Rochesters on a three two manifold. I now had two 180 degree joined Y headers running into Daytona pipes mounted under the running boards with mufflers inboard the frame. An AC/Delco electric pump fed fuel through a 3/8 fuel line from the tank to the fuel block. We were approaching the curve where Dwight's brother had rolled over two new Fords two years in sequence. He backed off and I made a U-turn. Back in town I found one of the carburetors had a chunk of neoprene that had fallen off the hose as it was cut. It partially blocked one jet out of eight. I heard you before The big radio stations I knew in those days were, CKLW Windsor, Ontario which you could hear in Hialeah, Florida strong and clear and Wolfman Jack from Mexico which at night in the Tennesse Hills on the way to Florida filled the airwaves. I went with Kurt Brinker one day in his sister's Catalina convertible to pickup a check from his dad at the County Fair Grounds and then a check from Charlotte Braden and deliver them to TJ in the CJ, night DJ at WLEW, the local radio station. He was busy filling his reel to reel tape recorders high up on shelves on the wall from a bank of microphones and a table of turntables. Then at University of Michigan I met the son of a WXYZ DJ who had become a witness in the Payola scandal. Our own house in the residence hall had Harvey Kabaker from Chicago as President. He was a DJ for the radio station on campus. I cannot remember the call sign of the Flint station that competed with WLS, the Chicago station at night. In the thumb of Michigan these were the stongest signals. Thomas McKenzie became a roomate when we moved out to Whitmore Lake the last year. He was the DJ's son. He also was a friend of a test driver at GM Proving Grounds. In the Summer of 1964, I helped him order parts from the Chevrolet dealer in Saline and the Vic Hubbard in Hayword, California. I identified a 327 short block for a 1964 fuel injected Corvette and the heads for a 1961 283 version now in cast iron with bigger valves than the 1964. To this I added an Iskenderian 555 roller camshaft, (Polydyne-5-cycle?) with 320 degrees of duration, a gear drive set and Rev-Kit. We spent several weekends polishing the crank and added a windage kit. We had the block align bored and semi finished bearings honed to fit. He had a 350 horsepower AFB- D series spread-bore carburetor from his friend Darryl. The manifold was only a 4 barrel for a 230 hp 283. That led to a big defect for me. He wanted the 4 Strombergs off my car and two more to go on an Edelbrock X cross ram with six positions. That led to maybe 450 horsepower for him and me sputtering and barking down the road with the secondary bores hanging off the sides of the manifold he traded me. I eventually got him to take me to Gratiot and buy an adapter to hopefully fit the big spreadbore on the small 283 manifold. By that time my exhaust had some blue smoke. I had burned a piston and eventually I found a whole upper compression ring missing! No time to fuss now school was out and I had to get to California before the hiring window closed. On campus interviews were not broad enough for me. When is a HI-Po 271 Not a 289? Look over there! Right beside us on Telegraph is a (not Woodward?) Maple is the dangerous crossing where tanker trucks burn coming down the hill. A new Mustang hardtop and it has a --the light just turned green I did not see the emblem on the left front fender. 2.20 low on the 1963 rebuilt Borg-Warner 4 -speed might be a bit tall. Then second gear is just right. Third and he is just back a bit. Fourth!--what is this 4th? So I guess I won't see a Mustang as a step up. Maybe it was a 260 with the Motorcraft 2 bbl? Beauty Is What Beauty Does Buck in Monroe had a 1961 Galaxy 500 convertible with white leatherette bucket seats. It had a 406 cubic inch/402 horsepower engine with the 3-Holley 2-bbls and the long tail shaft version of a Borg-Warner T-10 4-speed. In spite of himslelf he sold it and bought a 1957 Chevrolet black hardtop with a 270 horsepower bual 4-bbl engine. This car had a reputation on the streets of the County where the "hood lifting contest" was held each weekend in a shopping center. A sure winner was better than breaking or sullying. Stadium Boulevard On Stadium Boulevard in Ann Arbor the rumored king was a red Ventura hardtop with a Hydramatic. He hung out at a drive-inn. We took McKenzie's rusted out 2 door 1955 Chevrolet statioin wagon that once belonged to Darryl. Now it had the 450 hp 327 and a iron case Borg-Warner 4 speed with 2.54 gears. Tom was uncertain. When he turned off the key the engine just went- uhhh. Still a bit tight. On the freeway you could punch it in 3rd and it would just roar under the hood with reverse flow mufflers making minimal noise. Back at the Dead End in Whitmore Lake a 1961 White Ford came looking. Proffesional Pause One Saturday my roomate Dave Lynch and I took his Volkswagen to a Royal Pontiac Open house. We took pamphlets and looked at a Bobcatand a Banker's Special with the yellow air box for a Paxton blower on a 421 in a Grand Prix body. Scotty bought one of those after he got into embalming full time. Was this in 1962 or 1963? Smoke If You Have Them I didn't have time to install the fender I took off the 1947 Tudor to replace the one the deer crushed and Darryl welded the crack on. I did have time to get new Daytona pipes made for the ones that were now rusted after several winters. My build was 8 years old in a 8 year old in the beginning car. Going through the rocky cuts in Missouri I could see the smoke rolling out as I went up the next hill. I would have to check the oil and in spite of the hot state the water. In California near Needles the oil showed a milkey emulsion but the water was OK. It was using a lot of oil. The road (US 66) in those days crossed a lot of Arryoyos so you were constantly going whoopdee-doo up a rounded ridge and down into another arroyo. The little stores and gas stations had no service bays and no mechanical repairs seemed likely. Bright Lights Big city Rolling onto the San Bernadino Freeway the lights of the city went on and on. My ammeter began jumping and I realized that the wires that got burned when the rear 4-bar suspension was installed were not tied up by the black tape as oil had loosened them. Under the car by the side of the road was no way to get the tail lights solid. I tried to place the wires as best as I could. Maybe an hour in traffic and I saw Topanga Canyon exit in the Valley. I pulled up in front of my Uncle and Aunt's ranch house in Chattsworth. My Conestoga had gotten me here but no time to sell it as I would need it to find a job and begin my first days. I was facing a due date in six months when the rear plate expired and I had the wrong emergency brake cable for the one severed in the cab. Slot Car My Aunt had a white Falcon with white bucket seats. It purred along with it's Fordomatic. She took me over teh Los Angeles River and the railroad yards to where the overlapping crossovers merged to bring all the freeways into the "Slot Car" track as she called. My uncle took me in his car to Westminster where 7th street out of Long Beach and the 405 San Diego Freeway ended 4 lane forms. These then were the carrot to stay. My uncle had steamed some plywood in his shower to build a bass viol and once owned a Lloyd automobile. He had a bright red USMC ring. Greg my cousin took me to the ice rink at Topanga Canyon Mall and bought me an Orange Julius. The Ventura Freeway went beyond. Pepperdine University was way down the curving track of Topanga Canyon through a tunnel and on the PCH, the Pacific Coast Highway. I was to learn that Sepulveda connected to PCH somehow on the near coast next to Los Angeles. Santa Monica was just a ways down the coast from Malibu. The road to Malibu was one exit nearer LA than Topanga Canyon. The old actors home was in Woodland Hills even closer to Hollywood and LA. The pivot to the San Diego Freeway was at Encino. There was an airport near here but I never went there. I only found Burbank, LAX, and Long Beach. El Toro came later. Ralph Williams the world's largest Ford dealer was in Encino but I did not know that until I got a color TV. Parkwood Chevrolet would go bankrupt one year after I bought a new SS-396 Chevelle from them. It had the 360 hp engine and single exhaust. The transmission was an aluminum case Muncie 4-speed with 2.54 low. The mechanics like to dynotune it when I brought it in. From the odometer they also did road testing. I hated the fake hood vents and eventually knocked out part of them and removed the cast decor. White with bucket seats was my fate. No black convertible with a bench in 1965. I was too late and a demonstrator white hard top was found. My credit was ridiculous and a big baloon payment was scheduled to up my 10% down payment. My money put into the bank in Williamson New York by my grandfather was still holding and in Bank of America. Where? Van Nuys is a well known neighborhood but I only passed through for a month after I had taken a job. Then I decide to leave the one hour coming home each night and moved to Lakewood. I was almost out in dairyland across from the Dutch Village shopping center. Wes Godfrey drew up the insurance policy that moved me from 10-10 PL-PD to 100-200 with collision and miscellaneous. The dealership wanted another policy that I cancelled once I saw it did not cover war and I had life insurance at a defense contractor that did. I rented a Ford Mustang for one month and could not renew it. I was walking daily to and fro down South to Lakewood and then straight past the Parkwood Chevrolet dealership where I eventually bought the Chevelle and on to the plant gate. The heat of summer gave way to the rains of November once I had gotten past new car introduction and was washing my car in the carport. I had filled in for two months with a green Nova 194 six and automatic that had 13 inch wheels and put me almost sliding on my butt to get in. Where was the Ford dealer in Long Beach? I later found Murphy Lincoln Mercury and Circle Volkswagen and even in the seventies Longo Toyota to understand my land lord. The SS was expendable. I took it to Mexico as far as Ensenada past Tijuana and San Felipe on the other coast of Baja. I left it in the President's parking spot one day at 6 AM to get a proposal signed for 25 C-9's at $3 million each. The visitor spots had disappeared and my signer had a flightto catch and I had to pick it up from presentations where it was printed. Not a hot job held me up for over an hour and when I got back the guard had moved it to a Vice President spot. Mac MacGowen left when McDonnell merged and began his retirement in a winery. That did not last and he built the DC-8 80 series in Tulsa with CFM 56 engines from SNECMA/GE. I took my car home and replaced it in early 1967 after the Parkwood dealer had closed. George seemed a good buy until the closer tore up the deal and made a new one for $100.00 more. That wasn't the end. His curse in front of my wife was. I bought my last American car or truck. Trying to salve the bruise in 1987 with the new SATURN Corp was when I began to do art for real. I had an IBM 704 and a 709T4 behind me when I was given a ABS by McDonnell that ran in FORTRAN on a CDC 6400. Amphibious Capable I didn't want to be disqualified for military service so I applied for Navy Officer Candidate School. You take the same physical tests as draftees and follow the same colored footsteps on the floor. 