This may seem like a tragic story ... but it ain't. We will leave tragic to politicians as it's so cute when they cry.
University students once had immense fun trying to see how many people could be could be stuffed into a Volkswagen but the pro version of that works with a Plymouth Fury station wagon, naturally with a 383 cubic-inch V8 in it.
Maybe it doesn't look possible to stuff into a station wagon your wife ... six kids ... a full-race go-kart with all the kit needed for it ... plus one full-grown boxer dog. We did it ... not once but many times.
If that looks like it would be a cop car as a sedan, you bet. Cops loved that 383 motor too. This was back when cops used American hardware. Good luck trying to find a cop riding a Harley today.
The car pictured is not far from the color of the original and it's close enough to the same model year that there is little difference.
My ol' Mother loved this car too and don't be thinking she was mousy about anything since when kids were riding with her, we would be begging her, "Kick it down, Mummy. Kick it down."
The kick down was to floor the accelerator. The other two-barrels on the four-barrel carburetor would open and that motor would throw you into your seat like a jet aircraft take-off. My ol' Mother would bite her lip a little bit but she would be giggling the whole time. She was a definite wild woman. She was just as nuts as my ol' Dad, she had to be to survive it all. She didn't just survive, she was diggin' it.
What's the first thing you want on coming to America?
Right you are, matey. Let's go out on the road to see it. So we did, packed just as listed above, plus a whole lot more.
So, we're in California and my ol' Dad comes up with the idea: what say we drive to New York. Everyone says sure but none of us has any idea how far it might be to New York. Probably my ol' Dad didn't either but it looked cool so, what could he do, he has to go for it.
The surface presentation was a sequence of lecture tours at different universities around the country as he was Elvis in genetics after what he did to use computers to model population genetics. That was hot and it was happening ... so long as you have a particular penchant for D. melanogaster (common fruit fly, frequently used for studies in genetics).
The real reason was to coordinate the lecture tours with go-kart race tracks and their race schedules around the country. Myrtis Mosley was his secretary and she arranged it, likely with a lot of discussion with my ol' Mother. Myrtis went on to become a Dean in the university. She made that rise in the sixties and seventies even while all hell was on the street everywhere else. She's an exceptionally strong and admirable woman. There wasn't a racist bone in my ol' Dad's body. Are you smart, yes/no. All that really mattered to him. There's a good chance he gave her the launch but no-one will hold a woman like that back. She's probably gone now and a hat tip to her. She's a lovely person.
This was a grand expedition as the eldest of the kids were young teens and there was an array in-between of more kids, all with only a year or two separating us. The packing list for the Fury was to put Barbie, the smallest, in-between my parents in the front. Lotho and two other sisters were in the middle with Doc and I in the back.
That packing list lasted long enough, maybe, to get the car out of the driveway. Then the fighting starts. You said I could sit in the back when I traded you for a frog. The scream comes back that I'm not trading because we have only been in the car about four seconds now. Multiply that by whatever number of combinations of five screaming kids you like.
God how I wish I had children (cough).
With that highly-involatile mixed packed aboard, the family rolled out on the Great American Go-Kart Safari. We crossed the Sierra Nevada mountains and saw the incredible beauty of the country and visited Donner Lake, famed in U.S. history for the place where some settlers got stranded and are reputed to have eaten each other. Fortunately, my ol' Mother prepared coolers full of tomato sandwiches and things before debarking day so none of our number were consumed that day at Donner Pass.
The lake appears to be Donner Lake rather than Lake Tahoe which is much bigger. See the snow. See the water. Yes, that cold. This feels like early Spring rather than early Winter and it couldn't be in the middle as the Sierras usually get enormously-deep accumulations of snow. This is one of the best ski regions in the world and Squaw Valley hosted the Winter Olympics for 1960. Likely others have done that as well since there are multiple extraordinary ski resorts in the area, Heavenly Valley among them, and, yeah, some years later I cracked up there too.
We went on through Reno and, on the outskirts, my ol' Dad gave me the worst gambling lesson of my life ... but that one is for another article.
We rolled through a great many cities and towns on the Great American Go-Kart Safari and it was magnificent. While driving along the highways in the mid-country, it wasn't surprising to see pronghorn sheep all over the place. The kids thought this was fascinating because of the fuzzy white patches on their backsides and how the patches would seem to flash as they jumped around in the pastures and fields. 'What is that for, Mummy?'
All mothers should know, of course, why an antelope has a white butt.
Maybe click that one to see those gorgeous eyes
We went rolling and racing around the country, seeing a great many fascinating people, and incredibly beautiful things. So what if this sounds like a tourist brochure as that's what happened. The fascination of the people may come clear to some with a bit of genetical name-dropping. My ol' Dad and Dick Lewontin in Syrcacuse, NY, were big guns in genetics and had become friends so of course they have to meet. It was like that around the country as this was the genetics rock star tour ... and we were diggin' it, even though none of the kids had any idea of what they did. Fruit flies or something, man.
