The Caddie

It was a fine Fall evening, and we had all gotten together for a Friday night of Poker, beer and cheap cigars. Since graduation we had all gone our separate ways, so it was good to meet for a guys night out. We played real poker. No baseball, low spade in the hole, spit in the ocean. Five card draw. Five card stud, Seven card no-peek (match the pot if you peek). Our sole aberration was acey-deucey, while really not poker per-se does have real odds and calculation.

Cards have never been my friends. We always played penny/nickel/dime/quarter with a 50 cent bet limit, except for acey-deucey, where you could match the pot, which I had. I had turned up an ace and a king and went for the pot, only to have a second king show up, much to the amusement of everyone there. I probably would have called it a night, but as I had bummed a ride with J.B., I didn't have a way home. J.B. Was doing well, so it looked like I would be there for a while.

P.J. was up and contemplating how much to bet on an eight/three, when the door burst open. It was Meyer.

"The Caddie!!" he screamed. "My Uncle is going to give me The Caddie."

We had been hearing about The Caddie for the last couple of months. It seemed that Meyer's Uncle had this 1959 Cadillac sitting in the driveway, not being used. Meyer had been petitioning his Uncle to sell it to him cheap. Each week brought a new scheme got getting his hands on the car. Meyer's uncle had finally relented for a couple of hundred dollars and a summer full of yard work.

This was momentous news, since out of the five of us, we only has two sets of wheels, thereby limiting out access to a wider world. This was even more important than our guys only poker night, so we abandoned the poker game and all piled into P.J.'s 1957 Mercury four door sedan and headed for Mercer island to rescue The Caddie from Meyer's Uncle's driveway.

Our first stop was a Chevron gas station, where Meyer had dropped off a battery earlier in the day to be charged. A couple of miles from the gas station, the transmission started making some strange whirring noises, and a little smoke started coming from under the hood. As we got closer to the gas station, the noises got worse and the smoke more noticeable. By the time we got there, we arrived in a great cloud of smoke and a lot of noise.

A check under the hood revealed that the whole engine compartment was drenched in transmission fluid. A closer exam showed that one of the transmission lines had developed a crack and was spewing fluid into the fan which was doing it's best to distribute the fluid evenly over the entire engine compartment.

Since it was 10:00 at night by this time, there was no way we were going to be able to fix the Merc that night. So with the optimism if youth, we decided to get the battery, and carry it the mile or so over to Meyer's Uncles house, put it in the Caddie, start up the Caddie and drive it back home.

A car battery gets might heavy when you have to pack it better than a mile.

We finally arrived at Meyer's Uncles, and installed the battery in the car. We expected it to be a little reluctant to start, since it had been sitting in the driveway unused for several months, and we were not disappointed. It backfires, it flashed back out of the carburetor, it rattled a nd ran for a couple of seconds and died. It did everything except run.

The battery was starting to run out of juice, so we had a major decision to make.

Mercer Island is in the middle of Lake Washington. It is fairly large and has a central plateau which is a couple of hundred feet high. We were on that plateau, and about a mile away was the dropoff. It was only a slight uphill , not steep at any point, so we decided to push the Caddie up to the top of the hill,all climb in and even though it was an automatic transmission, we should be able to build up enough speed to start on the long straight downhill.

I do not recommend pushing a 1959 Cadillac up any sort of incline. It is not designed to be propelled by human motive power, even if you do have five healthy fit young males.

The first argument was who should steer, thereby escaping the worst work. Meyer felt that since it was his car, he should steer, but an eminent mutiny convinced him otherwise. We decided that Meyer belonged at the back of the car in the center and the rest of us would rotate position.

with a few rest stops along the way, we managed to get the car within about 40 feet of the dropoff, when the Police showed up.

"What you boys up to?"

with everyone speaking at once we tried to explain about the broken transmission in the Merc, the battery, the reluctant Caddie, the long push to the dropoff. The Officer stopped us.

"Who does this car belong to?"

We all pointed to Meyer.

"Son, can I see your license and registration?"

