THE LIFE AND DEATH OF MY FIRST CAR--"THE FRIDGE"

THE LIFE AND DEATH OF MY FIRST CAR

"The Fridge"

Estes Lane, McCracken County, KY 1962

Getting a driver’s license was an anticipated rite of passage for everyone of teen-aged years in the 1960’s.  A passage into independence, freedom, exploration, and everything cool.  And of course, for me at least, the anticipation had a little something to do with girls. Who am I kidding?  It had a lot to do with girls.

My first car was one Dad got for me at a cost of fifty dollars.  It was a tank of car, and I don’t know if that was Dad’s way of protecting my skinny and rambunctious teen self, or it was just the cheapest thing he could find and afford.  It was a two tone, green 1954 Oldsmobile 88 four door, 324 block, Rocket V-8 with the four speed automatic transmission, the best I can recall. The paint was faded and dull which helped the overall appearance some.  A little rust. Elvis would look like Steve Buscemi on a bad hair day in the car.

I didn't improve any on that. 

Oh yeah.  I hated the look of my new wheels.  But I loved the possibilities it represented.

I wanted to be cool just like the guys whose dads could afford the ‘57 Chevys and the Corvettes for their sons.  A two tone vomit green, four door Olds was not quite the same thing.  And it didn’t take me long to come up with the idea, that if I could just get the thing painted all one color it would change its sex appeal, and mine, too, by proxy, in a drag race minute.

And so, from my part time job loading and unloading trucks at Basin News on Husband's Road, I saved a sum that I thought ought to get the job done.  A family friend of Dad and Mother, one Woodrow Martin, had a shop in back of his house on Hovecamp Road and the power spray gun needed to do the work and a deal was struck.  

What color?  Something cool.  I decided white.  White would be cool.  

It took some time to tape off all the trim myself, something I did not anticipate, and finally it was time for a fresh coat of paint for my ride.  I watched the steady back and forth path of Woodrow Martin’s spray gun, fascinated at first with the transformation away from the ugly greens.  But, the more I watched the car take on its glossy white hue, the bigger the car seemed to get.  Until….it appeared to me….it turned into the biggest refrigerator I had ever seen!  

I couldn’t wait for the time when Mr. Martin allowed sufficient time had passed to take the tape off of the trim, and prayed the final result would turn out much better than I had feared.

But, of course, it didn’t.  It just added to the massive hulk’s grotesqueness  Oh, no!  I would be driving a refrigerator on wheels.  Not cool.  Not cool at all.

So, how to salvage my image of driving around in the monstrosity?  More chrome was the answer I came up with.  Valve covers, carburetor air filter cover, tail pipe, and wheel covers.  Every penny I made from loading and unloading the never-ending stacks of books and magazines at work in the afternoons and weekends. And it converted the icebox on wheels to an icebox on wheels with a lot of chrome.  The "Fridge" was born.

Nothing else to do.  My pals would love the jokes they would make at my expense, especially Sonny Vaughn, my best buddy.  And the girls?  Well, I had been a bachelor this long.  Someday I would get a cool car, and then I could get a girl to notice me.  I could wait. I was young. Or I could become a priest.

Was there a way it could be worse?

It could and I found it.  Roughly in front of where Donnie Wyatt's house faced Hovekamp Road, the road behind the Farley School woods used to wind its gravel way to a dead end.  Today I believe this converted to Herman Avenue. But, it was a great place to show off while cruising with some of my buddies...Sonny, Gary Threatt, and Jimmy Schoening were some of my posse that day.  I decided to put a little spice in their life and take the gravel curve at at a rate of speed obviously not well suited to my intentions.  The old car might have made it, too, allowing for decent tires instead of the almost bald excuses for road rubber that adorned it then.

Thirty seven hundred pounds of steel plus the weight of four or five teenage hooligans, so say another six hundred pounds counting the quarters for gas in our pockets, hurtled into the sapling growth near the edge of Farley woods destroying everything in its path without pause or remorse ….until the passenger front fender wobbled the massive oak it came to rest against.

Until the final stop, the trail behind blazed by the Fridge appeared as if the hand of God had just swiped across and leveled all of the young trees to the ground.

Taking inventory, Gary was white….and folks, I do mean white. Got nothing to do with race white. White. White on white. If he had sat on the hood of the Olds he would have been perfectly camouflaged. Except for clothes. Like the "Invisible Man".  But he was whole, even though it was obvious his heart was not pumping blood to all the places it should.  

Jimmy was just sitting there in shock and couldn’t talk if his life depended upon it, and gave me a look that let me know he was unhappy and disappointed with my driving skills.  I thought he looked a bit like Maynard G. Krebs. Only not as funny at the moment. Scary Maynard G. Krebs. 