And then we went to Indiana.
The name of the track escapes me but this was great racing for my ol' Dad and it even ran into the evening because the track had night lights. There's high drama in racing at night because everything sparkles reflecting the lights and the motors scream with some of them approaching seventeen thousand RPM ... at least until they exploded.
After such an incredibly exciting day, there's only one thing to do ... pack up all those kids and kit ... and drive five hundred miles. I may not be the only one in the family with a bit of mania.
It was late so everyone was tired and it was all a drag but we had the routine more or less figured out, except for the constantly-rotating packing list for children. Eventually it was all sorted and we were back on the road again.
Once the car was rolling, most, maybe all, of the kids fell asleep since at night you can't even make faces at other cars from the back anymore and that was one of the biggest reasons for wanting to be in the back. What fun is a road trip for a kid when it's not possible to aggravate other drivers.
The destination out of Indiana escapes me also but we made some distance toward it and maybe we made some required stop for, erm, personal relief and this was the time when the check-in didn't come up with the right number.
(Ed: explain check-in)
My ol' Dad might precede it with Coo-Ee, Coo-Ee a few times. That must have been an Australian word as it meant nothing to us except attend immediately. When that was followed by Check-In, that meant immediately go there to line up by age for a head count.
(Ed: sounds like Warden Boggs in Alcatraz)
Really, Horse? Try raising six kids without doing that.
You have probably jumped to what happened and, yep, the count was short so we had lost one.
Maybe you wonder how we could possibly lose track of one but the miracle is really that we didn't, at least not usually. The kids were always moving and, every time the Fury stopped, there had to be a new rotation for seating. We were such backseat lawyers as we would make deals for who sits where, how long, and trade that for who knows what kids carry about for that.
Without getting too defensive, yep, we lost Doc. That situation goes instantly to overdrive as my ol' Dad drove fast, as in really fast, any time there was a down kid. There was another one out of the Snowy Mountains which must have been the scariest drive of all time down those mountain highways. I was too young to know the detail but that must have been one major hell ride. That was another time for a down kid.
Driving some unknown number of miles to get back, it's now much later and the track is pitch black except for one bare set of lights over the pits. Underneath the pole for those lights was the loneliest little waif you ever saw in your life. We had not been here so long so the only place he had ever really called home was about fifteen thousand kilometers away on other side of that enormous ocean. We knew how enormous it was, we had seen it. If you want to know lost and forlorn in the darkness, he was the picture of it.
There was the glorious reunion, of course, and that lasted probably forty-eight seconds or so and the kids got back to what we did best: fighting. My ol' Dad went driving along.
University students once had immense fun trying to see how many people could be could be stuffed into a Volkswagen but the pro version of that works with a Plymouth Fury station wagon, naturally with a 383 cubic-inch V8 in it.
Maybe it doesn't look possible to stuff into a station wagon your wife ... six kids ... a full-race go-kart with all the kit needed for it ... plus one full-grown boxer dog. We did it ... not once but many times.
The car pictured is not far from the color of the original and it's close enough to the same model year that there is little difference.
My ol' Mother loved this car too and don't be thinking she was mousy about anything since when kids were riding with her, we would be begging her, "Kick it down, Mummy. Kick it down."
The kick down was to floor the accelerator. The other two-barrels on the four-barrel carburetor would open and that motor would throw you into your seat like a jet aircraft take-off. My ol' Mother would bite her lip a little bit but she would be giggling the whole time. She was a definite wild woman. She was just as nuts as my ol' Dad, she had to be to survive it all. She didn't just survive, she was diggin' it.
What's the first thing you want on coming to America?
Right you are, matey. Let's go out on the road to see it. So we did, packed just as listed above, plus a whole lot more.
So, we're in California and my ol' Dad comes up with the idea: what say we drive to New York. Everyone says sure but none of us has any idea how far it might be to New York. Probably my ol' Dad didn't either but it looked cool so, what could he do, he has to go for it.
The surface presentation was a sequence of lecture tours at different universities around the country as he was Elvis in genetics after what he did to use computers to model population genetics. That was hot and it was happening ... so long as you have a particular penchant for D. melanogaster (common fruit fly, frequently used for studies in genetics).
The real reason was to coordinate the lecture tours with go-kart race tracks and their race schedules around the country. Myrtis Mosley was his secretary and she arranged it, likely with a lot of discussion with my ol' Mother. Myrtis went on to become a Dean in the university. She made that rise in the sixties and seventies even while all hell was on the street everywhere else. She's an exceptionally strong and admirable woman. There wasn't a racist bone in my ol' Dad's body. Are you smart, yes/no. All that really mattered to him. There's a good chance he gave her the launch but no-one will hold a woman like that back. She's probably gone now and a hat tip to her. She's a lovely person.
This was a grand expedition as the eldest of the kids were young teens and there was an array in-between of more kids, all with only a year or two separating us. The packing list for the Fury was to put Barbie, the smallest, in-between my parents in the front. Lotho and two other sisters were in the middle with Doc and I in the back.