10 pushups, 10 pullups and 10 situps and you are not 4F. When the offer came it did not mention pay or transportation but had a contract to sign. I pondered if the shoulder separations I had gotten trying to surf in Biscayne Bay a few years before would make me a liability to those under my command or my fellow officers. Eventually, I decide that a 2A at a contractors was the best I could do for my country. If the later draft lottery included me I was as ready as I could be. Now enlisted are not tolerant of me. I spent my years with at least lieutenants though at Eglin AFB I did eat with the non-commisioned officers mess. Off the beaten child My father kept a maple yard stick with brass ferrules on the end hung up in the hall closet where the broom and the floor wax was kept in the house he had built in 1946. He would use it to correct any misbehaviors which my mother detected in day. The level was in her words when she threatened before anything happened, "until you can't stand up." Expensive toys My grand parents had at their house in East Williamson, New York, toys that my uncles had played with before they went off to join the Navy and Army Air Corps in WW-II. There was a red cast iron tractor with thickly nickel dipped wheels. The front wheels had a tall central ridge and the rears had lugs that were forbidden by signs on the public roads. I learned later it was probably an imitation of a Fordson. (Editor’s note: Some early multifuel Fordsons had a downstream vaporizing device to add air to a rich mixture after the engine had heated up enough to not need to burn from a tiny tank of gasoline. This early development may have trapped me later into some air leak events that were a disaster for my engine as well as riding on a grader behind a Drott dual fuel bulldozer.) There was also a red cast iron car or what my grandmother called an "auto." I later learned it was imitating a Desoto Airflow. It had white rubber tires. I ran them on the patterns in the living room carpet at my grandparent’s house pretending the rectangular corners were roads. Surprise My grandfather owned a general store he called "East Williamson Mercantile, Company, Incorporated, Henry Van Eenwyk & Sons, prop. In the back of the main store building was a shed with two large bays that served as a warehouse for stock until it was put on shelves in the main store building shelves. It had a large green truck in one bay one day when I was taken there. I can picture it in my mind now and would identify it as a Ford with dual rear wheels and a tall green stake rack unusual in height on a flatbed. The cab had a conventional nose and the grille was 1946-48 or late 40's with vertical bars of creme color. It had extra blinkers on the fenders and clearance lights on the cab top. Later my uncle explained it was not a 2-1/2 ton as I had thought from a brochure of the early 50's but in NYGVW a 7-ton with extra helper springs and a hydraulic dumper lift. That was in 1983 so maybe the GVW was less in the late 40's. This truck had 16.5 inch wheels not the 20 inch of bigger trucks of that era. My grandfather traded this truck every 6 years. It had an electric two speed rear to climb the Dugway hill on old New York 104 near Ironduquoit Bay that was being resloped by steam shovels for years. There was another truck also that my grandfather also traded every 6 years but on an alternate 3 year skip. I did not see this truck until later when my elder uncle gave me a ride in it to pickup floor covering in Rochester, NY. I would now say it was a 1951 with the wide bar grille with the protruding bumps and fenders better integrated with the main cab. It had only one seat and I had to hang onto "what!" to keep from sliding back to the rear door as my uncle pulled away from a stop sign or traffic lights. It was red and lettered on the sides of the panel rear section. Through the years it was not always a Ford. Sometimes it was a Dodge. The big truck was always a Ford. (Editor’s note: February 7, 1919 The Supreme court ruled that Henry Ford had to operate the Company for the benefit of the shareholders.) My grandfather owned a lot of Bethlehem Steel stock. History My grandmother subscribed to National Geographic and my grandfather bound up the year’s issues from 1915 at the end of the year and piled them into big boxes in the attic of his house. At some point after I could read, I began untying the twine and looking at the advertising in the magazines. I decided I liked the 1934 cars best with their vee windshields and grilles. I don't remember any Ford ads but I did notice the Lincoln. I also noted the early ads for all white tires. (Editor’s note: In 1912 tire makers began adding lampblack to the tire rubber and white tires with titanium dioxide disappeared. After that only sidewalls as an option were white.) Possession In 1953 my father decided to trade in the 1949 Plymouth my mother had coveted when they traded in the 1940 Chevrolet her father had given her to attend college in Albion, Michigan. He had had troubles getting the Plymouth six to start in extreme cold with it's automatic choke. His friend the principle of the grade school also had bought a 1949 Plymouth and both of them kept the dealer wrecker busy towing the cars in to sit in the warm dealer garage and start with no troubles. August seemed like a time to get a special order in at a good price. As a sponsor of high school classes my parents knew the Ford dealer's children. He also knew one of the salesmen for L.A. Talaski Ford sales. In the showroom I was bored. My father was in the closed glass surrounded office of the sales force. The dealer came over and handed me a an ivory colored plastic molded model of a 1953 Ford Tudor. He wound it up and showed me the key was underneath. Then he set it off across the floor. I was focused. When my father came out, the dealer made a show of giving it to me. I was a war baby, not one of those later called a Boomer who were one year after the War. I had very few toys. I remember specifically a red and green livery Railway Express truck that was not very authentic and had the top of the van stove in and the wheels wobbly from when my one year older sister tried to ride it. It was sheet metal. Lithographed sheet metal was a big part of toys of my era. The cab was a bit heavier metal and all red. Years later the Ford had warped from the sun coming in the South window in my upstairs bedroom and shining on some long plank shelves my father had laid into the sloping eaves of the attic that he had finished with knotty pine tongue and groove wood. I ran the Ford on the linoleum floor in my bedroom. There was also a sheet balsa wood Piper Cub model my father had assembled but not painted and wound the rubber band propeller drive and released it in the dining room to attract me from the living room some time before. The car and the airplane sat on the shelves. Neither of these toys was a Christmas or Birthday present. Later when I was kept home from school with respiratory ailments, I was given balsa and tissue paper models to build with an X-acto knife and Testor’s glue. I built them on a breadboard pinning the balsa after cutting out the die-cut formers and stringers to wax paper over the plans. My father also helped me build a Strombecker version of a B-24 “Liberator” bomber of preformed hard wood by sanding to smooth shapes and gluing with the enclosed yellowish-brown powder wood glue. It had plastic propellers I attached with enclosed pin brads. Under the nacelles was something I was curious about represented by decals. My father told me these were turbochargers for high altitude flight. I was impressed! (Editor’s note: The B-17 also had turbochargers and disk brakes, hardware that figured in automobile design in the future.) Full size Early Ford V-8 The car my father bought in 1953 was a Country Sedan station wagon with the V-8. The engine type was the last L-head design that Ford offered for sale. It had 110 horsepower. He took our family on a trip to the West Coast where we visited my uncle who lived in Fresno, California, at the time. He lived in an adobe house that he opened up every morning at 6 to gather the morning cool and use the thick adobe walls to keep it cool all day. He was married to my father's sister who had moved to the West Coast in WW-II. We also visited Chinatown in San Francisco. We stopped at a Chinese store and I bought a Soroban calculating abacus similarity and a plastic imitation ivory Rik-Sha. We ate egg foo jung for breakfast next door. Later we drove to Mare Island shipyard and Naval base but did not enter. My father had been in the Navy as an officer right after I was born barely avoiding a draft notice when my grandfather had sent him a telegram telling him to get off the train heading to report because Officer Candidate School had accepted him. We visited Sequoia where a picture of the Ford was taken in the Wenona Tunnel tree and then Yosemite where we swam in the chill Merced river and watched the firefall at night. The umbrella tent with rear extension that had been bought in the time of the Plymouth was our accomodation. We did not need a roof rack with the station wagon. This car later got coil helper springs and a welded on trailer hitch when in 1956 the family purchased a Holley 20 foot travel trailer. It was weighed at the Montana weigh station at one point and the total weight was 5000 lbs. with the canned goods and other gear. The hitch weight was checked by unhitching and placing the hitch dolly alone on the scales. That was on a later trip to Glacier National Park. The Ford had 6-ply tires from the beginning but they were Firestone and eventually weather checked very badly. In those days they had rayon cords which were better than the cotton cords of pre-War cars. The trailer had 8-ply US Royal tires provided by our neighbor who owned a tire store. It had come with 6-ply Mansfield trailer specific tires and one had blown out on the very first trip to the Smokey Mountains and a park near Knoxville and Oak Ridge where my father studied at the Oak Ridge Reactor School in a Summer school to introduce the Physical Science Study Series (PSSC) new texts and curriculum. I met the glove box and various film badges and dosimeters as well as the face of the solid carbon reactor at Oak Ridge. I bought a neutron irradiated dime that I kept for years until I gave it to a tree trimming crew from Asplundh in 1976. On the hill behind the drive inn theater at the trailer park where "And God Created Woman" starring Brigitte Bardot was playing a sound announced that a dark Merc had appeared. Bobbie who was with me knew the owner and we went up and the owner showed us the S.C.O.T supercharger equipped flathead in the car. Major Side track When I was in Junior High shop, I passed an Allison 1710 V-12 on a pallet that my father had purchased for $1 as surplus from the Battle Creek Surplus Center and had shipped C.O.D. to the freight depot in Bad Axe, Michigan to be used in instructing students in aviation just after WW-II. The cost was high to move it but eventually Russ LeCronier, the principal agreed to fund the purchase and freight. Exactly where the supercharger was on that one I did not really mark but blended it with the Potvin GMC Rootes installation on the Calvin Rice dragster that exceeded the German Mercedes and AutoUnion standing kilometer records of the 1930's. (Editor’s note: The Allison centrifugal supercharger was at the rear of the engine and had a two speed dampened drive.) The Allison had been disassembled and reassembled by classes that expected a boom in aircraft that did not manifest as they ended up in the Korean conflict. Jet aircraft made the piston inline vee engine obsolete. Somehow, I learned it had overhead camshafts driven by bevel-geared shafts up the back of the cylinders but not that it had 4 valves per cylinder. (Editor’s note: The Ducati motorcycle had a drive like