Prologue

I love cars, especially the muscle cars of the 60’s and early 70’s. What red blooded American teenage male didn’t? Well, maybe except me. While my friends were in an incestuous relationship with horsepower, bucket seats, manual transmissions, and stick shifts, I judged them to be a barrier between me, and every teenage boy’s second obsession, girls. A hot Corvette, Thunder Bird, or Mustang might attract a prospective date, but it’s a roadblock in almost every other way. How can your girl get close, with a stick shift or worse, a center console in the way, and unless you’re in the country, how can you put your arm around her if you are constantly shifting gears. I won’t even get into the discomfort of the back seats of those cars.

My solution, a 1961 Rambler Classic 770; boxy, underpowered, and with an automatic transmission. But it had a secret weapon, I’ll get to that in a second. My friends called it a granny car, which in truth it was. My grandparents grudgingly gave it to me the day I got my driver’s license, a few months after I turned fifteen. I couldn’t have asked for a better present.

Ramblers, along with Studebaker, and Hudson designed a line of cars for traveling salesmen. In the 40’s & 50’s, motels were not as plentiful as today, with the exception of Howard Johnson’s, there weren’t any big chain hotels and motels. Salesmen’s cars had to have large trunks for samples and seats that would be fairly comfortable to spend the night in. the 611’ Rambler was a departure from this design except for one feature, fully reclining front seats. They reclined all the way back to make a relatively comfortable bed. A secondary advantage was more leg room in the rear seat for passengers. The seats were my secret weapon.

I was raised by my grandparents; I never even knew my mother’s name until I registered for social security at 65. My father popped in and out of the scene for a week or month at a time, then disappeared into the void. This would give my grandmother a couple months ammunition to wake me up at two in the morning, to rant for hours about what a loser I would be for the rest of my life. Needless to say, I was shocked when my grandfather handed me the keys.

The car itself was stock Burgundy/Bronze two tone, except for two changes. The original owner was either a great salesman or loved comfort, because he had the seats reworked with added padding, and covered in tan tucked-and-rolled leather that was butter soft. The second thing was he had the back of the rear seat split. The driver’s side washad one third of the seat andmodified so it opened like a door to reveal a cabinet, that had a rolled up Quilted pad that must have been custom made. It was like a fitted sheet on the laid-out seats, along with a blanket and two pillows. Above that was a pull-out drawer for whatever. The other two thirds of the seat swung up to give full access to the trunk. Great way to sneak friends into the drive-in---Not that I would ever do anything like that.

I had moved from upstate New York to a small town between Orlando and Ocala Florida. The first teacher I met that September looked me up and down then said. ““You swim boy?” When I said that I did, he laughed, “With duck feet like yours, you have to swim.” I was on the swimming team before I got my first homework assignment. Then I found the Audio Visual and Science Club.

As the AV nerd, when I wheeled a projector into a room and set up a film, I became a piece of furniture. Everyone would talk around or through me, and as a fly-on-the-wall, I heard a lot of juicy information, that could have been very valuable if I had been inclined to blackmail. As a nerd, I wasn’t ostracized by the rest of the school, but I wasn’t in any of the cool kid circles either. That suited me just fine. Keeping a low profile kept my grandmother out of my business. Live down to her expectations and she stayed out of my life, except for her lectures.

Shortly after school started, I got my first job, at the local walk-in theater, that set me up for a fantasy high school experience.