When in college I drove a yellow and white 1953 Packard, complete with the swan hood ornament (Ask the man who owns one!). It had the flat straight-8 engine. Like so many cars I owned and loved in those years, I could not afford its last fatal repair. I had bought it from a kid named Kent, a friend of my brother Jan in Miami. Very few mechanics in those days, twenty years after it had been made, understood it was a low compression engine. If the engine overheated the flat head warped easily and blew the head gasket. It is standard when that happens to send the head to a machine shop to mill it flat. With that engine all THAT did was raise the compression because of the reduced combustion volume, blowing head gasket after head gasket, leading to a death spiral. I found a man in Miami who had thirty Packard’s out behind his house, rusting and covered by tropical vines. They were going nowhere! He would NOT sell me just the head. He insisted I buy the whole engine, for which I did not have the money. I remember the day I sold it for scrap to a junk yard. It was a crime for such a classic car to be consigned to the scrap heap.
Kent was truly crazy. When I bought the car he had taken the legs and arms off rubber baby dolls and had put them over all the door and window handles. The car was named Gertrude. I kept the name. He was an early vegan in the group. One day we are at a movie theater in Miami. The actors were sitting down to a meal which included meat. Kent stood up in the dark and at the top of his lungs started shrieking:
“Oh my G-d! They’re eating meat! I thought this movie was rated G! They KILLED those poor defenseless animals just to feed their fat, piggy faces! Oh, my G-d! I can’t watch this anymore!”
He didn’t need to as by then every employee of the theater was wrestling him out onto the street, all the while Kent was sobbing hysterically. He is lucky he didn’t get arrested. When I bought Gertrude from him he had moved up to living in a black Cadillac hearse, which suited his morbid nature just fine.
The Kent story reminds me of another interesting episode from those days. It was 1968. My Grandpa Sam had moved to Miami with us in 1956. He worked at a supermarket on Red Road at Dixie Highway called Stevens Market as a produce man. It was eventually taken over by the Winn Dixie chain. One day he calls my brother and I up and says:
“I have “volunteered” you to be Santa Claus for the supermarket’s float!”
They appointed this assistant grocery store manager to haul this float around behind a station wagon. It would pull into a parking lot where hundreds of screaming children were waiting to tell Santa what they wanted for Christmas.
Now picture this. We are talking South Florida, a pretty good ways towards the equator from the North Pole. And it is HOT under that sun! In a dark red Santa outfit! On top of that, my brother Jan and I both had beards already. Our beards were NOT white. His was bright orange red. Mine was black. The guy we worked with gets the bright idea that he would spray canned snow on our beards wherever they showed through. Trust me, that stuff was NEVER intended for cosmetic use. And we were Jewish!
Jan got to ride in the local parades. I got the parking lots. The riots had been the previous summer. Every little white boy who got on my lap wanted Hot Wheels for Christmas. The little black kids?
“I want a GUN!!”
ALL the little girls wanted Barbie.
One day Jan has this little red head, just like him, saying
“I can’t get on your lap.”
My brother asks why?
“Because I’m Jewish and we don’t believe in you!”
My brother pulls down his fake beard showing the kid his hair is the same color and he says:
“Don’t tell anyone but so am I!”
Made that kid’s day.