this and also the Velocette Venom and the Norton Manx had dual overhead cams similarly driven) Civilians used the Allison in Unlimited Hydroplane races that occurred on the Detroit river and the Arfons Brothers used one in their dragster in Ohio. In 1957 a flathead Ford engine burning nitromethane fuel as well as a fuel burning Harley-Davidson motorcycle led the records and eliminations in NHRA competition. Then it was gone. Editor’s note: 1955 was the first NHRA National at Great Bend Kansas and Calvin Rice won later after a rain out with his flathead not the blown Chrysler.) Forensic Examination I got a reputation for fighting on the playground in grade school as girls in Kindergarten who were slightly older and bigger hit me on the head with wooden semi-trucks and later I needed glasses to see the blackboard after 4th grade. Sunday dinner with other members of the Trustees of the Presbyterian church one Sunday led to the County Coroner taking me into his coffin showroom for a private talk about overhead valve V-8 cars that were coming. The elders thought that this would lead to a rash of crashes. He described the spleen removal and liver lobe removal required to remedy the traumatic injuries that occurred when a car hit a tree on rural pavement by running off the road. I pictured the surgery as happening at Hubbard Memorial Hospital but kind of missed the point. I did not drive and had no expectation of ever owning a new car. A year or so later I walked behind Goebbel Brothers Chevrolet with the son of another trustee on the building committee who was raising pledges to reroof the church and brace the walls and add new pews. There was a 1955 Chevrolet there with an open driver's window and blood on the seat. Maybe six months later I saw a red 1955 Chevrolet coupe that belonged to the New Holland baler dealer's son and had dual exhausts. Was it a PowerPak? (Editor’s note: Bob Goebell had offered me a 1954 Corvette he had in his showroom when I was 10. I looked in in the open hood and thought it had 2 carburetors on it’s six cylinder engine. It actually had 2 air cleaners on 3 carburetors that year.) Seduction My Uncle August had been in the Army and had a shower in his basement. He took me for a tour of the limestone quarry and we rode down in the elevator and then we were on our own to avoid the huge Euclid quarry dump trucks on the surface once we got there. He took me over to look at one that was parked. Then avoiding the moving ones, we went over to look at where the current working face was. Ingersoll-Rand drills were preparing shot holes for dynamite. Back at his house that night he got my father and the rest of us to look at the beautiful chrome water fall front in his 1949 Desoto interior. The radio and heater and all other accessories were right there. I did not think about the day my father parked on the wrong side of the road coming back from dumping trash baskets at the City dump. He got out and got a shovel he prudently kept in the trunk of our maroon Plymouth four door sedan. Then he went over across the road where the city snowplow had surrounded a man's car with a snow bank and began to help him dig out. Meanwhile my sister and I sat in the car as it became cold. A blizzard was blowing snow over the top of the car. Then my sister and I saw a cloud of snow approaching slowly. It was the snow plow now plowing out the side we were parked on. It swerved when it saw us but too late it hooked the right front fender. Sitting in the middle of the rear seat I fell forward and hit my mouth on the ash tray in the middle of the front seat back. After, my father told me not to mention I had been injured as it would tie things up. I looked like Bogart from then on. My youngest uncle in New York rolled over my grandfather's blue four door Dodge driving back from visiting his girl friend when he fell asleep. That left my grandfather with only his green 1949 Dodge coupe which he offered to me in 1955 or 56. Another sedduction involved the new overhead vavble vee 8 Buick "Fireball" and the smooth "Dynaflow" transmission. The school business teacher who had a office products sales in his front porch and whose wife did book keeping for a fee got one in 1953. He invited us over on Sunday to look at it including the bank vault sound of closing the doors. He had a cruel scar in his face where non-safety glass had cut his face in the crash of a Packard years before. Then my uncle August replaced his Desoto with a similar Buick hardtop two door. Buicks were popping up nearby. Our neighbor across the street had owned Buicks for several years. They were the older straight eight types and in some ways were of the era of the Pontiac that the business school teacher drove. His wife was the new Buick owner. This wave of preference would hold off until 1956 to reappear in my other uncle's garage as a replacement for his 40 Ford. Meanwhile, the Ford dealer's older son was given a 1955 Ford Sunliner convertible in yellow and black colors. We never saw it but in Oak Ridge the trailer park owners daughters got an identical car. I saw them driving it with the top down under the trees and out of the park with one sitting on the tonneau in the back seat , feet on the seat like a parade car. Bobby, the boy I met took me to see another Merc in a new house garage. It was sitting on it's frame with no wheels with boxes of electric window lift kits and electric door kits from Honest Charley Speed Shop in Chattanooga on the floor beside it. I thought the Merc looked like something way too heavy to be my style. My mother bought me flannel lined Bell brand denims in the Winter in "Huskie" sizes. There had to be a way to escape. My father stood 5 foot 5 and 1/2 inch tall and had to get a waiver from President Roosevelt to get into Navy OCS. My driver's license when it came said 5 foot 6 and 150 pounds which was about 10 pounds heavier than my father. My mother had put on a lot of weight and my grandmother was taller and very heavy. I stopped looking at those sorts of statistics. I could climb trees and jump over a bamboo rod at a 3 foot height. Disaster The Ford dealer's son rolled over his car in broad daylight near the County Farm at a turn in the main road M-53. He survived. The car was taken to a place behind the East wall of the mechanical shop at the dealer ship. Time passed. Then , the next year, the dealer's daughter was given a 1956 Ford Crown Victoria with the chrome wrapover the top. The son borrowed it and promptly rolled this one over! At the same place! His dad was angry but undeterred. Both the Ford dealer and the two brothers who owned the Chevrolet dealership were very heavy men who sat a lot. I passed both dealerships every day going to grade school. By 1956 I could walk just a short ways to the high school built in 1951. To get there I had to pass the Lincoln-Mercury dealership and the next door Oliver tractor dealer. Minnick, the mercury dealer, was a fit man and a Catholic like Talaski. The Oliver dealer once gave me a cast aluminum tractor model. I hung out in the County garage through the years with the Austin-Western four wheel drive plows as well as the Walter dump trucks which got Vee plows and used the gravel road dressing under frame angle blades for snow removal. One smaller and rather dull Duplex dump truck remained in a bay. The mechanics called it the "morphendike." The Bad Axe Galion road grader with dual rear wheels and straight up front wheels sat at the other end of the garage. I avoided it. 1957 found the dealer's older son in a used car from the lot to the West of town by the radio station. It was a repainted black 1954 Tudor with the once new Y-block V-8. A nice easy to preserve choice was the idea. My mother had had some confrontations with this student at both the Junior and Senior prom about bringing alcohol into the gym. Senior Prom night was the end. News the next day said that the Bean Queen beauty and Jerry Talaski had been struck from behind by another car the previous night. Both cars ended up behind the East wall at the dealership. According to ( Huron News?, Huron Dailey Tribune?) not the Bay City times that I used to deliver, Jerry was not driving and the driver and his date from the front seat had survived. A 1957 Ford Fairlane 500 hardtop driven by a USAF sergeant from the Port Austin radar site had been coming down North Port Crescent from the North and at Filion crossroads had crashed and vaulted over the 1954 Ford turning onto that same road from the West. The back seat couple had died instantly. The front seat couple spent a long time in the hospital. (Editors Note: Ford Motor introduced standard features and an option package in 1956 they called Lifeguard Design that included a padded dash and sunvisors, a deep dish steering wheel, seat lap belts, double locks, safety rear view mirror. Seat belts were first and option in 1955. Cornell University did the testing.) I saw a 1946 Ford club coupe parked on the lawn in front of the Talaski home before that time. It was light gray and had the striped grille and side trim that differed from what I later learned was the 1947-48 model year. It also was leaner than the later car I learned was a Sedan coupe. I liked the tighter coupled look of the later car. This car belonged to L.A. Talaski’s younger son, Dwight or Dewey. It soon disappeared. At first I heard it drive up as I peddled newspapers. Later, saw it up on the lawn close to the house as I pedaled by on my bicycle. Deception When I actually owned a 1948 Ford coupe, I wanted to brag that it had a 59A V-8 and a Stromberg 97 carburetor. Uuhhh! Wait, try 59 A-B is that original and just as good? And the closest I came to a 97 were 4 Stromberg 48's a few years later and then 2 rebuilt 97's the rebuilder wanted to be free of in 1964. The 1948 I owned had a Chandler-Grove 94 which later was made by Holley. I helped a friend to buy all the spare Stromberg jets from Warshawsky/JC Whitney in a clearance of catalog parts before I left Michigan. My car had 3 hubcaps. Two had the multiple red slashes and one had the blue Ford in block letters. The rear bumper had an oval stamp with Ford script. The hood had shortened chrome strips. The emergency brake cable had been severed with bolt cutters or something in the driver's compartment near the actuator handle. The ignition switch was all boogered up. The trunk trim was not present and no holes for it were there. The title presented one fact, it weighed 3100 pounds. I hoped for something more like 2000 pounds. I didn't expect a weight like an Indy car but more like the weight of a Volkswagen beetle would have been nice. Was that possible in malleable iron, cast iron and rod iron sheet metal? One cool thing it did have was 1948 Mercury wheels with 15 inch diameter for newer tires. I even cleaned them up and put tubeless valves in them. Problems? Not in 10 years. No evidence of a Columbia 2-speed rear end the current owner said had been removed. No extra vacuum or electrical connections were in evidence anywhere. As far as a possible earlier Ford target for the iconic 59A V-8 I did not like the 1935 looks and the 1938 was so-so. Exactly how the springs and axles would work out I thought not so well but I could put the brakes on the earlier car also. The whole thing would have to happen in my family's back yard. I did not immediately go looking for a target and across the street from the grade school and elder lady backed out a 1937 Ford Tudor one day in an odd color. She was not interested in selling and I had no money to persuade her. A 1937 V-8 60 showed up one day when my friend and I were checking out an auction site at a farm that had many old vehicles. My friend eventually bought a 1939 