After fishing in the glove box for the registration, Meyer explained about the deal he had made with his Uncle, and why the car was not licensed in his name. I don't think the Officer really believed Meyer, and he kept looking at us like he was starting a file on each of us for future reference. But what he said was:

"I don't suppose you have a bill of sale, do you?"

When the answer to that was negative, he motioned to Meyer and said "You come with me, son. The rest of you just stand over there while we sort this thing out."

He took Meyer off into the back of the patrol car, and the rest of us stood outside in the cool Fall night wondering what was going to happen.

After about a half an hour, Meyer got out. It was a good news/bad news sort of situation. On one hand, we were free to go. On the other hand, we were not going to be allowed to push the car over the top of the hill and try to get it running. No amount of pleading could convince the Officer of the logic of just turning his back and not witnessing us taking matters into our own hands. After all, the car was going to be towed to the nearest gas station, which just happened to be at the bottom if that very hill. If the car started, we could be on our way and everyone was happy, if it didn't start, it would be at the gas station.

So the Officer called a tow truck, and we all piled in the car, which was towed to the Chevron station at the bottom of the hill. We found ourselves, at two o'clock in the morning, stuck at a closed gas station a long way from home.

Since we had been playing poker for pocket change before we went off on our little errand, we had plenty of change to give the pay phone a good workout. The only problem was finding someone who would come out to Mercer Island to rescue us in the middle of the night. Parents were definitely out. So we ended up playing poker in the bathroom and taking turns trying to beg a ride from someone.

Bruce finally managed to get in touch with his sister's boyfriend, Dave who was only mildly inebriated at the time. He agreed to come and get us if we would help him put in a clutch on his other car the next day.

A half an hour later, he showed up in his fuel injected custom painted diamond tuck naugahide four speed custom wheeled 1957 Chev. We all climbed in to head home. Dave wanted to show his car off to all of us, so the only time we did the speed limit was within the first twenty feet after he started off. He wasn't all that familiar with the area, so we had to give him directions. When we realized he was going to miss the left to go around Beacon Hill, we all yelled "Take a left, take a left!" which he did, four wheel drifting through three lanes of traffic. I remember thinking that it might be a good idea to get out at the next corner, but the car never slowed down enough get out.

At any rate, we survived, and ended up at Bruce's apartment at 3:00 in the morning. We decided it was too late to get back to the poker game, so we divided up the pot and went our separate ways. B.J. gave me a ride home.

when I walked in the front door, there was my mother in her bathrobe, tapping one foot on the floor. "Just exactly where have you been until three-thirty in the morning?"

"Mom I just had a terrible night, I'm exhausted, and you don't want to hear it. I'm going to bed, and we can talk about it in the morning."

By the way, the Caddie had a broken timing belt and wouldn't have started anyway.

Dynamite

My mother's side of the family has traditionally held a family reunion on the Fourth of July every year. I have always enjoyed getting together with the relatives I don't see the rest of the year and see what everyone has been doing. Not the same people show up every year, so there is always someone different to talk to. It is always potluck, with everyone bringing something they make especially well or are proud of (not necessarily the same thing). It is pretty much a traditional Fourth of July.

Except for the dynamite.

My Aunt and Uncle live on the South end of Vashon Island, where they have a sizeable chunk of property. It is a very rural setting. The land is mostly second growth timber and brush. At the time, because they were clearing land, they could but dynamite (for agricultural purposes only) at the Co-op. Anyone who has spent time on the business end of a muck stick and prybar trying to get a stubborn stump out of the ground can really appreciate the pristine beauty of a couple of well placed sticks of dynamite. Not to mention the fact that it is a heck of a lot of fun to make things go BOOM. Both the relatives on Vashon and my family in Idaho had obtained and used dynamite for a number of years.