That packing list lasted long enough, maybe, to get the car out of the driveway. Then the fighting starts. You said I could sit in the back when I traded you for a frog. The scream comes back that I'm not trading because we have only been in the car about four seconds now. Multiply that by whatever number of combinations of five screaming kids you like.
God how I wish I had children (cough).
With that highly-involatile mixed packed aboard, the family rolled out on the Great American Go-Kart Safari. We crossed the Sierra Nevada mountains and saw the incredible beauty of the country and visited Donner Lake, famed in U.S. history for the place where some settlers got stranded and are reputed to have eaten each other. Fortunately, my ol' Mother prepared coolers full of tomato sandwiches and things before debarking day so none of our number were consumed that day at Donner Pass.
We went on through Reno and, on the outskirts, my ol' Dad gave me the worst gambling lesson of my life ... but that one is for another article.
We rolled through a great many cities and towns on the Great American Go-Kart Safari and it was magnificent. While driving along the highways in the mid-country, it wasn't surprising to see pronghorn sheep all over the place. The kids thought this was fascinating because of the fuzzy white patches on their backsides and how the patches would seem to flash as they jumped around in the pastures and fields. 'What is that for, Mummy?'
All mothers should know, of course, why an antelope has a white butt.
We went rolling and racing around the country, seeing a great many fascinating people, and incredibly beautiful things. So what if this sounds like a tourist brochure as that's what happened. The fascination of the people may come clear to some with a bit of genetical name-dropping. My ol' Dad and Dick Lewontin in Syrcacuse, NY, were big guns in genetics and had become friends so of course they have to meet. It was like that around the country as this was the genetics rock star tour ... and we were diggin' it, even though none of the kids had any idea of what they did. Fruit flies or something, man.
And then we went to Indiana.
The name of the track escapes me but this was great racing for my ol' Dad and it even ran into the evening because the track had night lights. There's high drama in racing at night because everything sparkles reflecting the lights and the motors scream with some of them approaching seventeen thousand RPM ... at least until they exploded.
After such an incredibly exciting day, there's only one thing to do ... pack up all those kids and kit ... and drive five hundred miles. I may not be the only one in the family with a bit of mania.
It was late so everyone was tired and it was all a drag but we had the routine more or less figured out, except for the constantly-rotating packing list for children. Eventually it was all sorted and we were back on the road again.
Once the car was rolling, most, maybe all, of the kids fell asleep since at night you can't even make faces at other cars from the back anymore and that was one of the biggest reasons for wanting to be in the back. What fun is a road trip for a kid when it's not possible to aggravate other drivers.
The destination out of Indiana escapes me also but we made some distance toward it and maybe we made some required stop for, erm, personal relief and this was the time when the check-in didn't come up with the right number.
(Ed: explain check-in)
My ol' Dad might precede it with Coo-Ee, Coo-Ee a few times. That must have been an Australian word as it meant nothing to us except attend immediately. When that was followed by Check-In, that meant immediately go there to line up by age for a head count.
(Ed: sounds like Warden Boggs in Alcatraz)
Really, Horse? Try raising six kids without doing that.
You have probably jumped to what happened and, yep, the count was short so we had lost one.
Maybe you wonder how we could possibly lose track of one but the miracle is really that we didn't, at least not usually. The kids were always moving and, every time the Fury stopped, there had to be a new rotation for seating. We were such backseat lawyers as we would make deals for who sits where, how long, and trade that for who knows what kids carry about for that.
Without getting too defensive, yep, we lost Doc. That situation goes instantly to overdrive as my ol' Dad drove fast, as in really fast, any time there was a down kid. There was another one out of the Snowy Mountains which must have been the scariest drive of all time down those mountain highways. I was too young to know the detail but that must have been one major hell ride. That was another time for a down kid.
Driving some unknown number of miles to get back, it's now much later and the track is pitch black except for one bare set of lights over the pits. Underneath the pole for those lights was the loneliest little waif you ever saw in your life. We had not been here so long so the only place he had ever really called home was about fifteen thousand kilometers away on other side of that enormous ocean. We knew how enormous it was, we had seen it. If you want to know lost and forlorn in the darkness, he was the picture of it.
There was the glorious reunion, of course, and that lasted probably forty-eight seconds or so and the kids got back to what we did best: fighting. My ol' Dad went driving along.
4 comments:
Myrtis was his go to gal in Cinti years after this trip
Those motors only spun about 9k. maybe 9500 before the rod snapped
Your local fact checker
I seriously do remember someone saying the Atkins / Adkins brothers have motors spinning up to 17K. I appreciate the fact checking but that one really wasn't pulled out of thin air. Turns out the number is still bogus but it wasn't entirely fantasy. Or maybe they did. Dunno.
Myrtis is one of the major characters and we don't see her much but she had a large effect. I hope her kids weren't as rebellious ... but they probably were.
Post a Comment