Chapter 15

Right about the time I-67 was going in, a local guy by the name of Harvey Wohlstadt got a bright idea. He figured that there would be a lot of traffic coming by on the Interstate, and he also figured that people might like to get off the highway for a bite to eat. He thought people weren't likely to go all the way into town if they could get off the Interstate and eat right there in sight of the entrance ramp, and being the first one in line might bring him a pretty good business. Well before the freeway opened, he was constructing what would be the largest restaurant in town.

Looking back on it, Harvey's thinking was pretty good. I'm not clear on why he named it "The Chicago Inn," but it may have been because he was a huge Cubs fan. Considering the Cub's track record over the decades, he must have been using his heart, rather than his mind to want to risk the jinx of having the kind of success the ball team has had over the years. Nevertheless, it was a pretty decent restaurant if not super high class. It was built of cinder block, and wasn't exactly the most beautiful building in the world, but it was adequate for what he wanted. There was a huge sign in front that helped to draw business.

Arlene and I went into the Chicago Inn for the first time in the first few days it was open in late 1963, not long after I'd walked away from the track, and a few days before the freeway actually opened. The food was pretty good, and the place was moderately busy, so I figured that I'd be in the place again in the future. That was well over forty years ago, and I can't imagine how many thousands of times I must have been in there over the years.

Although the Chicago Inn was intended to be a traveler's stop, it soon became the busiest local restaurant. One of the things that made it seem friendly to the locals was a big table in the back, where a more-or-less-regular gang gathered for breakfast every morning. I really wasn't one of the regulars for a long time, but still, I seemed to make it down there for breakfast about once every other week back in those days.

I was a little bit more of a regular in the summer of '64, when I was once again riding with the driver's education kids. I had a big group of kids who wanted to get their driving in real early in the morning, so once again I'd go get in a couple hours of driver's ed, then break for breakfast until the next session rolled around. One morning along in June, I was sitting in a booth by myself, nursing a cup of coffee and thinking about nothing in particular, when I happened to glance up and see Smoky Kern coming in the door.

Smoky and I hadn't had much reason to talk to each other since our little set-to out at the track the year before. Since Bradford was a small town we'd probably run into each other a few times over the course of the year, but "Morning, Smoky." – "Morning, Mel," was probably about the limit of what we had to say to each other. In fact, if I had to get the odd auto part for whatever project I was working on at school or at my shop at home, I'd hang on until I had reason to run into Hawthorne to get it. Frankly, I didn't want to talk to him, mostly because I didn't want him apologizing to me. If he did – which didn't seem all that likely – I would just about have to accept his apology, and I figured the next thing I knew he was going to be twisting my arm to try to straighten out the mess that had resulted when he ran me off. I'd already pretty much done it once at the expense of a lot of effort, all for nothing, and I didn't feel like doing it again.

In any case, I didn't want him to see me just sitting there staring out into space, looking like I obviously had nothing to do. I didn't have a lot of options open to me, but just then one of the waitresses walked by carrying a newspaper that she'd found abandoned in some other booth. "Hey," I said to get her attention, and relieved her of the paper. That would probably serve about as well as anything. Quickly I opened it up and buried myself in it. I glanced up, to see that Smoky had sat down a ways away from me, but was looking in my direction, so I figured I'd just better hide myself behind the paper.

I was just a little disappointed to discover that what I held in my hand was a copy of the Detroit Free Press. I had never been much of one to read the Free Press, since I was a lot more oriented toward Chicago than I was to Detroit, even though Bradford was in Michigan. After all, I'd spent years in the Chicago and Milwaukee area, and Arlene being from Schererville just added to the Chicago orientation. It had been several years since I'd been in the Detroit area at all, and I just had never gone back to Livonia since I'd left the MMSA ten years before.

The front page held my interest for a little while, even though a lot of it was Detroit news that I didn't care about. The sports section was all about the Detroit Tigers, and I couldn't have cared less. I flipped around to the comic section, and that was pretty good although I thought the comics in the Chicago Tribune were better. I finished the comics, and flipped a page, to discover it full of classifieds. There was nothing there that I was interested in, so I flipped one page and then another, until all of a sudden I realized that I'd seen something that caught my eye on the previous page. I flipped back, to discover that there was reason for something to catch my eye – a three-column ad announcing great deals on new cars at Frank Blixter Ford in Livonia!

"Well, son of a bitch!" I said out loud.

If it was the same Frank Blixter – and considering everything, that seemed pretty likely – then it was the first I'd heard of him since the MMSA left me behind in Bradford back in 1954.

If Frank owned the Ford agency in Livonia, it seemed pretty likely to me that it was the one that Herb Kralick had owned, and I couldn't help but wonder how Vivian fit into the picture. That, of course, opened the floodgate of a lot of memories of the years I'd spent with the MMSA.

Back when I'd been lying in a hospital bed in the old hospital in Bradford that had since been replaced and converted into a nursing home, Arlene and I had pretty well made up our minds to turn our backs on the MMSA. It was something we had done, and we'd had fun at it, but it was addictive, and it wasn't something that would work out very well with the lives we'd wanted to build. Although we'd often wondered what had happened to Frank and Spud and the rest of the guys, as well as the MMSA, we'd never lifted a finger to find out. I might as well admit that there was a time that I was a little sour about the fact that Frank or Spud never appeared to have taken any interest in getting in touch with us – after all, we hadn't gone anywhere in all that time.