Fordor with the 85 hp engine. He began to "make a dragstrip" next to his father's shopping center with a Drott dual fuel bulldozer and me on the former County towed hand wheel grader. That quickly turned into a pitching wave form. His father traded the 1936 Cord four door sedan where my friend had jammed the preselector gears to another collector for a blue metallic 1948 Lincoln Continental convertible that had a transplanted L-head V-8 replacing the V-12. I considered searching for a Lincoln Zephyr 3 speed set of closer ratio gears for my car but the Zephyr gears Warshawsky had fit into the regular Ford box and seemed maybe to be too weak. Later when the input shaft to the transmission in the Lincoln failed we learned it had been welded and the transmission was some bigger unknown. It’s V-8 was probably the larger truck V-8 of over 300 cubic inches. Why it had the welded input shaft as if no clutch disk could fit or the input shaft was too long I don’t know. Maybe the ¾ and 1 tons with a bigger 3 speed did not ever have the 337 as stock and the later Lincoln use was only with automatics. Restored to original condition Two Model T's showed up after the new Mackinaw bridge was completed. One was restored by a former Navy quad 20mm gunner that had faced Kamikazes in the Pacific. I had met him before when he delivered my Sears 3-speed bicycle in 1954. He was a peddler driver for Blair Transit that avoided the long haul and sat on a motor scooter tire tube for comfort. His brother had done the sheet metal work and painted the 1926 Model T roadster pickup. Before starting his own bump shop the brother was the body man for the Buick and Pontiac dealer. The owner of the T had sand blasted his frame and heavy irons and had even poured and scr*ped his own Babbitt bearings. He loved giving rides in the box to children around the neighborhoods. The other T was a 1923 Touring with electric lights. For a while he also gave rides and I took one. He worked as a general handy man for his family's Ace hardware after dropping out of McComb Junor college. English was his downfall. He was the favored soloist at the Methodist Church of the teacher who thought I was a bully and once gave me an assignment to write an essay on why half a loaf is better than none. I could not figure out where that was coming from. I wrote about a skid row bum who was very lazy and how that was better than starving to death. She reluctantly accepted the essay. I squeaked through English. The owner of the 1923 Touring hit a curb going around the corner just down the street from the empty grass he parked on. One of the wooden spoke wheels shattered and he took the whole car apart and stored it as parts in Miss Allen’s garage until he could have time and money to restore it totally. Two Model A's showed up owned by the son of the former Studebaker dealer. I had gotten to know him after he was sent away to Military School in Jersey City and then spent some time in Detroit. He had a photograph of he and his wife lowering a souped up flathead V-8 into a white 1932 Ford roadster with cycle and bobbed fenders in the Michigan style of about 1947. One of the Model A's was a 1931 Two door in faded red. The other was a clean and repainted blue 1928 Two door. One Halloween on Devil's night vandals pushed them across the main road and toppled them onto the front doors of the high school. The wooden body frames were destroyed. At this point I no longer had a picture of myself as the owner of an Early Ford V-8. Only recently have I turned my attention to such a project even in a research sense. Decades later I met some Fords of the early V-8 vintage at a gathering at a former T-Bird's drive-inn location that was used to build a branch of a 150 year old bank in Highland Park. That ended with a bank takeover by a Wisconsin bank and a rename as Talmer in 2008. The parking lot show after hours continued. These owners were different than in the 1950's. They bought their cars and one told me he would rather have a Buick. Wasn't that a jingle once? Ask the man who owns one? Packard flak! Ford family of fine cars? The Chinese restaurant next door was a destination for couples. A magazine that was going to feature cars that would be in the Woodward Avenue celebration was not interested in any of my digital modelling. After my friend gave me a Canon camera in 2010 I took some digital photographs of some of the cars to remind me of features that tested my memory. More recently I found some Ford V-8's at Dick's in San Marcos but he is closing after passing away. They also had magazines and AMT and JoHan models from the 50's. That library is going somewhere. San Francisco-Oakland airport terminal had a Ford V-8 used in an aircraft with propeller in 1998 when I visited my son who worked at MIPS. At last at the Edison Museum in Fort Meyers, Florida I saw a genuine 59A along with some description. I might have seen one in a 1940 Ford coupe at the Talmer get together but it had been replaced with an 8BA. I saw some stock 1932 Fords at the Henry Ford museum. I only write this to assure you that I was looking not as a secret passage to a treasure unknown to the public. Through the years folks have commented that they like my words better than my images so I have created this short historic page as a best contribution to the Early Ford Club now that I am a member. This is not "Just the facts Ma'am" nor is it a complaint. I hope it shows the character of those I knew and how I bounced off the less deeply involved. The current owners of these fine automobiles are appreciated for keeping them in my view. I sold my 1948 Ford to someone who had an old Graham at the Rose bowl swap meet in 1976. He was the only person who had a car there. I also gave him all my old magazines. (Editor’s note: I tried to explore automotive design in Troy, Michigan after I parked my car in 1987. New buildings held Efficient Engineering and Troy Design associates. Off to the East was Modern Engineering where the future head of American Motors and then Chrysler Jose Duderweiler from Brazil migrated from Canada as a French connection. I tried to make contact and eventually found that any work on the Cadillac Northstar 4 valve dual over head camshaft design had moved to the equivalent Lincoln. Falconer was bringing technology from England via Canada and I looked instead at KITPLANES magazine and I learned about the Papa Mustang and it’s V-12. The Outboard Marine designed corvette V-8 moved to Arizona and then faded out. Both Ford and Chevrolet developed roller camshafts with hydraulic lifters for what was coming to be called small blocks. Pushrods held for a time. Fours and v-6’s dominated sales. The Fog One day while taking the shorter way to Birmingham from Troy at night in 1964 I was passing by the GM Milford Proving Grounds. My headlights picked up a shape off to the side of the road and then it jumped into the road and hit my front end just off center. The hood flew up as the latch was destroyed. The engine began to overheat as the radiator had burst. I tried to see if I could creep on and then stopped. Within moments a State Police car appeared. As usual he was totally outraged as his car had two stags in confrontation on the door seal. Eventually, he went on and I was left to get my friend's car following me to tow my car back to Troy where a test driver lived. I found parts for the grille and had the test driver weld the cracks in the fender after bumping it out roughly. No hammer welding with a 1/4 inch strip of copper left rough ragged breaks. The hood was reformable and a used latch mechanism made it stay down. The only other body damage to the vehicle in the time I had it was when a pheasant in flight crashed through the passenger windshield near the Ann Arbor airport. I replaced both panels with tinted safety glass. Well there was the time I had taken the rear bumper guards off and an attempt to push the car to start it crunched the lower right trunk edge. That I filled with Black Knight filler. Getting the car body sanded and painted and some minor rust repair set this all up. At sale it was worth $600.00 after 10 years growing from my payment of $100.00 in the beginning. It did not have an engine number on the title but used the number on the firewall. As near as I know it is still in the Inland Empire of Southern California. Eleven years later,I sold off my last car in 1987 and stopped driving. Women had run into my car in California and Michigan in what seemed to be deliberate acts by owners of Chrysler and American Motors cars, specifically three different Dodge Darts and an AMC Pacer as well as a Dodge van. With my last car gone I walked out to Army Tank and Automotive Command in Warren to look at the bid room specifically related to anything that might prevent a Bradley from being airlifted by a C-17. The YC-15 prototype I had witnessed the first flight of couldn't fully fill out the CXHLS goal of 1965 set for building 13 in Long Beach. I went on to Prratt & Whitney and in 1980 specified the clipped fan JT-9 that became the F-117 fan for AMST. Now after Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom I have no questions. In 1962 the Iranian ambassador to the US's son lived next door to me in the residence hall and borrowed my typewriter for a year. When he returned it the tab was broken off the zipper. An Iraqi in the English as a second language across the street program lived on the floor below and was teased a lot taking it with good humor. Good News for the Ford L-head V-8 The local dealer received several very nice trades of 1953 Ford V-8 sedans and he saw them as an opportunity to support the local football team. He set a bargain price to compensate any reluctance to obtain a technology that was being left out of the new cars. The boy across the street bought one and used it to deliver the Detroit Free Press mornings. He became quarter back of the high school team. He was two years older than I. A boy down the street who lived closer to the dealer also bought one. He used it to deliver the Detroit News in the after noon. He became center of the football team. He was my age. Who my age became the quarterback? A farm boy who managed to practice even without a bus ride also became the boy friend of the girl I thought was the prettiest and brightest in the school became quarterback in my Senior year. The dealer shop manager loaned me the king pin reamer so I could replace the bushings in my '48. I also replaced the tie rod ends and the spring shackle bushings both the rubber ones and the hard fiber filled ones. With an alignment by the new recapping shop I was ready for two new tires. My father had traded his 1953 V-8 two tone Saddle Tan and (Antelope Beige?) Country Sedan with three seats for a 1957 gray (he loved gray, he painted everything he could grey unless it needed aluminum silver.) Country sedan with two seats and a six. Even with the addition of the travel trailer 120 horsepower was more than 110 hp so why not go with the OHV six? In 1962 at Christmas I codrove a residential hall dish machine coworker's 1954 Ford six TuDor to Miami with retread front tires. There we met the Intercoastal Waterway bridge keeper's daughter and her newly purchased and painted black 1954 Ford OHV V-8. I painted the wheels for her with the glass jar of touchup paint she had been supplied. The engine in my father's trade-in had to have new main bearings replaced and then was put right on the lot West of town. I took Driver Training from a former truck driver at the high school in a 1959 Plymouth with an OHV V-8 and dual controls with a three speed column shift. I did drive my father's 1957 on the narrow concrete roads of the upper penninsula of