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“It seemed like a perfectly good idea at the time.”
— T-shirt a jailed man wore
I got a ticket a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.
The aged and torn Los Angeles traffic citation dated Aug. 17, 1967, was exhumed last week from a cardboard crypt of stored memories. This was a vivid reminder that havoc happens when good judgment takes a holiday.
Let’s return to that year, a couple of weeks before the end of the spring semester at Kilgore College. I arrived home on a Friday afternoon. Mom was in the kitchen on the phone with her little brother in California. Everyone talked on the phone in the kitchen because that’s where the phone was, and the cord wasn’t long enough to go anywhere else.
“Tell Uncle Bill, ‘Hello,’” I hollered.
Before I could drop my laundry bag by the washing machine, Mom called, “Come talk to Bill.”
When I spoke to my uncle, he offered me employment. Uncle Bill was the body-shop manager at a Volkswagen dealership in the Los Angeles suburb of Canoga Park.
“Do I want to come work for you in California this summer?” I responded to my uncle. “This a trick question, right?”
And just like that, I was Southern California dreamin’: Hot-rod cruising nightly at Bob’s Big Boy drive-in, Beach Boys on the radio and the jukebox, and dune buggies running the sand hills at Pismo.
And who can forget surfboards and bikini watching Saturday afternoons at Malibu?
Reality, however, was centered on summer jobs to afford school, not on a 19-year-old’s daydream coming true. This was a job offer.
Now, fast forward a few weeks. I’m balancing my college-money budget with that California-dreaming thing when I spot a newspaper ad: “FOR SALE: 1929 Model A hot rod, 1946 Ford chassis, 1954 DeSoto ‘Firedome’ Hemi V-8 motor. Needs finishing and paint.”
I grabbed it and visions of having this cool car for cruising kept me working on the auto at my uncle’s house.
Ralph Kyger, the incredibly talented painter at the shop where I worked, was called on to apply the bright red enamel for my new car, which was mechanically sound and prepped for freshening up.
Ralph painted Volkswagens by day and high-end, classics and custom cars by night. He was my mentor for skills that I would use to finance the rest of my college career back home at Sandlin Chevrolet and Olds, and Surratt and Heimer body shops.
Granted, these are great memories. But there is a problem that popped up, and it involved my tardiness to transfer the old car’s registration at the courthouse.
Mount Pleasant friend and classmate, Ronnie Lilly, made the trip from Texas driving his 1957 Chevy to see me. Before heading home, in a brief delusional lack of good sense, we decided transferring the front license plate off Ronnie’s car to the old Ford was a good idea.
Done with that, I headed for the paint shop on the back streets while Ronnie stopped to gas up his car.
That was all well and good until I turned onto a busy street just as a black-and-white Plymouth passed with “Los Angeles Police Department” stenciled on the door. I knew I was busted when the squad car lit up doing a U-turn.
Standing on the street after pulling me over, the officer silently inspected the car and my driver’s license.
“I can’t believe you drove this thing all the way from from Texas,” he said suspiciously.
Choosing words carefully, I simply said, “I’ve done a lot of work on it. Taking it over to Thousand Oaks for a paint job tonight.”
Just as I began to breathe again, Ronnie caught up. The Chevy’s brake lights came on, he pulled over and backed up to meet us. The officer’s eyes went to the Texas plate on the back of Ronnie’s car, then to the matching plate on the hot rod.
“Registration, please,” he said.
It was a different day and time back then, even in California.
After issuing me citations for “no proper registration” and “no valid plates displayed,” all the officer said was, “Cool car. Go get it painted tonight, then get it registered tomorrow.”
In today’s California, or even in today’s small town anywhere, what seemed like a pretty good idea back then likely would result in jail time today.
