Chapter 20

Like the year before, it took us two days of hard driving to get back to Livonia. Getting back there felt a lot like getting back home. It was home for some of us, and those of us who had wintered there the year before at least felt like we knew our way around a little.

The group of us wintering over in Livonia was a little different than it had been the year before. Right after we got back, Woody decided to head home for a few days, across the state in Grand Rapids. A few days later, Frank got a card from him saying that he and a friend had decided they didn't want to freeze their asses in Michigan. They were going to head out to California, to check things out and maybe stay the winter. If they found something worthwhile, they might stay longer. Woody said that he'd get back with Frank in the spring about driving another year.

I might as well go ahead and say right now that was the last we heard from him, so we figured they must have found something. Really, it didn't come as any big surprise. I'd been getting the feeling for months that Woody was getting a little tired of life on the road. He never said much about it, but you could tell that the edge was gone. Woody had been with the MMSA right from the beginning in the '48 season, longer than anyone else except Frank and Spud, and that life wears on you if you let it.

To balance off Woody's not being with us, Dink announced that he was going to stay in Livonia with us for the winter. Dink wasn't much to talk about his personal life, but we got the idea that he hadn't been all that crazy about going back to Wisconsin just to pump gas, which was a job outside in the cold, of course. Vivian had arranged for another house for us to rent, this one a little bigger than the one we'd had the last winter, so several of us moved into it just like the previous winter.

Chick, Hattie, and Carol decided to move in with us. They hadn't made up their minds about another season yet, but we could pretty well tell they were leaning against doing it. It would depend on if Chick could find a decent job that would last. I guess Frank must have had a word with Herb, because it wasn't long before Herb came up with a pretty decent offer: automatic transmissions were just starting to get popular in those days, and Herb didn't have anyone on his staff who knew much about them. Herb made the offer to send Chick to a school Ford had set up to teach mechanics about taking care of them, with the idea that he'd become their transmission specialist, and it didn't take Chick a lot of thinking. After talking it over, they decided that Chick would go to the school, then go to work for Herb. Rocky, Pepper, Dink, and I worked out the same deal we had last year, to chip in to have Hattie do the cooking and other housework, and we settled in for the winter.

There was a place up the street from us that had a two-bedroom upstairs apartment for rent, and Frank and Spud decided to rent it so they wouldn't be living with Frank's folks again. Although we all had an unspoken agreement to keep it among ourselves, it was no secret that Frank and Vivian liked to get together once in a while, and on the odd occasion when that happened Spud had first call on our couch.

I might as well get this part of the story out of the way now. You remember those two fat gals that Dink woke up squeezed between back at Hoss's wedding? We'd teased him about those two girls for the rest of the season, and he never said anything much about it, except that they were nice girls and he liked them.

Well, one day not long after we got back, Dink was down buying something at the Woolworth's Five and Dime, and he happened to run into these two again. They were both happy to see him and greeted him like a long-lost brother or something. It turned out that they were cousins, they both worked at Woolworth's and had a little apartment together. One thing led to another, and the two of them wound up inviting him to dinner that evening. After we knocked off work, Dink went back to the house, cleaned up, borrowed my car, and we didn't see hide nor hair of him till it was time for work the next morning. When he showed up, he hadn't had much sleep but had a big smile on his face. It took a while for it to build up, but by the time we were into the new year, Dink was spending three out of four nights over at their apartment, and kept looking like he enjoyed it more and more.

As it turned out, Spud only had to spend a night or two on our couch, since Dink's bed was available more often than not.

When we got back to Livonia, we discovered that Vivian had managed to rent another warehouse, a little closer to the Ford dealership, but a little smaller. It was only big enough to get all the race cars inside if we left most of them on the hauler, and it was just one big room. No heat, of course, and the winter had already been colder than the one before, or so at least Vivian told us. In the first few days after we got into the place, we rigged a little work room out of tarps and scrap wood in the corner of the place, and rigged up the oil drum space heater again. For whatever reason, the heater didn't do anything like as well as it had done in the place we'd had the previous winter, so most of the time it was uncomfortably cold working on the cars. After a while, I got to thinking that maybe Woody hadn't had such a bad idea after all, going to California.