Michigan near Tacquamenon Falls worrying about the 4 inch drop to the soft shoulder and swamp. That car developed a whooping, whutting rear axle bearing failure that the mechanics studied by lying on the floor in the back as he drove. The 1959 six he traded for was alos a country Sedan in gray and fated to have the same rear axle bearing failure. What didn't fail was the engine screaming down the hills in second gear on the newly openned TransCanada Highway , above Lake Superior in Ontario, with the trailer pushing it. I was no longer living at home in 1962 when my father dropped the station wagon body style opting for a four door to carry a single ended canoe on a roof rack and chose the big engine (almost) a green painted 352 cubic inch version of the new for 1958 Interceptor with a single two barrel Holley carburetor and a long and lanky shifting 3-speed transmission. At least the linkage was very sturdy looking. A cotter key had fallen out of the transmission end of the one in the 1959 in the middle of a turn in an intersection in the middle of Ontario on the way to New York leaving the car locked in two gears. I had to crawl under the low belly avoiding the hot exhaust to assertain the fault. Then I walked over to a garage I saw to buy a cotter key. Typically for the lean operations in Canada they had none. I did obtain a nail which I bent to temporarily get us on our way. Reliability? How about all the Buicks we saw in Colorado in the 1950's steaming beside the road? Rabbit Ears pass and the Trail Ridge Road sorted them out. But how about that Ford 3-speed synchromesh transmission? I put a pre-1935 straight-cut floor shift in my 1948. My friend the Studebaker dealer's son knew where to get them and always had one. I blew the reverse out by frying the rear tires in the gas station driveway when I first got my car running again in 1959 when I was old enough to drive on the street and had finished driver training. It made several local trips jumping quietly out of gear in 3rd unless I held it in with my leg. One day past Ubly headed for Cros-Lex a rival in football in dropped the cluster and case bottom and I had to turn it around and rive home in high all the way. The next three speed had helical low/reverse. It lasted until a run at the new Ubly Dragway. The clutch linkage was worn and just did not give a clean shift into second. The main drive bearing failed and whut-whut-whut I coasted rapidly to the turnaround road. I replaced that one with a strange looking object that the REA diesel supervisor in Ubly had in his basement. It was converted at the rear to early Ford but the front input leaked even with a new slinger and new leather seal. Maybe it was for a different rotation and the helical gear acted as an oil pump instead of evacuating the area? That ended the use of the Ford torque tube rear end that had brand new axles I had bought at an auction the school kids in Dexter had featuring obsolete parts donations from the local dealers. it rained that day and I was the only bidder once the sale closed. Even those rare 15 inch 5-1/2 inch bolt circle wheels, with tubeless tire valves, had to leave to give a common spare. I suppose it was only half an Early Ford in terms of ride and vibration that headed down the US 112 and then the Ryan Expressway past Joliet Prison to join Us Highway 66 in 1965. Arriving in Canoga Park where my father's sister lived it took up a new search for a less vocational life style. Every day choose a new target reception area or guard and a maybe a personnel department from the student activities supplied book of research locations. Hughes Thousand Oaks, Hughes Pepperdine, Rocketdyne Canoga Park, Lockheed's new Rye Canyon, Douglas Santa Monica Clover Field, North American Sabreliner Division, Air Research on Sepulveda, Hughes Space Division got an interview to develop code for the TV camera on the surveyor moon lander with someone who my father had worked with on radar at MIT and now a Phd, then an insider, my uncle had had an assistant manager who had a fraternity brother who now worked in Personnel at Douglas Long Beach production facility. The news was without an actual engineering degree only Technician jobs were available and Santa Monica wanted a B average and impending Master's degree. The ceiling later in salary would be $800.00. Just loaning your Complex Variables book to a roomate or tutoring another roomate to a B+ in LaPlace transforms and loaning him the book made them engineers and even one on to grad school and an Automotive Engineering professorship at U of M Dearborn. Production was a risk with the flight testing of the DC-9 begun but Long Beach and a move away from my aunt and uncle looked better than a lower salary and job managing code for scheduling and task times at Rocketdyne. I still have a memory of my Ford sitting at the guard shack at Gate 6 with the chain link topped by triple strand barb wire fence and gate and the few visitor slots. In a month I would be in the huge parking lot to the Southeast and Building 13, the former C-133 production line location would be my post at a wide drafting table with someone's abandonned drafting machine and some rolls of vellum. In the next two years, both of the men I had loaned books would come and live in my apartment until they found jobs. Another man who had worked on the dish machine came out but found his own way to a job at Santa Monica setting up Digital Machining paper tapes. He had worked for Ford Rawsonville one summer measuring flow rates on the new Motorcraft 2 barrels and attaching the little tin flow tags. Another room mate one summer worked full time nights while going to school at the Ford transmission plant where both his mother and father worked. He installed the greased ring of roller bearings in the input main drive. His father was a millwright and set up the wood block floors for new machines at line yearly changeover. The only hot rod folks I met in california was at Reath automotive behind Douglas on Cherry Street. I was looking for a bellhousing for the New Process wide ratio transmission that I thought was similar to one in a 1946 Ford 3/4 ton owned by the REA supervisor. (He also had a 1934 Ford V-8 Tudor sedan with plumbing pipe exhaust and Gambles glass packs. He had chopped down a maple tree in his front yeard to make the bird's eye maple dash insert in his Ford.) Both instances of trying to use this transmission gave brushes with NC maching advertised as giving a surface finish of 1/10000. Sadly the surface was as much as 1/2 inch inaccurate in position necessitating a visit to more conventional mill, maybe a Bridgeport once, so precision, yes, accuracy, no. Shortening the torque tube and driveshaft worked better in the U of M Engineering Mechanics Laboratory where the two guys I loaned books to worked after the dish machine. In the 1990's I took a written test administered by the Michigan Secretary of State on Heavy Maintenance and passed to receive a license for a year. The only thing I had not done hands on was set the pinion clearance. The announcement of Mr. Goodwrench crate engines came soon after. Folk wanted packaged OEM. I would say that not building an engine where dust could fall or installing one after building it in the Winter cold and then in a very hot day putting it in and starting it avoids risks spinning a bearing in a large displacement V-8. I considered each year going to the SAE show in Detroit but the closest I came was walking over to the SAE headquarters and talking to the receptionist, twice. The state had my niche and it wasn't as an engineer much less a professional one. Atlantic Research once told me so. Fitting in Test pilots accept me as a digital predecessor. Combat pilots wish I could bend the rules a bit. I once had all the Douglas Commercial transport manuals DC-9, DC-10 and DC-8 all dash numbers as the stretches came. Only airlines got these. I had the bird farm report of the line positions for every assembly and subassembly each day as it was issued. I had the KC-135A and B as my first flight manuals. The C-132 mockup loomed in the storage area behind the plant as a reminder of what might have been in large cargo. The A-4F was my first Flight manual as my boss insisted I check the graphs made by Aero Performance and they insisted I not let my results be seen outside as they decided what width pencil was used. The A-4 had come from El Segundo and then went to Palmdale to build what would not be in inventory when Desert Storm began. I attended Tailhook in 2010. I flew the the F-18 simulator and the F-135 simulator but not the C-2. What I expected to find at Early Ford V-8 People who were familiar with the St. Paul, Minnesota facility. I was there in 1984 before I decided to go further West taking a copy of the St. Paul paper to deliver to the USN facility at Monterrey. Huh! Music? Spy Stuff? old Spanish trace? Wells-Fargo Pony Express? A quiet voice as I crossed the Twin Bridges over the Potomac in 1983 had suggested St. Paul. The second reinforced toothed timing belt failure woulr end that trip just outside Grand Rapids, Michigan. My parents were in Europe on a tour when I called and I walked to Grand Haven to the West headed for Chicago. I remembered one of my cousins worked for K-Mart there as I approached. A week later with a new belt installed I was headed to Saginaw and then to Troy again supporting cargo on Eastern Airlines to Managua until 1987 and neither a rebuild kit nor a rebuilt carburetor could keep the car on the road. A possible road trip to Nicaragua with goods for Nicaragua Medical Relief I had found in a Detroit Free Press article fortunately was avoided before this. The gasohol was not the friend of someone dry since 1981. I need to be careful of friends. Eighty-five in a Sixty Five This makes sense as the horse power rating of the first Ford V-8 and the later one that diverged from the smaller V-8 of sixty horse power. Another way would be 21A rods in a 59A block. That is more about 21 vs. 24 hours in the sense of the studs holding the heads on. The intrigue of this came from the City police man with his gun and gun belt and his lock up separate from the next door County Jail. It was a the Boy Scout Leader of a troop sponsored by the public school that he was going to move from his own car where he believed that the Spicer rear end locked in a realtionship to speed that he could use to find any speeders in secret. The Salisbury rear end of a Chevrolet was not open ended in this. These were for the newer 50's cars. The older ones had Hotchkiss or spiral bevel. He believed he could easily run down any of those lesser ones and they would not dare to try. I did not see his actual car until the boy who I raced in Phys. ed and discovered that by applying my openning I could chase him down to eventually let him pass the finish line in a 1/4 mile dash first. That boy bought the car and showed it to me after the police chief died of a heart attack in his fifties. The police chief had run the school bus at top speed in the hills on the way to the Boy Scout Camp near Bear lake. He said he had taken the governor off because he had to get back to the city before dark to protect it. The city had a state police unit headed by a Sargeant on the West city limits and a County sherriff's office on the court house square but he patrolled mostly the east end near the railroad tracks. The idea of no governor perhaps played to the Governor General of Canada which I saw later when Mikael Gorbachev reviewed the Royal guard with fixed bayonets just before he was deposed. This was decades before that event of course. 