Cars and Girls: My Second Car

Every teenage boy equates his status with a driver’s license and a set of wheels. Unfortunately I was one of the last in my high school class to get my driver’s license. My birthday is in October, so I came of age months after many kids. I took drivers ed in my senior year and took the driving test in a friend’ s car. I had to rely on rides from my friends or parents. It was not unusual for my dad or my date’s parents to take us on dates. Hard to make out in the back seat when your father or date’s father could see you in the rear view mirror. This was a severe blow to my ego since the only way I could get anywhere was on my bike – that is bicycle, not motorcycle. I went steady with several girls in high school and was forced to ride my bike to their houses after school or during summers if I wanted to see them.

I was a bike rider, even the summer before entering college. We lived in Henrietta, a suburb of Rochester, NY, and it was nothing to ride into the city and go to the main library, the George Eastman House, or the museum. I had been doing that for years.

The summer before entering Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) in the industrial chemistry program, I worked on an egg farm, not a chicken farm, but a farm that produced eggs. I was hired to be a handy man. Mr. Fix It. All the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches I could eat. That was to offset the paltry hourly rate I got. There were thousands of chickens. One of my jobs was to manage the manure.

The noise was incredible as was the smell of the chicken shit I had to scoop out of the hen houses with a front end loader, which just fit in the aisle between cages. I used the loader to scoop up manure and dump it in a spreader. You could smell that stuff miles away.

The egg farm was some 10 miles from my home and I rode my three-speed Raleigh English bike. I was in very good physical condition and didn’t mind the 20 mile round trip ride, except one day. There was a pretty steep hill on the rural road I took. On the way home I was flying down the hill, no hands, when I reached down to my windbreaker wrapped around the handlebars. As soon as I did this, the front wheel whipped perpendicular to the frame and I went flying over the handle bars landing in the road and went sliding down the road and scraped the skin off my knees, shins, forearms, and hands. I was going at least 20 mph when this happened. Bleeding from a serious case of road rash I limped along pushing my bike, which suffered no damage except some chipped paint. Not so for me. No one was around and it seemed like forever until a car came by. Fortunately it was someone I knew and they took me, my bike, and my bleeding body home. It took forever for the wounds to heal because every time I moved, the sores on my shins and forearms would ooze. My dog loved licking the sores on my knees, biting the scabs off. I still have large scars on my knees to remind me of this incident.

What does this have to do with cars and girls? Well, I think it convinced my parents it was time I had a car. My second car (I’ll explain why not the first). The car my parent’s helped me buy was a 1954 Plymouth. I hated this car and really wanted a cooler 1954 Chevy. But my parents paid for most of it and no reason to complain. It was a four door sedan, also not cool, was automatic, and had a flat head six. It was not a chick magnet. Just the opposite.

My neighbor, who was also a freshman at RIT had a 1954 Chevy and I was very jealous. The Plymouth had a less glamorous profile, more blob-ish. What was worse was the winter of our freshman year, my ’54 Plymouth seldom started on those cold Rochester mornings. I had the embarrassment of having to ask my buddy to push my car around the subdivision with his Chevy to get my car started. It usually sputtered to life half way around the subdivision. How humiliating. His car always started. My car was a piece of junk. Primered body panels and red wheels were in then but not even those custom touches made that Plymouth look cool. But it was my car. It meant I could go on dates without parents involved and could go to drive ins and make out or park and make out. Making out was a primary objective.