I sat there, looked at that ad, and let my mind roll back. If my dealings with the Bradford Speedway the year before had taught me anything, it had taught me that a lot of the old racer addiction had burnt out of me, and just seeing that name in that location got me curious about a lot of things. What had happened to those people that my life had once been built around? Would it be a good idea to find out if it was the same Frank Blixter?

And just how damn stupid would I feel if I didn't try to find out?

I glanced at my watch. I had plenty of time before I had to get back over to the school to get the next session of kids going. I grabbed my check and that section of the paper, and headed for the cash register.

It didn't take me long to drive over to Doc Bronson's office, where Arlene was working in those days – she'd taken a few years off when the boys were little, and after she went back to work she decided she didn't want to work at the hospital. Working for Doc Bronson meant that she had a regular schedule on days, rather than any old time of the day or night that she'd had to deal with when she'd worked at the old hospital. It would have been just as bad at the new hospital, which had been completed a couple years before. The old hospital had been inadequate and something of a fire trap, and the town went to a lot of effort over the years to come up with the cash to build a new one. It was one of the real points of pride in Bradford.

Things were still pretty casual around Doc Bronson's office in those days, and it only took a couple minutes waiting to see Arlene while she finished up with whatever it was she was doing. "What's up, Mel?" she asked.

"Take a look at this," I said, showing her the paper and pointing out the ad for Frank Blixter Ford.

"I'll be darned," she said after a couple seconds. "You don't suppose it's him, do you?"

"Blixter isn't a very common name, and it's in Livonia," I said. "I'm darn tempted to fiddle around the driving schedule for the rest of the week and take a run up there tomorrow. Would you like to come along if you can get off?"

"It'd be interesting," she said. "But I can't get off, and I'm not sure how bad I want to go up there and hear you two yarn about Okinawa and the old days."

"You don't mind if I go by myself?" I asked.

"No, suit yourself," she smiled. "Boys will be boys."

With that, I headed over to the school, thinking about what I could do to my schedule to free up a day. A lot of people think that teachers have it soft, what with being off all summer, but it really didn't apply in my case, what with the driver's education. It ate up a lot of time, and with the size of the classes increasing as the Baby Boomers hit driving age, it had started to get out of hand. I wasn't getting the free time in the summer that I would have liked. Fortunately, after the summer of 1964 when I realized things were getting out of hand, I went to the school superintendent, Ralph Olmstead since Mike Corrigan had moved on, and talked them into putting on a second instructor. That got me back to a little more reasonable schedule where I could get a day off once in a while and not have to work weekends. It turned out to not be a big deal to get the schedule worked around with the kids so I had tomorrow off.

That evening, Arlene and I got talking about the old days and the MMSA a lot, much more than we normally did, and I realized that she was about as curious about what had happened as I was. Once again I made the offer for her to come along with me, and once again she refused. She made one suggestion, though: "If you get Frank feeling real softhearted, why don't you see what kind of deal he'd give you on trading in the Olds?"

"Might not be a bad idea at that," I agreed. The Olds was paid for and four years old, now; we'd gotten rid of the '55 Chevy a couple years before, and I had sort of inherited the F-85 as my go-to-school car. The Chevy had really been showing its age, and it was to the point where I had to either give it a major rebuild or just limit myself to driving it around town. For once I hadn't felt like giving a car a major rebuild, especially since I'd been in the middle of the Bradford Speedway hassles when it had become clear that it was time for it to go. We'd pretty well decided that it was going to have to get traded sooner or later, probably for a smallish car since we had a big Pontiac station wagon for Arlene to drive, big enough to haul all the kids without feeling cramped like we did in the Olds.

The next morning, I got in the F-85, stopped off at the Chicago Inn for breakfast, then headed up the I-67 on-ramp toward the north and I-94. It felt a little strange; I rarely drove the Olds much farther than Hawthorne, but then, I rarely had reason to go much farther than Hawthorne without the family anyway. It was strange how much of a homebody I had become. I hardly ever got more than thirty miles or so from home, especially by myself. It had been years since we had been farther than Schererville. In the back of my head I realized that we were long overdue for a real family vacation, but Elaine might still be a little young for something like that. On the other hand, if we went to the right place it might work out all right.

It seemed a long ways away from the way it had been in the old days, when I drove the old '37 Ford all over the Midwest while I'd been with the MMSA. How I used to enjoy being on the road, to see what might lay beyond the next hill, to see sights I hadn't seen before, go places that most people would never see. Those had been the good old days, I thought. I'd turned my back on a lot when the MMSA had left me behind in Bradford.

I couldn't help but wonder if this was a fool's errand. The MMSA was a long time ago; I wouldn't have wanted to bet if Frank would even remember me. On the other hand, there were a lot of unfinished stories I'd often been curious about, and if nothing else I might be able to get answers to some of those questions.

We'd never had I-94 back in the MMSA days, although it wasn't long coming. US-112, the road I would have taken ten years before, was a crooked, slow road that brought back a good feeling of all those slow two-lane roads and small towns we'd so often gone through. This time I avoided it for the sake of getting there more quickly; it couldn't have been more than two hours from Bradford to Livonia using I-67 and I-94.