1955 was going to lead to a racing ban by the Automobile Manufacturing Association in 1956 and hark in my subconscious to the 1940 Ford with moon tank that the lady friend of the boy I met in Tennessee said her husband still had. NASCAR had begun in 1948 with a 1940 Ford driven by Red reigning as champion. When my father told me I could not build a hot rod I understood him to mean no California parts. Anything from the dealer seemed to be covered. My plan to build with a Mercury crank and bored and stroked 3/8 from there with a ported and relieved 59A block seemed out of the question even if I could find a way to do it. Floyd Clymer's book kept me company with bullies on the playground. I had no ready answers for the tough older high school boys on the way home who claimed my father caused them to get bad grades and get drafted. Washing my face and my sister's face with snow in the winter or throwing frozen ice balls at us caused her to go across the street to wait them out and me to go to the County garage. I had been almost choked out by the grade school principal's son in the tall grass near the woods when I was four. He was two years older. His brother one year older called him off, saying "You failed let him go." The younger son explained he could execute me if I resisted in anyway. How much did a 85/65 ticket on US 23 near Brighton cost in 1963? I think it was about $3 a mile and a need for a personal appearance before the Justice of the Peace. At some point with the points assigned for infractions I was scheduled for an interview in Lansing but I skipped it before I went to California. The Ford dealer had tried to plead his son's car no contest but had failed. I was not going to get trapped there. In 1984 I successfully did plead no contest to 45/25 and get a sentence of one day in the county jail when I had no money for bail and a Russian bible in my winter coat pocket. It wasn't the motorcycle that was subject to this ticket it was the overhead camshaft. The marks on the road were for an airplane to use a stop watch. Only Indianapolis cars had over head camshafts in the early Ford V-8 days. Some Ford V-8's had contested but none ever won. The supercharged Novi's never won either with their V-8 form. Four cylinder cars ruled the paved oval track. Was a Model T 25 horse power and a Model A 45? Later the Baptists deacons seemed to class women in T and A categories. When the substitute preacher who owned a used furniture store had a heart attack in the pulpit I thought "He had a Model T one ton." I knew nothing about steroids like testosterone and androsterone until I began looking up molecular weights in my Handbook of Chemistry and Physics. Then I made a t-shirt in red letters with "Flat Rate 288" to signal a Motor's Handbook kind of work and later "Blue Flame 292" to cover the big six I had missed. It wasn't to make a hideout or a sleeper that I put the 6 emblem off a spare car the wrecker driver gave me to get a new fender onto my car. Nope, it was to celebrate all the good miles my father's sixes had run after the V-8 of 1953 was traded in in 1957. When custom back hoe showed up to "hand dig" my pool hole in the 70's it was powered by a Ford six not the tractor four. The operator was proud of his machine. When folks wanted to call my father to account they came to me. He was not responsible for anything. He had insurance. Chemistry is the media I was the Chemistry laboratory assistant for the year I was in Chemistry as a student. Maybe I protected the girls from unwise impulses that had injured one in a class several years before, appealing to the janitor as the keeper of the properties of strong chemicals had not served her well when she ran out into the hall. I knew acetone, toluene, banana oil, turpentine from model airplanes as well as ether from plastic assemblies. Ethyll alcohol from shop for sh*llac was added to my household though the grade school principal used that. Hydrochloric acid and Ammonia openned together in the fume hood combined in the lab stock room to give a powder on all the bottles. It wasn't immediately apparant. I had to spend several days wiping all the bottles. The farm boy who pushed me down from behind and crushed my coronet bell as I hit the ground while walking to the shool bus to take us to the new band room at the new high school had a younger brother. I threw him into the tuba case some time later and he did not come back. My father made the younger brother his chemistry lab assistant. I ignored the snub. A farm boy who worked with chores was no match for a boy who lifted an engine block and moved it from the basement two floors to set on his bedroom floor after thoroughly cleaning it. How did I get it into the basement as a dirty thing? I don't remember just that Wisk was better than Tide and GUNK had begun the outside but now it was vulnerable after being boiled with caustic and bored out. At this point keep track of the 59A-B block as being the host of a 3/4 race grind camshaft and no longer in my possession though the new owner wants to sell it back and give me a chance to restore my car. This is the jumping off point for me joining the Early Ford V-8 Club if you allow for a time jump from 1965 to 2018. Computer coding folks think that a picture is worth fractions of a tenth of cent. Photographers would like it to be a digital negative and copies worth about $10.00. I have to build a model to replace the metal image I have as held in my hands. I found it takes months to do that from photographs in a Floyd Clymer book and the computer with two video cards in SLI costs over $3000.00 and the graphics software as cheap as I can get it is $500.00 and several iterations of previous computers and software had to occur in order to be at 2010. As someone who took a lot of Teramycin for respiratory illnesses and had stay with the grade school principal's two sons to recuperate from measels, and chicken pox to give my father assurance he would not get sick and miss work I needed more than one carburetor for my car. A four barrel was two expensive and complicated and only maybe a Lincoln had one. I took my father's yard stick away from him and put it up when I was 14 but it was years later that I went past where the first 35 Ford 3-speed dropped it's cluster and checked out a report of manifolds and multiple carburetors in a gas station in Peck at a cross roads. Tattersfield had four just for racing. Barney Navarro had three for large displacement. With a 3/4 race camshaft the REA manger had two though I don't remember the builder of his manifold. His heads were shaved to approximate the Denver high altitude heads that fit Floyd Clymer's locale. My car could not get a parking or storage pass even for my first year at college so it was put up on cinder blocks with the water drained. Did I find all the water? Would it be still be whole when I returned after summer recess? I had run a mile at my full speed and went though my wall on a 1/10th mile cork elevated track in the old Waterman Gymnasium. I had lifted 250 pounds over my head in Phys ed. I had volunteered for an Exercycle ergometer study for a coach and put out over 1-1/3 horsepower. Now, where was my car level. After the 1964 drag race transmission failure I welded reinforcement onto the new clutch linkage and used the 1948 gears with brass synchronizers in the final 1939 case my friend would sell me. I needed this one to last. It didn't. I blew it out when I jumped on it at a crossing street and a car appeared at the top of the hill on state street. Bud-do and a quick coast across the street. That is how I came to be looking for the odd ball the REA manger had in his basement. It was drilled for what looked like a Ford rear bearing retainer and I bought a new one at the Dexter auction the day I bought the new axles to clean up the threads on their ends. There is one other part I put on my car that altered it's Ford configuration and that was some NASCAR type 60/40 valved shock absorbers for teh rear end that were discounted by Ford's Autolite factory in Saline when they had to divest to complete a merger and bring out Motorcraft and the older Prestolite brands. What does this mean to the police chief's belief that the he could find any violator? Today I conceived of the idea that the dealer tried to plead "no contest" to any moving violations by his son's car but law enforcement in it's secret police form as set out by the county coroner refused to accept it. By eliminating my own car the ... well, you tell me? Sometime in 1966/1967 a Dana rear had 3/4 floating like the Ford torque tube years without the taper and keys with a nut at the axle end in common with Chrysler. My native thought says that the secret police in this was to find "top of the tooth" usage that indicated very high speed. Taxi cabs of Chrysler products growled more from odometers way beyond 150,000 miles. This was "revenue sound". As time passed the court rooms began to accept any police intuition about speed. There was no acceptable contradiction of a police decision to pursue and arrest. Looking at the Early Ford V-8 News photos I am sure I would be boggled at so many just Fords in a point of view. How they escaped from the John Dillinger notoriety I don't know. Maybe it was just an update in the mid fifties to more strongly accomplish law enforcement in a land of rebels. The Early Ford V-8 Sound In my art studies when I was searching out topics for drawing and painting in the 1980's I found that my mind was dark until my hand moved and when my hand moved it sought out what I later identified as sounds. Now after getting new hearing aids I can definitely establish the early Ford V-8 as a recognizable sound for the most distinguished cars as I approached driving age. Think about a 1950-52 Ford two door with dual exhausts where the pipes angled in a bit at the back and the mufflers were steel packs. Leaving the high school parking lot and turning onto M-53 headed into town on the main street in the late fall, the vapor from the pipes twirled opposite to each other out of the pipes as the crescendo of the sound rose. Looking for this car later I only identified a 1950 Victoria with the fabric top that hung around Neeb's Mobil station. Someone said it was Ford Pariseau's car. Later I met him as the Ford garage wrecker driver. The final time I saw him he gave me his 1947 Tudor with a G-series six that had frozen. That was after I had been to the Ubly dragway and watched an F class dragster with a TuffBlok resin filled water passage maximum over bore Flathead of 400 cubic inches burning fuel contest Top Eliminator in the summer of 1964. The sound does not particularly register with me. Was it a slingshot? Did the driver's elbows hang out by the wheels like on a Midget with a V-8 -60 I had seen running on alcohol at the 1/4 mile Owendale track? I have already commented on the 1955 scene near Oak Ridge where my father's car drove through a rocky ford at Cade's Cove and a supercharged Mercury appeared at dusk. Marty Ramsayer's 1951 Ford coupe had two sounds as I rode in it one with the worn out Fordomatic and one with the replacement 3-speed standard shift we put in it in a pit near Ubly. The engine did not differ only the spectrum of sound and the run up and down in gears. How about a 1/4 mile dragstrip series of runs in N stock with a 1939 Ford fordor that had a fouled plug maybe from a blown piston and would occasionally fire into the oil pan creating a lot of smoke. It's timing slip? 60 mph and 20 seconds I was driving and shifting the gears. I knew that transmission very well by then. 1963, was it? The cars I have seen recently were not running. They were either in the impromptu car shows where a 1949 Olds could not be told from a 351 Cleveland Ford V-8 or they were in a