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Coming of Age in America
Part 26 |
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A few weeks before my senior year Neil Armstrong became the first man to step foot on the moon. The space race was on. Shortly thereafter, everything and anything revolved around the moon landing and space. Our homecoming parade was no exception, it had a space theme, too. Our paper staff decided to enter a lunar rover into the parade that would go down Main Street homecoming weekend. Luckily, someone knew a gentleman on the north side of town that had a dune buggy. One of the kids on staff was in the band with his daughters and asked if they thought he would allow us to borrow it for the big day. Mr. Peterson handed us the keys. Growing up on a farm, I was the only one that knew how to drive a straight shift, so I had the honors of being the driver. I picked it up the night before we were to decorate it and was supposed to drive it to another kid’s house and park it. Supposed to. Those were the two key words that evaded me. I had never driven a dune buggy and I thought I would savor the moment while I had the chance. The local hangout in those days was at Gentry’s Grocery Store parking lot across from a Mug-N-Cone drive-in. That’s the first place I went. The dune buggy was like a magnet for all the kids that were already there. They wanted me to ride them around in the parking lot. So I’d pick up a few, do a few figure 8s and go back for more. Then I got a little braver. Several kids climbed on board. Sixteen to be exact. One girl was even holding her beagle puppy when we exited the parking lot and began our trek to the other Mug-N-Cone on the south end of town. I made a couple of passes through the parking lot down there before deciding to head back to the north end of town. I had gone a few blocks when I noticed flashing red lights behind me and pulled onto a side street. Mr. Hamrick was the policeman that crawled out of his patrol car that night and slowly walked up beside all of us kids on the dune buggy. He tilted his hat back a bit while taking it all in before looking me square in the eyes and asking, “Son, can you possibly get anyone else on that contraption?” With as straight a face as I could muster, I said, “Well, sir, it you want on we’ll certainly make room.” Evidently that wasn’t the response he was expecting. His hat found home position real quick and he barked, “Heck no, I don’t want on! And I don’t want’a see all you kids hanging off that thing either. “Boy, you take all these kids back to wherever they came from and go home! If I see you out and about again tonight… Geeeez, just go home!” With that said, he turned around and went back to his car. As I mentioned before, living in a small town had its advantages. Mayberry had nothing on Louisville. Normally I rode the bus to school but for some reason that I can’t remember, I had to take my parents car one day. I was in a hurry leaving the house and forgot to grab my driver’s license. Halfway to town when it dawned on me my license was back in my room. Immediately, I slowed down and made a special effort to do my very best driving the rest of the way. I did not want to get pulled over by the patrolman we all knew as Big Iron. I suppose Big Iron was a pretty good guy. He did a lot of work with the Boy Scouts and was in charge of Camp Pailla, where the Scouts met and worked on their merit badges. Not having ever been in the Scouts I can’t say for certain what all he did, but I know it was a lot and he was a good community servant. However, it was rumored among us guys that if you weren’t into Scouting, he had it out for you. I can’t say that was true, but having only been in the 4-H Club I didn’t want to find out. Well, I made it to school without an incident. Several times throughout the day I worried about having forgotten my driver’s license and kept going over and over in my head an alternate way home in order to avoid crossing paths with him. He was notorious about patrolling the highway I lived on. When school let out for the day I thought I had it all figured out. I drove all the back streets until I reached the edge of town. Then instead of traveling on Old Robinson Road which would have been the logical route, I drove west on Highway 14. I knew three miles out I could cut across on Pearson Road that connected to the highway I lived on. I did exactly that. When I came to the end of Pearson Road I took a right and was only a mile and a half from home. I breathed a sigh of relief because I just knew I was home free. Our house ended up being on a high hill after the new highway was constructed back in the 50s. When the grade of new road was lowered nearly thirty feet they had to build us a new driveway that was hidden between two high banks. Just as I turned into my driveway, there he sat hidden between the two banks waiting to catch some motorist speeding by. I stopped the car and there we sat facing each other. I couldn’t get past him to get to the house, and he couldn’t pull out because I was blocking him in. As they say in the Westerns, we had ourselves a Mexican standoff. Who was going to flinch first? It was either Big Iron or me. Who would it be? I could hear the theme music from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, running through my head. With sweat beading up on my forehead I put the car in reverse and backed up enough for him to ease by and get out of our driveway. He glared at me as he drove by. I smiled and waved a nervous wave at him. I wondered, would he stop and ask for my license? Was he chewing tobacco and would he spit it on my dog? He did not. He eased on out into the road and drove out of sight. I had knots in my stomach for an hour.
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