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Re: Hey Timbuk (or any car guys)
Memories.
Oh man, I thought the DeSoto with two 4-barrels would have had the super cool intake manifolds. The kid (about a year older than me) who lived across the street had them on his (59?).
Picture this. Put your hands in front of your chest, with your thumbs toward your chest and palms toward the floor. Now lace your fingers together with the tips down. That was how the two intake manifolds sat. The carb by the left front fender cross-fed to the cylinders on the right through four long tubes. The carb by the right front fender fed the cylinders on the left through four more tubes interlaced with the first ones.
The car was awesome, but not pretty. I think it was a re-paint. It was light puke green, the color of old hospital and school walls. One day it got into an accident.
In my hometown, there is one main road (state highway) from the north end of town to the south, and one east-west highway. When school let out, there was a LeMans-type race out of the parking lot to get out on the road before the skoolies pulled out. If you didn't make it in time, you had to stop every 100 yards when the 4-ways on the buses lit up (no yellow "Jersey light" 8-ways in those days).
So, on this day the skoolies rolled, and one of the southbounds started dropping off students. As I heard the story, a woman in her Chevy stopped behind the bus. Russell in his old VW bug stopped behind the Chevy. Dave in his DeSoto wasn't paying attention, picked up Russell's bug, slid it into the Chevy, and then using the Chevy for leverage, proceeded to shorten both ends of the bug. There was no damage to the other two cars. I couldn't even see scratches on the DeSoto's bumper, which was always parked right across the street facing my driveway.
It's like the Jay Leno joke from his stand-up days, when he talked about the old metal Buick Roadmasters with the metal dashboards and no seatbelts. After a fatal crash, "just take a hose and wash down the dash and sell [the Buick] to someone else."
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Someone said "Making good decisions comes from experience, experience comes from bad decisions." I say there are three kinds of people: those who learn from their mistakes, those who learn from the mistakes of others, and those who never learn.
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timbuk
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