This'n Such

I think you have met some of my friends through the stories I have repeated here in my blog. Stand by for more:

One of my friends helped his dad clean a bunch of wild rabbits back in the 50's and he caught Tularemia from that experience. He developed a high fever and darn near died from having his kidney's shut down. After the fever and illness he was never the same. I really didn't know him prior to his illness but he got held back in the 4th grade and was in several of my classes in school. In high school he was a Vocational Education student and spent half of his day out in the automotive shop. I remembered that he told us that in his class on brakes they had to do a brake job on one of the old jalopies that had been there many years. No matter what they tried something would always fail. My friend crawled under the car and taped a soda can to the frame so the brake pedal would have something solid to hit. He passed that portion of the class through the blessing of Coke and duct tape.

My good buddy Danny Rex and I had a lot of experiences that just were on the edge of go to jail and in fact I almost did. Danny called me one morning and asked me for a ride out in the country to get a transmission for his old Ford. He had bought a transmission and he had to take it out of the old truck as part of the deal. We went out there and I mostly watched but did some heavy lifting when he needed help. I took him home and helped him put the transmission in his car and everything was fine until... I got stopped by a sheriff's officer and was told that my car was seen out by a farm where a transmission was stolen. I immediately took him to Danny's house and Danny produced the bill of sale for the transmission. The officer read the information and told Danny there was only one problem. He had gone to the wrong farm to get the transmission. We had to go out to the farmer and explain what had happened and put the transmission back in the truck. Then we started all over and had to get the right transmission out and put it in Danny's car. Today, the police would have just taken us to jail but back then we were allowed to make things right without an arrest record.

I had a friend whose Dad was a trash hauler. As he went around his regular route, he would pick up all the trash there and often he would have an old bike or two at the end of the route. My friend Leon was one of those guys that to say he was different was an understatement. He acted weird and spent most of his day drawing comics. Each time he came to school, he had a different bike and no two looked like anything Schwinn had made. They were radical long before I ever saw radical any where else. Most had little front wheels, big back wheels and handlebars that later we called Ape Hangers. Most were painted that primer grey color and quite a few had pictures of things drawn in the paint. One day right after Christmas, Leon had one of his creations at school and I asked him if he would sell it. Immediately my Christmas money turned into transportation. I had the coolest bike on the block for about a week. As I rode that strange contraption, minor things began to happen. Bearings would fall out of the front handlebar tube, the pedals would fall off and the seat bracket broke. I fixed a flat on the front tire so many times the rim was sharp where my screwdriver pried the tire off the rim. In less than a month, my wonderful bicycle turned into a heap for the trash. A couple of weeks later, I saw him on that same bike. yep, Dad had brought it home and Leon put new parts on it and it was again for sale. No thanks Leon.

Today Barb and I needed to as my Dada would say "Get out and blow the stink off". We went to Lawrence, had lunch, hit a book store a grocery store and the came home. Wow, such an exciting life. Oh well...

MUD