For the family get-together, people would usually start arriving around noon, and start out with the veggies-and-dip, and chips and snacks. Around the same time the first fireworks would show up. The policy towards fireworks has never been consistent in the State of Washington. Heck, it is not even consistent from block to block. It is literally possible to buy fireworks, walk a couple of blocks and be arrested for setting them off. It is not a policy designed to to build a great deal of respect for the law and its enforcement. To complicate matters, the Indian Reservations are only subject to Federal Law, so you can get a lot more of "The Good Stuff" from the Indians, including some stuff that is outside Federal guidelines.

Every year, McCord Air Force Base in Tacoma holds an Airshow to celebrate the Fourth. They generally flew North out of the base and turned around at the North end of Vashon. During the day we would see all kinds of Aircraft from fighters to cargo carriers, to bombers. We would hear them coming and rush outside to see if we could identify the type and model of the plane.

The fireworks would typically start with the younger kids lighting snakes and smoke bombs, then progress through lady fingers, regular firecrackers, bottle rockets and the usual small fireworks. Since we had to take the last ferry back to the mainland at around 7:00 we never got into the more elaborate airborne displays. We spent the afternoon and early evening, when not occupied eating, inventing new and more elaborate ways of blowing things up.

Firecrackers were placed under tin cans.

Holes were punched in tin cans to pass the fuse through, and then the cans pushed down into mud or soft sand. The idea is to see how high in the air you can blow the can. My personal favorite was an Old El Paso chilies can inside a regular soup can partly filled with water. If you didn't get the fuse wet, it was good for at least a hundred feet of altitude.

I suppose that it was inevitable that we would someday come to the conclusion that since we had dynamite, and there were stumps to be blown, there was no reason we couldn't blow stumps an the Fourth of July. We didn't do this every year, just when the urge was irresistible.

One year after sending cans flying as high as possible, we started speculating how high in the air we could send something if dynamite provided the propulsive force and we could find something sturdy enough to not disintegrate. First we took an old wellhead, dropped a lit stick of dynamite down it, followed by a section of madrona. It made a satisfactory BOOM, but the wood disappeared completely. We never saw it after it left the pipe.

Next we saw a car wheel laying out by the barn. Perfect!

We put the car wheel on a flat place over the top of a stick of dynamite, lit the fuse and got back.

BOOM!

Totally unsatisfactory. The wheel, spinning madly went about thirty feet in the air. Heck we could blow tin cans a lot higher than that. The problem seemed to be that the force of the explosion needed to be focused. Not an insurmountable problem. Having experienced the benefits of the fact that water is not compressible, we decided to dig a pit slightly larger than the wheel about a foot deep, fill it with water and try again. And since one stick of dynamite didn't provide enough propulsive force, three ought to do the job!

We finished digging our pit and filling it with water. Actually, but the time it soaked in, it was more like thin mud than water, but we were pretty sure it would do the job. We had waterproof fuse, so we didn't have to worry about the fuse going out. We set three sticks of dynamite equally spaced in the pit, and dropped in the wheel. We lit the fuse and got the heck out of there.

Just as we lit the fuse ad retreated, we heard a thumping noise on the horizon. It was a flight of six helicopter. Surely they wouldn't be coming anywhere near us! But they kept on a course that would bring them right overhead.

OH SHIT!

We looked at the wheel with the dynamite under it. The fuse got shorter. No one was willing to go near it to pull the fuse. A mistake would probably be fatal.

The helicopters came closer.

The fuse got shorter

Closer

Shorter

BOOM!!!

We had succeeded in our plans, for the wheel flew a couple of hundred feet in the air.

Right into the view of the helicopters. They must have seen it, because the formation split apart and headed away.

We figured we were in huge trouble. The first thing we did was put the dynamite back in the powder shed. Then we all went in and watched some sporting event on TV and prayed nothing came of it. Every time a car went by, we figured it was going to turn in the driveway, filled with guys in grey trenchcoats and black fedoras, but we never heard a thing.

I always wondered what the Flight Leader reported. I don't think he would want to report that they were under attack by car wheels. Maybe they never said a thing and that's why we never heard anything.

The only thing I know for sure is that the next time we went to the Co-op to buy dynamite, they wouldn't sell us any.