The Joy Ride

The Joy Ride

“A pound of pluck is worth a ton of luck.”

James A. Garfield

When I was a teenager, several of my cousins and a couple of my good friends all had the same thing in common. We learned to drive on the 1929 Model A Ford pickup at Aunt Janice and Uncle Gordon’s cabin, above Lake Tahoe.

We had such fun driving the Model A on the dirt roads around the cabin that it seemed natural to us to get Model As for our first cars, which we did.

My 1930 Model A Coupe was completely disassembled when my dad paid $237.50 for it. The guy selling it wanted $250, my dad offered $225, and they split the difference. The car was forty-one years old at the time and hadn’t run since 1954. I was fifteen when my dad bought it, and it didn’t run again for nearly a year after that.

The picture above, with my friends Todd and Stan, was taken in an early, unsuccessful attempt to unfreeze the engine by dragging the car up and down our street. It took months to put the Model A back together and coax it back to life. We were so excited when at last we got it to run, just like a real car. My friends and I jumped in and backed out of the garage and on down my parents’ fairly steep driveway.

About half-way down, I noticed that we hadn’t hooked up the brakes. We went shooting across the street, heading straight for a telephone pole. Luckily, there was no cross traffic. My cousin John was in the seatless rumble seat and got a bird’s-eye view of what happened next. We hit with a bang but fortunately didn’t hop the curb into the pole.

After catching my breath, I put the car back in gear, looked both ways, and drove straight up the driveway, just slowly enough to coast into the garage. We quickly hooked up the brake rods, went back down the driveway, and drove off into the wild blue yonder.

Looking back, I had a lot to be thankful for that day. We hadn’t hit the telephone pole or killed my cousin John. I didn’t have to explain to my dad how I wrecked a car that wasn’t even running when he left for work that morning. And I was sixteen and had a car that ran.

-Hank