If you are not old enough to know who Maynard G. Krebs was on T.V., he was on a show named "Dobie Gillis". The actor was Bob Denver, better known as the lead on "Gilligan's Island".  Except the Maynard G. Krebs character was a "beatnik" and adept at the lingo and grunge of the day. Like, cool man.  

Jimmy didn't look cool. Jimmy looked like he had been huffing the air outside a coffee house in downtown Los Angeles.

Sonny was laughing.  “Sh*t, Skeeter”.  I gave him my look.  He laughed even harder.  If I could have stopped shaking from fear that I had killed dead all my friends, I would have punched him. It would have only been the ten thousandth time I had done so.  He always gave back as much as was given, yet, we were never one without the other.  But, he had no right to be this happy.  As serious as I was about the life I had been given and the things that affected it, Sonny just found humor in everything.  Especially if it was at my expense.

 My teeth hurt.  Every dadgum one of them. 

God decided He wasn't finished with us yet.  But, I'm sure He was shaking His head a little.  Probably with a little crooked grin.  No telling how many times He had seen this played out.

Assuring one by one that we were all OK, with trepidation I turned the key to see if there was any hope that the thing would turn over.  Started right up.  So, I backed through the tree trunks and branches of the freshly destroyed forest, across the shallow ditch, onto the gravel road.  And got out to assess the damage to the car.  Bumper with a few small dents and one roughly the diameter of the injured oak tree. Passenger front fender crushed but not impairing the wheel.  Cracked windshield.  Empty socket, crushed to a slit, where the headlight used to be. Now I was driving a dented and dinged white refrigerator.  It was not pretty.  Not at all.  And it most certainly wasn’t cool.

Knowing there was no way I could afford to pay to have the Olds repaired, I decided it just added character--- like some mythic Norse warrior scarred from battle and adventure.  

My Dad didn’t. Seriously didn't.  And with winter already under way, he decided I could ride the bus or with friends to Reidland High School for the next few months or so, and took the keys and parked my ride just off of our driveway to the little house on Estes Lane.

I settled in with Sonny or Jimmy as a passenger to school and to make the rounds at Bob’s as the snows began to pile up on my Olds 88.  It virtually disappeared, blending perfectly with winter’s offerings, but the crushed fender stood out giving me the impression the Fridge was always winking at me from under its shroud of snow.

One beautiful day towards the close of winter, my heart jumped as Dad tossed the keys back to me.  Freedom!  FREEDOM!  Thank God and warn all the girl children of my approximate age.  I was ready to be cool again.  The Fridge was back in action.

I strolled casually, as if it was no big thing, to open the driver door and settle in to turn the key. The slanting glare from an early spring sun was in my eyes as I slipped the key into the ignition. And that big bad boy started right up.  I revved the engine a few times and sat back to gaze over the hood with new found appreciation for the beauty of the massive beast.  Not more than a couple of minutes passed, before smoke began bellowing out from under the hood.  What now?

Dad was standing framed in the doorway of the house and yelled quickly for me to turn it off.   He approached the car and opened the hood amidst clouds of smoke.  Looking the car over, satisfied everything outwardly looked as it should, he took a rag and gingerly removed the cap of the radiator.  I heard him grunt.  It wasn't a good grunt.  It was his upset grunt.  I had heard it a few times before. Especially the last year or two. He disappeared as he dropped to the ground and shuffled under the block.  About a minute passed.

Dad stood upright wiping his hands on the rag to stand and peer into the window where I sat horrified at the expression on his face.  Not good.  Not good at all.

“Did you check or add antifreeze to this car before freezing weather”?  

Antifreeze?  You have had the keys all winter, Dad, isn’t that something you should have done?  Not one word of which I uttered out loud.  But, in my head I was fearless. John Wayne fearless.

Of course that is something I should have done.  No keys did not equal no responsibility.

Fearless in my head and heart, defiant even, I managed finally to squeak out a pathetic little “no”.  Somewhere John Wayne was shaking his head.  Easy for him to be condescending, he wasn’t staring into the steel blue eyes and stoic demeanor of Dad. His eyes had always had a little twinkle of amusement.  Except now. I think I slid down in the seat a little.

Dad, pushed himself backwards from the window ledge of the Olds never breaking eye contact.  “Well. this car has a cast iron block.  It also has a split in the block that runs half way down it because the water froze in it.  You can’t weld cast iron, it splits ahead of you”.

Dad had been to a Navy welding school and this was not a trade with which he was unfamiliar.  In fact, if it was mechanical, he could work on it, fix it, and make it better than ever.

“That's it for this car, unless I can find someone who will attempt to weld cast iron, and a new block is out of the question”.

No white refrigerator on wheels to drive and wink at me on approach?  How would I live?  I loved my car.  Best looking and driving car in the neighborhood. Just when I was getting ready to wreak havoc on all the girls south of Hancock's Food Center.  My life was over.