But I got a little lucky, as it turned out. I'd been thinking about doing some substitute teaching around there locally, just for the sake of the experience since I was pretty sure even then that this racing stuff wasn't going to last forever. I didn't get much chance when we first got back since I was busy with helping get everything set up for the winter, but after a few days I told Spud I was going to take off for a while and check out the possibilities. Vivian told me about three or four places I ought to check out and get my name in. Wouldn't you know that the first place I went to the principal was going nuts looking for a sub for that day when I walked in the door, and ten minutes later I was in a classroom.

I hadn't actually been in a classroom of any sort for any reason since I'd done my student teaching almost two years before, and all of a sudden there I was in front of a bunch of tenth graders teaching American History. That was a subject that I was pretty good with, so rather than just baby sit the class I checked the teacher's lesson plan, then got a little discussion going on whatever it was they were studying. It all went pretty well; the principal checked on me a couple times and after school was out for the day he said that I'd done a lot better than he'd expected for someone that had just walked in unannounced.

By that time there weren't a lot of days left before classes broke for the Christmas holidays, but I think I only missed a couple of them. In those days a teacher was expected to wear a suit and tie, so I got good use out of the one I'd bought for Hoss's wedding. The money wasn't real great – even full time teachers didn't make a lot in those days – but it was about what I would have made working on the cars. I have to say that it was a whole lot more comfortable than it would have been to be working on cold, greasy engine parts in that warehouse, with my hands and my butt numb from the cold. I can say that because that's what we did most days over the holidays.

I got a call to go substitute the first day classes were back in session. I went in to see the principal, George Anniston, to see what he was going to have me do. "Mel," he said, "I've got a little problem. You said you're a race car driver, right?"

"Part of the year," I admitted, figuring I was going to get shown just exactly where the door was. Race car drivers weren't exactly seen as having the highest socially acceptable profession in those days; we were probably seen as being a little more socially acceptable than prostitutes or bookies or something, but not a whole lot.

"I always understood that a race car driver has to be a pretty decent mechanic," he said.

"I'm pretty decent at it," I said. "If I wasn't working here today I'd be down working on one of the cars."

"I thought so," he smiled. "Mr. Kravitz, our auto shop teacher, had a heart attack over the weekend. There's no telling how long he's going to be gone. You know that teenage boys can be a little on the wild side, but you've done well at keeping your classes under control. Do you think you could take over Mr. Kravitz's auto shop classes and actually teach them?"

"Probably, if I have some idea what he was supposed to be teaching them," I told him.

"Good enough," he said. "You're the auto shop teacher, at least till he can make it back. Since you're actually going to be teaching the class, there'll be a little more in your pay envelope. It won't be full rate, but better than daily call."

He took me out to the auto shop classroom, which was a cinder block building behind the old three-story brick high school, and introduced me to the class. "I think if you hunt around in the desk you'll find something of a syllabus there," Mr. Anniston told me.

"I should be able to make it work," I said.

In those days, of course, cars were just not as reliable as they've gotten today. They needed a lot of work, which is part of why gas stations in those days were service stations, instead of being snack food stores. Owning and driving a car meant that you had to know something about maintaining it. You can get by today by having the oil changed every three thousand miles, changing the oil filter and checking the fluids. Cars back then needed a lot more attention, and it was pretty well expected that the owner had to know how to do some things that would be a major operation today. For example, my old Ford needed a valve grinding every twenty thousand miles or so, and I'd done it several times by then. It was no big deal; it was something you did under a shade tree with some fairly simple tools. Today, a valve grinding is rarely needed, which is good since it involves a major tear down of the car and usually several thousand dollars. Plus, it was possible to actually work on a car in those days – there was space under the hood to get at the engine, where today you've got the engine and all sorts of other stuff like air conditioning all stuffed up there in the nose like a head cold.