I suppose everyone can remember their first car or their favorite car. My first car was a 1955 Chevy two door post. It was a six cylinder, three speed (on the floor) with a Hurst shifter that was worth more than the rest of the car. I was eighteen years old and working in Chicago when I purchased it from a co-worker for $100. I bought it on a Friday and when my shift ended at midnight, I headed for Kentucky with it. It burn't fourteen (I'm not kidding) quarts of oil on that trip. I stopped about every 75 miles and added two quarts of oil. As I was coming off the exit ramp in Madisonville (onto highway 85 to highway 70), a strange thing happened. The person who installed the Hurst shifter, for some reason, cut a hole in the floorboard large enough to install the transmission from the driver's seat. This thing had an 18" square hole in it. Since it apparently was an oil burner and smoked a lot, the guy had stuffed rags all around the hole between the transmission and underside of the floorboard to keep most of the smoke out of the cab. Also, I forgot to mention the car had no muffler (I thought that was cool). As I was coming down the ramp, I shifted it back to second gear to help slow it down (the brakes weren't too hot either). I suppose the "backing off" made a flame come out of the broken off tailpipe, that happened to end right beside the transmission, setting the rags on fire. It was about 6 A.M. and Saturday morning early traffic was starting to "mill around." There I was sitting at a green light with the door opened, dragging burning rags out and piling them in the road. People were giving me dirty looks as they went around (some were laughing). I went ahead and added a couple of quarts of oil while I was stopped to insure I'd make it to Central City. This was my first car (it only lasted about two months...it later quit on a side street in Chicago so I left it there and "gave" it to Freddie Byars....never knew what he did with it), but it wasn't my favorite car!
My favorite actually wasn't even mine. It technically belonged to my buddy David Greenwood (he's getting this blog) but it really was a community car. Most of the CCHS class of '64 had ownership rights on this car. It was a 1953 Ford 2 Door sedan that originally belonged to Charles Greenwood, David's older brother. Charles managed to scrape enough money to purchase a new Corvair and he gave the old Ford to David. It was already slightly wrecked when David got it but it ran great and drove good. It sorta looked like crap, though, but not for long. We had a "painting party" over at the Greenwood's house one afternoon and we invited about half the school to write anything they felt like on it with a paintbrush. Vulgarity wasn't allowed but anything else went. The car was literally covered in messages and names, so much so that one night we were pulled over in Greenville by a policeman for doing nothing...he said he just wanted to stop us and "read the car!" It took him about 20 minutes to do this. He was nice, though and pretty soon we were on our way. The car remained with this paint job for about 6-8 months when we decided to paint it again. This time we got out our paintbrushes and painted it bright red with a white top. It didn't really look any better, just different. We followed that up by removing the bumpers and replacing them with 2 x 12's and painted them "candy cane red & white!" It was starting to grow on us, but we felt it was still lacking something.
David's parents owned Barnes Mercantile Company downtown and David worked there after school and on weekends. Barnes was a "Red Goose" shoe dealer.
One of their displays had this hardboard life-sized Red Goose. Mr. Greenwood wanted to change things around a bit so he told us we could have it. We managed to secure it to the top of the car (which had been caved in from kids sitting on it at school - we just "popped" it back up). We then ran wire to it and installed some lights where the eyes of the goose were. They lit up when you turned on the key. Larry Vincent's grandfather had an old blacksmith shop behind his house so we took a piece of 1/2" rod about 6' long, heated it and made one of the most abstract floor shift levers you can imagine. It literally "corkscrewed" up from the transmission and we topped it off with a 4" rubber ball. That was about it. We had one of the sweetest "Rat Rods" around. Now I don't know if you were familiar with 53 Ford Sedans but you could easily sit four people in the front seat and four more in the back. We managed to squeeze 5 people in the front and 6 in the back and if you were willing to ride in someone's lap or let someone ride in yours, we could increase those figures to 7 & 9.
We got a thirty minute lunch break which was ample time if you ate in the lunchroom. We always enjoyed the food better at Chaney's. For some reason, Eugene Doss's cheeseburgers and fries were much more appetizing than the "sloppy joes" and "macaroni with cheese" they were always serving at the school...and they were about the same price. It was a common custom to load as many as we could into the old "Goose" and head for Chaney's. I remember one particular trip where we had about 6 or 7 in the front seat. David was the driver and he operated the steering wheel, gas pedal, clutch and brake. I sat beside him and Jim Bob Vincent sat beside me. We had left the high school for the quick trip to Chaney's. We came up to the intersection of West 2nd Ave. and Center Sts. (in front of First Presbytarian Church) and stopped. David operated the clutch and brake and Jim Bob had to handle the gear shifting duties. David looked both ways and saw nothing was coming, pulled out to the right, gave it the gas for a few feet, pushed on the clutch and told Jim Bob to shift into second. I don't know if the transmission was actually "worn out" in the old car or if Jim Bob shifted too fast but anyhow we didn't hear it "scrape" the least little bit but when David let the clutch back out and gave it the gas, all of us in the front seat obtained a knot on our heads because the car was in "reverse" and transformed from going about 15 miles per hour forward instantly to going 15 miles per hour backward. Thank God no one was behind us (although we could have used some witnesses because when we relayed the story later, nobody believed us - as probably you don't right now).
Remember me saying that we removed the bumpers off the car and replaced them with rough hewn 2 x 12's (painted like peppermint sticks). To this day, I credit Muhlenberg County getting the Western Kentucky Parkway to those bumpers. Owensboro, Kentucky's third largest city lobbied hard to get the parkway to swing through their area. The road was still in "design phase" and the engineers had cleared a dirt path to the Green River in Ohio County that I always thought swung too far west. Along each side of this proposed path was a 3' high wood stake about every 20'. We drove out 431, got the "Goose" on this path and using the wood front bumper, we knocked over every one of those stakes all the way to Rockport and knocked down the other ones on the return trip. I'll never forget the sound, "clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap-clap" for about twenty minutes each way. I sure hope the statute of limitations has run out on this crime. When they put the stakes back up, I'll always believe they built them further to the East to include us. Anyway, we sure had some good times in the ol' Goose until one day she just "laid down" and died somewhere up on West 4th Avenue. If anybody out there ever took a picture of her in any form, I sure would appreciate getting a copy and I know David would too.
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