In the course of time Dad approached every body shop and mechanic/welder in town, and he knew most of them from his work selling rental uniforms.  Many expressed a desire to attempt the task in order to help out Dad, but in the end relented that it was just not doable.

The Fridge sat there for another few weeks or so, awaiting a seemingly inevitable trip to the junkyard.  Until one day Dad came home with all the borrowed equipment and welding rods to crawl under the chassis and make the attempt himself.  He had a technique that he had given a lot of thought to, that would involve him making stitches and then connecting to his seams.  And this he did to plan perfectly.  The result, however, was not perfect, and left a few small gaps that allowed some drips to escape.  This he addressed with Bar’s Radiator Stop Leak.

My first date in the Fridge was to follow a short time later. Not a girl from Reidland.  I wouldn't have had the courage to ask a girl out from High School in the mangled, malformed, battle-scarred  Olds---aspirations and claims aside--- even though there were several  of which I was ready to proclaim my eternal and undying affections. The entire cheerleading squad for starters. "A" team and "B" team. After that I had to whittle the list down to another 6-8. Or 10.

I couldn't risk not only being rejected, but suffering the whispers and giggles for weeks after.  We didn't have a lot of propriety wealth, so protecting your sense of worth and and self-image was important.  I was too young to understand and appreciate that most of my Farley friends didn't have it any better off than I did.

So, someone I had known for years, since my early baseball years when she came to watch our games, became my first girl to snuggle with in the car.  She was very pretty, and we had had flirtatious exchanges often in the previous years.  I knew the car was no big thing to her, that my company was all she was interested in.  

We did what was expected for our day....we went to the Sunset Drive-In, then "dragged the gut" on Broadway, making the  customary trip below the flood wall to pause by the river for a few moments before completing the circuit. The water was several inches over "The Foot of Broadway" and it continued to rain as it had off and on for the past several weeks.  

Naturally, we headed for Bob's Dairy Queen on Bridge Street before heading back into our Farley neighborhood.

I anticipated how cool even the Fridge would look with this pretty girl next to me as we slid into the main overhang to order our cokes and fries.  It was Saturday night and the place would be packed.

Coming from town we made the right into Bob's from Bridge Street and a spot under the overhang on my left was miraculously vacant.  So in we went.

And went.

The brakes had suffered too many dunking's, and the water had obviously caused my already suspect brakes to fail.  I pumped furiously on the pedal to no avail.  We kept coasting forward.  This would not end well.

The Fridge found the upright support for that portion of the roof, and down the post came, as if in slow motion, smack onto the top of the "88".  The roof of the popular hang-out, so far, remained.

My date's eyes were as big as one of Bob's crispy-edged hamburgers.  People got out of their cars to point and laugh. and out came, I supposed, Bob himself from the back door.  Dear God in heaven, in addition to the new crease in the roof of the car, the humiliation I was now and would suffer for weeks ahead, would I also have to buy Bob a new post and roof, too?

Bob causally lifted the post from the car and set it to the side.  He laughed at seeing my horrified face and demeanor.  "Brakes"? He said.  "Yes".  I managed to convey back.

"No problem.  Don't worry about it. You guys alright?"

"Yes".

"Have a good rest of the night".  And he turned and retreated to the task of making burgers, fries, chicken baskets and chocolate shakes for the dozens of cars there on that rainy Saturday night.  

The Fridge limped home at a modest 20 miles an hour after some time to allow the brakes to dry out.  A sweet kiss goodnight let me know that even the embarrassment of the evening theatrics had not diminished the possibilities of future dates and affections of the young lady that had suffered the indignities with me that night. She could not have known how much that meant to me at that moment in time.  Or maybe, just maybe, she did. 

I continued to drive the old car around the next summer and winter (antifreeze included) until it finally just gave the last measure of all it had to give.  As the wrecker came and hoisted the Fridge and made it ready to haul, and then finally left the gravel of our driveway, my heart hurt at seeing it make the right turn onto the asphalt of Estes Lane.  So many memories in that old tank, so much laughter and joy it had brought into my life.  My first car had been something special.

Standing there, losing such a valued comrade that had taken me into that first big step into my life as an adult, I was feeling pretty sad.  And then I laughed.  

My last impression of the old girl was of her winking at me with that battered old headlight just before she disappeared from view, the wrecker making another right onto Yarbro Lane. 

As is the way, I suppose the Fridge met the iron furnaces to transition into another life and purpose.  I wouldn’t lay odds against her living out her next life upright in someone's kitchen chilling R.C. colas, bologna and cheese.

I hope all of you have such fond memories of your first car, etched forever into your thoughts and dreams, whenever they take you back to the dawn of your journeys--- into the sobering and unwavering path of leaving innocence behind. 

Copyright by the author Keith Wayne Ragan, May 24, 2019.