museum and only the Lincoln Continental had it's hood open. I did see one 8BA in a 1940 Ford where the owner had replaced the 3-speed with a Mustang II four speed and adapted the floor shift lever from a 1939 Ford. I talked with the owner several times but never heard it run. If rain was predicted the owners wanted to get how to avoid getting the under carriage dirty. I had walked about 3/4 of a mile to the lot so I had to leave about 15 minutes before the cars to avoid getting wet. I usually had some photo prints either of other caars or of renders I had made and did not want to risk ruining them even in a rai coat or with an umbrella. There was a dealer in town that began to sell 1946-48 Ford convertibles that had overhauled engines with aluminum heads and dual Chandler-Grove 94 carburetors but he advertised them as having Stromberg 97's. Were the 1947 and 1946 Maroon cars I saw at the impromtu show bought there? Shhh! I don't want to know. Years earlier as I was peddling papers I heard a unusual Ford V-8 start up and leave the dealer's house before I was in range to see it as I was blocked by trees fora sightline. Maybe two months later it was parked by the house I an I could see it was a gray 1946 with the longer trunkline of what I thought was a club coupe. I didn't try to buy it as it was too soon for me to drive and he probably wanted more money that someone who averaged $5.00 per week could afford. Even saving it all for a year would only be about $250 with starts and stops and contests on a route that averaged 30 customers weekly and more on Sundays. By six months that car was gone and I did not meet the owner until he was President of the Gambler's Car Club in 1959. I was introduced to him by Ken Cook who was an amateur magician and gave me his seats out of the customized 1947 white convertible he eventually took the body off to free the engine to put into his primered 1949 Mercury. The back seat was incompatible with a Sedan coupe. Dewey was kind of haunted by his brother's death and hard to get near. Subchaser The next story is a bit of an octopus and involves a 1953 Ford convertible, Weiderhold Freight line and Pontiac and Hydramatic. One arm is my neighbor across the street who drove for Weiderholdt for years until he got a dislocated disc in his back. Then he drove a 1959 GMC V-6 van with Grumman body for New Era potato chips as a driver/salesman. Another arm is the gas station across from the high school where I eventually worked as a 15 year old with a work permit. The previous young assistant station attendent and the leasee took on a job the previous Summer changing any flat tires on a group of gravel trains which are diesel tractors with a double set of dump trailers and a dolly between the trailers. Some were 30 wheelers. At some point after I had my car running adversaries began to try to set up a race between my car and the 1953 Ford that belonged to Barry Weiderhold the son of the freight line owner. Somewhere along the way he included an Autocar tractor and gravel train to his fleet. I never took up this challenge. I saw the transmission as a possible failure that would end my driving career. After some years after a boy who was older and had hit a car head-on with his Cushman motor scooter and had facial injuries returned from DeVry Technical Institute and the Navy. He had become Torpedoman First and while training in Arizona had bought a 1958 Packard Hawk. After racing with Robert Greene who had been to Lake Orion Dragway with his father's Jeep station wagon with snow tires he wanted to not just go fender to fender with a 1958 Chevy, he heard that Barry Weiderhold was back in town and wanted to sell the Ford convertible. Dave Armstrong asked me to go with him to look at the car. The day was a typical Winter blizzard day and at the Weiderhold house a dumptruck with the box filled with coal for traction was in the driveway. The father's wife ahd died and he was very depressed and Barry had come home to restore the gravel train to continue the family business. The Ford was something extra now. We looked at it under the hood and saw it had a small 2 barrel and by color maybe was a GMC version of the Pontiac. What year? Was it a 284 or a 389? Whoa! I knew nothing about Pontiacs. We go it started and the oil pressure gauge waved its hand at us and then settled down to about 40psi steady. Hmm! Not great but GM has different values than Ford. Dave really wanted it and he took out his wallet and made the purchase on the spot. A few weeks later Dave called me and had me come look as he had it up on the rack at Ramey Swackhammer's Texaco with the oil pan off. One of the rod journal was wrapped with what looked like shim stock. The early Ford free rotating rod bearing had bit him. He was disgusted and that was the end of our friendship until my former boss at teh Standard Station told me that he thought Dave had taken his ratchet and 3/8 socket set. He confronted Dave and Dave showed him he had painted it black over the green and indeed had it. Was Dave making a gravel train guilt connection? Later Barry Weiderhold fell asleep driving the Autocar and ran off the road and the truck caught fire. He burned to death. End of story? I said this was an octopus. In 1981 after my analytical career was over I took a ride on my motorcycle up to Port Ste. Lucie Nuclear Power plant. I wanted to talk to them about running the backup diesels continuously and burning soft nuclear waste like rags and paper and clothing in the exhaust and bubbling it into water to concentrate the wastes and make them easier to separate by activity level. Two reactors were running and two were being built so I had a hard time finding a place to park but eventually I walked up to the gate and asked to see the health physicists. I knew of them from Oak Ridge in 1955. We talked for awhile and they suggested I go the FP &L Headquarters in Miami. On the way back home it began to rain a light rain and I had experienced a defraying throttle cable so I was very cautious. Approaching the traffic light in Tequesta I noticed a FINA gasoline station and turned off and ran up to the pumps. I remembered a female attendant at a FINA in Fort Pierce who put the nozzle in my tank and filled it so I was playing a bit. Just then I heard a crash behind me and off to the left! I looked back an saw a black man in a pink t-shirt that said South County Supply stumbling out of the near side of a white van with an Internaional cab. The truck was in the ditch partway and the fuel tank was ruptured and leaking fuel. It had run into the back of a blue Chevrolet Citation. I waited a while and then left. Tequesta had a police officer but no station. I called them later to report what I had seen including the fact I was the missing man in the set up. In Miami I couldn't find a place to park and the proposal was beginning to cool. 1984 found me in a Pinto running across Grasslands National Monument beside some trucks from the nuclear facility in South Carolina. I assumed they were going to Richland, Washington. With this I'm ready to stop unless someone wants to see a story about passing a car on a day with heavy snow after the banks beside the road had been raised up by the Austin-Western plows. When I got beside the car I was passing the engine in my car began to make a popping sound and lost a lot of power. A car came around the bend headed toward us and I could not get back with a car beside me. So knowing the Austin-Western had a jib plow that tossed the top of the berm way back I took to the shoulder on the far side. Snow began flying over the hood which on a 1948 Ford is pointed like a boat as E.T. Gregorie made it. Soon I had slowed down enough to mae a safe u-turn and I returned sheepishly realizing that the chilled iron lifter I had substituted for the 1956 solid lifter required had maybe failed. I had heard that popping sound in the 1937 Ford TuDor that the former ambulance driver for MacAlpine had bought with a swap OHV. Fortunately, it was 1959 and a new 1956 replacement part was available and I could use a new 1959 camshaft with them. They cost $1.89 each. The ambulance driver went on to found the largest wholesale embalming practice in Detroit after attending Ferris State and getting a degree in mortuary science. Oh! Whatever I've been holding in that I followed Calvin Rice and the "Glass Slipper" and how they took over the Mercedes and Auto-Union records and yeah! Don Garlits and how he took his 8 Stromberg equipped dragster to the Kern Timing Association meet got sent home and came back with a bigger GMC blower than they had and won the meet. My mind had slipped from a 3/8 by 3/8 flathead with the Merc crank and 1/8 stroke, ported and relieved, with a full race cam and 10-1/2 to one aluminum heads. How many carburetors? Three on a Navarro manifold or four on a Tattersfield? My car had burned twice. Once in front of Pioneer high school on the hottest day of the Summer it coughed and I saw the tell-tale brown spot begin in ythe hood. Soon there was more flames out the edges of the hood. I ran to a school bus and commandeered the fire extinguisher in the door way and put out the flames then openning the hood to make sure just as the fire truck drove up and wanted to blast it with the high pressure hose. That time I got off with new neoprene hoses to the carburetors from the fuel block on the fire wall. I had to reprime the hood. I did not yet know that with wear the needles and seats let the fuel leak at idle and the excess leaked out the sides of the throttle shafts now not fitting all that well to puddle on the mainfold. I should have done better. I bought a new fire extinguisher to mount on the floor boards. I had the school fire extinguisher filled by Chet Lash who was the volunteer fire chief. He had been a customer for my new delivery route years before. He took the additional death and dismemberment insurance sold by the Bay City Times. Exactly when the next fire happened escapes me except by then a new disk type float valve ahd been announced by Don Garlits and I bought four of them. This time I was fire proof. With the new hoses installed I headed out M-53 toward the big curve past the Coral Gables motel. As I past Charlotte Braden's Fleet wing gasoline and heating fuel operation I saw way behind me a car coming up fast. I let my car rollout until the closure held at zero. That would not do for the follower. So I had to open mine up. At 100 mph the vent windows blew closed and it became warm inside. The I began to hear the tell-tale "shooting ducks" of a lean situation. I might burn a piston. I backed off a little. I was able to hold off the car behind which I now saw was a black 1957 Ford. It began to dawn on me that this was not one of the Brown girls. Dwight Talaski had repaired the death car that killed his brother and painted it black. Now four years later here he was chasing my little 1948 Ford Sedan Coupe. My coupe had once had a 1957 Duntov camshaft in a 1956 Chevrolet truck engine out of a farm to market milk truck. I was able to bore it 1/8 and install the 10-1/2 to one pistons of a fuel injected Corvette in it. On top was a Weiand staggered four manifold with four Stromberg 48's. I had had a choice of three Rochesters on a three two manifold. I now had two 180 degree joined Y headers running into Daytona pipes mounted under the running boards with mufflers inboard the frame. An AC/Delco electric pump fed fuel through a 3/8 fuel line from the tank to the fuel block. We were approaching the curve where Dwight's brother had rolled over two new Fords two years in sequence. He backed off and I made a U-turn. Back in town I found one of the carburetors had a chunk of neoprene that had fallen off the hose as it was cut. It partially blocked one jet out of eight. I heard you before The big radio stations I knew in those days were, CKLW Windsor, Ontario which you could hear in Hialeah, Florida strong and clear and Wolfman Jack from Mexico which at night in the Tennesse Hills on the way to Florida filled the airwaves. I went with Kurt Brinker one day in his sister's Catalina convertible to pickup a check from his dad at the County Fair Grounds and then a check from Charlotte Braden and deliver them to TJ in the CJ, night DJ at WLEW, the local radio station. He was busy filling his reel to reel tape recorders high up on shelves on the wall from a bank of microphones and a table of turntables. Then at University of Michigan I met the son of a WXYZ DJ who had become a witness in the Payola scandal. Our own house in the residence hall had Harvey Kabaker from Chicago as President. He was a DJ for the radio station on campus. I cannot remember the call sign of the Flint station that competed with WLS, the Chicago station at night. In the thumb of Michigan these were the stongest signals. Thomas McKenzie became a roomate when we moved out to Whitmore Lake the last year. He was the DJ's son. He also was a friend of a test driver at GM Proving Grounds. In the Summer of 1964, I helped him order parts from the Chevrolet dealer in Saline and the Vic Hubbard in Hayward, California. I identified a 327 short block for a 1964 fuel injected Corvette and the heads for a 1961 283 version now in cast iron with bigger valves than the 1964. To this I added an Iskenderian 555 roller camshaft, (Polydyne-5-cycle?) with 320 degrees of duration, a gear drive set and Rev-Kit. We spent several weekends polishing the crank and added a windage kit. We had the block align bored and semi finished bearings honed to fit. He had a 350 horsepower AFB- D series spread-bore carburetor from his friend Darryl. The manifold was only a 4 barrel for a 230 hp 283. That led to a big defect for me. He wanted the 4 Strombergs off my car and two more to go on an Edelbrock X cross ram with six positions. That led to maybe 450 horsepower for him and me sputtering and barking down the road with the secondary bores hanging off the sides of the manifold he traded me. I eventually got him to take me to Gratiot and buy an adapter to hopefully fit the big spread-bore on the small 283 manifold. By that time my exhaust had some blue smoke. I had burned a piston and eventually I found a whole upper compression ring missing! No time to fuss now school was out and I had to get to California before the hiring window closed. On campus interviews were not broad enough for me. When is a HI-Po 271 Not a 289? Look over there! Right beside us on Telegraph is a (not Woodward?) Maple is the dangerous crossing where tanker trucks burn coming down the hill. A new Mustang hardtop and it has a --the light just turned green I did not see the emblem on the left front fender. 2.20 low on the 1963 rebuilt Borg-Warner 4 -speed might be a bit tall. Then second gear is just right. Third and he is just back a bit. Fourth!--what is this 4th? So I guess I won't see a Mustang as a step up. Maybe it was a 260 with the Motorcraft 2 bbl? Beauty Is What Beauty Does Buck in Monroe had a 1961 Galaxy 500 convertible with white leatherette bucket seats. It had a 406 cubic inch/402 horsepower engine with the 3-Holley 2-bbls and the long tail shaft version of a Borg-Warner T-10 4-speed. In spite of himself he sold it and bought a 1957 Chevrolet black hardtop with a 270 horsepower dual 4-bbl engine. This car had a reputation on the streets of the County where the "hood lifting contest" was held each weekend in a shopping center. A sure winner was better than breaking or sullying. Stadium Boulevard On Stadium Boulevard in Ann Arbor the rumored king was a red Ventura hardtop with a Hydramatic. He hung out at a drive-inn. We took McKenzie's rusted out 2 door 1955 Chevrolet station wagon that once belonged to Darryl. Now it had the 450 hp 327 and a iron case Borg-Warner 4 speed with 2.54 gears. Tom was uncertain. When he turned off the key the engine just went- uhhh. Still a bit tight. On the freeway you could punch it in 3rd and it would just roar under the hood with reverse flow mufflers making minimal noise. Back at the Dead End in Whitmore Lake a 1961 White Ford came looking. Proffesional Pause One Saturday my roomate Dave Lynch and I took his Volkswagen to a Royal Pontiac Open house. We took pamphlets and looked at a Bobcat and a Banker's Special with the yellow air box for a Paxton blower on a 421 in a Grand Prix body. Scotty bought one of those after he got into embalming full time. Was this in 1962 or 1963? Smoke If You Have Them I didn't have time to install the fender I took off the 1947 Tudor to replace the one the deer crushed and Darryl welded the crack on. I did have time to get new Daytona pipes made for the ones that were now rusted after several winters. My build was 8 years old in a 8 year old in the beginning car. Going through the rocky cuts in Missouri I could see the smoke rolling out as I went up the next hill. I would have to check the oil and in spite of the hot state the water. In California near Needles the oil showed a milkey emulsion but the water was OK. It was using a lot of oil. The road (US 66) in those days crossed a lot of Arroyos so you were constantly going whoopdee-doo up a rounded ridge and down into another arroyo. The little stores and gas stations had no service bays and no mechanical repairs seemed likely. Bright Lights Big city Rolling onto the San Bernadino Freeway the lights of the city went on and on. My ammeter began jumping and I realized that the wires that got burned when the rear 4-bar suspension was installed were not tied up by the black tape as oil had loosened them. Under the car by the side of the road was no way to get the tail lights solid. I tried to place the wires as best as I could. Maybe an hour in traffic and I saw Topanga Canyon exit in the Valley. I pulled up in front of my Uncle and Aunt's ranch house in Chattsworth. My Conestoga had gotten me here but no time to sell it as I would need it to find a job and begin my first days. I was facing a due date in six months when the rear plate expired and I had the wrong emergency brake cable for the one severed in the cab. Slot Car My Aunt had a white Falcon with white bucket seats. It purred along with it's Fordomatic. She took me over teh Los Angeles River and the railroad yards to where the overlapping crossovers merged to bring all the freeways into the "Slot Car" track as she called. My uncle took me in his car to Westminster where 7th street out of Long Beach and the 405 San Diego Freeway ended 4 lane forms. These then were the carrot to stay. My uncle had steamed some plywood in his shower to build a bass viol and once owned a Lloyd automobile. He had a bright red USMC ring. Greg my cousin took me to the ice rink at Topanga Canyon Mall and bought me an Orange Julius. The Ventura Freeway went beyond. Pepperdine University was way down the curving track of Topanga Canyon through a tunnel and on the PCH, the Pacific Coast Highway. I was to learn that Sepulveda connected to PCH somehow on the near coast next to Los Angeles. Santa Monica was just a ways down the coast from Malibu. The road to Malibu was one exit nearer LA than Topanga Canyon. The old actors home was in Woodland Hills even closer to Hollywood and LA. The pivot to the San Diego Freeway was at Encino. There was an airport near here but I never went there. I only found Burbank, LAX, and Long Beach. El Toro came later. Ralph Williams the world's largest Ford dealer was in Encino but I did not know that until I got a color TV. Parkwood Chevrolet would go bankrupt one year after I bought a new SS-396 Chevelle from them. It had the 360 hp engine and single exhaust. The transmission was an aluminum case Muncie 4-speed with 2.54 low. The mechanics like to dynotune it when I brought it in. From the odometer they also did road testing. I hated the fake hood vents and eventually knocked out part of them and removed the cast decor. White with bucket seats was my fate. No black convertible with a bench in 1965. I was too late and a demonstrator white hard top was found. My credit was ridiculous and a big baloon payment was scheduled to up my 10% down payment. My money put into the bank in Williamson New York by my grandfather was still holding and in Bank of America. Where? Van Nuys is a well known neighborhood but I only passed through for a month after I had taken a job. Then I decide to leave the one hour coming home each night and moved to Lakewood. I was almost out in dairyland across from the Dutch Village shopping center. Wes Godfrey drew up the insurance policy that moved me from 10-10 PL-PD to 100-200 with collision and miscellaneous. The dealership wanted another policy that I cancelled once I saw it did not cover war and I had life insurance at a defense contractor that did. I rented a Ford Mustang for one month and could not renew it. I was walking daily to and fro down South to Lakewood and then straight past the Parkwood Chevrolet dealership where I eventually bought the Chevelle and on to the plant gate. The heat of summer gave way to the rains of November once I had gotten past new car introduction and was washing my car in the carport. I had filled in for two months with a green Nova 194 six and automatic that had 13 inch wheels and put me almost sliding on my butt to get in. Where was the Ford dealer in Long Beach? I later found Murphy Lincoln Mercury and Circle Volkswagen and even in the seventies Longo Toyota to understand my land lord. The SS was expendable. I took it to Mexico as far as Ensenada past Tijuana and San Felipe on the other coast of Baja. I left it in the President's parking spot one day at 6 AM to get a proposal signed for 25 C-9's at $3 million each. The visitor spots had disappeared and my signer had a flight to catch and I had to pick it up from presentations where it was printed. Not a hot job held me up for over an hour and when I got back the guard had moved it to a Vice President spot. Mac MacGowen left when McDonnell merged and began his retirement in a winery. That did not last and he built the DC-8 80 series in Tulsa with CFM 56 engines from SNECMA/GE. I took my car home and replaced it in early 1967 after the Parkwood dealer had closed. George seemed a good buy until the closer tore up the deal and made a new one for $100.00 more. That wasn't the end. His curse in front of my wife was. I bought my last American car or truck. Trying to salve the bruise in 1987 with the new SATURN Corp was when I began to do art for real. I had an IBM 704 and a 709T4 behind me when I was given a ABS by McDonnell that ran in FORTRAN on a CDC 6400. Amphibious Capable I didn't want to be disqualified for military service so I applied for Navy Officer Candidate School. You take the same physical tests as draftees and follow the same colored footsteps on the floor. 10 pushups, 10 pullups and 10 sit-ups and you are not 4F. When the offer came it did not mention pay or transportation but had a contract to sign. I pondered if the shoulder separations I had gotten trying to surf in Biscayne Bay a few years before would make me a liability to those under my command or my fellow officers. Eventually, I decide that a 2A at a contractors was the best I could do for my country. If the later draft lottery included me I was as ready as I could be. Now enlisted are not tolerant of me. I spent my years with at least lieutenants though at Eglin AFB I did eat with the non-commissioned officers mess. v

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