The Love Machine
Having learned nothing from my Mustang II experience, I attempted to be one of the cool people. This was after the oil embargo of 1973, but tricked-out vans of all descriptions and other behemoth trucks with V8 engines were enjoying their heyday, at least until the recession of 1978 -79.
The trendiest mode of transportation was a van with murals or psychedelic designs on the outside and carpeting everywhere inside. A stereo and a built in icebox for beer completed the package. It was to be my entry into the sexual revolution as my “Love Machine.”
My 1975 Econoline was pretty cool with Pirelli tires, white mag wheels, custom captain chairs, and a marginally loud stereo. It was a blast to drive, but doom hovered over it.
The first problem was with water leaks. Apparently, the doors were for decoration and not to keep the weather out. A few trips to the dealership (They were really starting to dislike me at this point.) got most, though not all of those annoying little geysers plugged. I wasn’t so lucky with the paint.
The murals were gorgeous and unique. Unfortunately, the factory paint didn’t want to stick to the areas around the door hinges and the mural wasn’t guaranteed because it was after market. A few bottles of touch-up paint helped as long as you didn’t get too close.
Lurking beneath the hood of the “Love Machine” was a too large alternator. For the uninitiated, cars then had few accessories compared to today’s models. A 60-amp alternator was good enough for most vehicles. Some wise guy at the factory had put a 90-amp monster in my van. With nowhere to go, the excess juice fried my main loom, the regulator, and the alternator itself. The one bit of luck for me was the 90-amp casing had a high trade-in value, so I got a healthy start toward a new alternator.
The first winter exposed another little problem. Pirelli tires are great for high speed. They are very bad on ice. I actually got stuck in front of my parent’s home on Elyria Avenue in Amherst in the road. Yes, in the road. I burned one tire up getting free.
The curse continued as I tried in vain to keep the beast in one piece. The van was a reincarnation of Steven King’s “Christine.” It encountered a duck in West Virginia, a carwash in Amherst, a tornado in Virginia, the worst snowstorm ever in Monroeville, Ohio, and was mistaken for a drug dealer’s mobile distribution unit. Even after I sold it, it put my job at Ford in jeopardy. (A long story.)
The most humiliating thing is that I never christened the “Love Machine”. A number of people made use of the built in bed, while I got lost, but not me. I should have rented it out by the hour and made a couple bucks to pay for gasoline.
I did consume a lot of beer in the back with friends, who deserted when the beer did, behind the curtain that separated the driver’s compartment from the den of iniquity. I should say I borrowed a lot of beer. My temporary friends would set their watches by the regular eruptions that were inevitable when I partook of Schlitz. Like “Old Faithful,” I could be relied upon to liven any evening.
I finally developed more than a brain stem and sold the “Love Machine” so I could buy a house. I lost the house, but at least I got to christen it.

The Mustang II
I’ve already admitted that I had the poor sense to own Ford’s sorriest mistake after the exploding Pinto. In all fairness it was a nice looking car and you could be proud of it as long as it didn’t leave the driveway.
Thinking back there were a number of odd things about this vehicle that should have told the engineers in Detroit that this was not a “better idea.”
The ignition coil is a thing of the past, but was a necessity for the Mustang II. This car had a doozy. It had, no kidding, a connection wire over two feet long. I believe it’s true purpose was to hang oneself with it after installing the fourth tune up kit in under 20,000 miles and still having to get out a push the car up steep inclines.
The 1974 Mustang Mach 1 (you would have had to drop it from outer space to get it to go that fast) had decals on the front fender where road crap could beat the devil out of them and then they would fall off. Mud flaps helped, but the extra drag made the car go even slower. The blazing Mach 1 topped out at a blinding 85 mph.
This car was very lightweight so in the winter it was worthless. I was nailed by a state snowplow because I couldn’t get out of the way of the flying slush. I was stuck at the end of my parents drive way and the right front fender caved in like a state governor invited to a golf outing.
My Mustang was painted a beautiful dark copper with flat black below the character line. At least, is was flat black until it rained and then it tended to be just copper. Repeated trips to the dealership made buying a can of spray paint and some masking tape the way have the car in my possession more than in the body shop.
This was around the time aluminum magnesium wheels began to be popular as original equipment. Again, the engineers got ahead of the practical side and they left the lip off the edge so weights could be attached to balance the wheels. The idea was to keep the car from wobbling all over the road. Instead, they made a marvelous adaptation of weights that stuck to the rim with adhesive tape.
The first sign that stick-on wheel weights might not work was the clunk as they bounced off the inside of the fender. The adhesive stayed on the rim and could not be removed by any means. A tight grip on the steering wheel was the solution for this little oversight.
This particular car was bad luck, but thank goodness it had the old 5 mph bumpers. Until some genius in the Federal government decided less protection was better for us, all passenger cars had to be able to sustain minimal damage up to this lightning speed. My brother-in-law-to-be tested this feature for me by backing his father’s “Jimmy” into it. The engineers got this part right. The car traveled horizontally and vertically, but suffered only dents from the GMC’s license plate bracket. (The lesson learned: Don’t park your Ford in a GM driveway.)
I kept my albatross for 18 months before the new car bug bit. I went from the frying pan into the fire by purchasing a full-sized van. I was trying to get in on the custom-van craze, but having no imagination and serious case of laziness, I bought it ready to party in.
Where my old Mustang II ended up, I’ve no idea. It’s probably in purgatory holding up traffic on the highway to hell.

Medical Advances, Maybe They’re for the Better
Being a kid and getting hurt are just opposite sides of the same coin. You can’t possibly have one without the other. The thing that has changed in the last few decades in this equation is how scrapes, bee stings, cuts, and boo boos in general are treated.
When I was a youngster in the 1960s no one went to the emergency room unless they were near death. If you hadn’t coughed up a lung or lost more than one limb, you were treated at home. Money was scarce, but your parents could make another kid that looked just like you, so you had to either make a good case for a trip to the hospital or you learned to walk with a limp.
For one thing, we were proud of our accumulated scabs and scars. The mutants were the kids with smooth knees and elbows, and unblemished faces. Nothing said cool like a jagged scar above the eye.
If you scraped a knee your mom washed it with soap and water, sterilized it with peroxide, and covered it with gauze and white adhesive tape. Band-aids were reserved for Sunday School and when company stopped by.
A scratch got the merthiolate tincture treatment. Merthiolate was the one thing we kids hated. It stung like a bugger and you mom blowing on it didn’t help a whit. After you finished crying you could show off the red stain and your playmates would commiserate with you.
Bee strings were more an inconvenience than a real medical issue. When I was about 9, I had the pleasure of having a hornet crawl down my shirt while on a family trip in my father’s old Ford Biscayne. Sitting in the back seat with the bee crawling on the rear window, I told my dad it was going to sting me. He, however, was certain if I left it alone, it wouldn’t bother me. He was wrong. Around the fourth sting he got the car stopped, pulled me from the car and removed my shirt. My mom and siblings collected themselves from the floorboards while I did my version of a Native American rain dance.
A sweet woman from the home we had screeched to a stop in front of offered to treat my wounds. She did so with a little water and baking soda. The idea was to draw the poison out and thereby reduce the pain. I took their word for it, but I think they fibbed.
Lacerations were treated on a sliding scale. The further from your heart, the less likely it might kill you. If you were going to live, the next consideration was whether stitches or a little tape might be needed. The rule was if it didn’t need more than three stitches, you got that white adhesive tape, again.
Rashes were treated with that old cure-all Vaseline. Summer chafing, heat rash, minor scrapes, indigestion, hemorrhoids, and crusty build up all responded nicely to this petroleum product. It was also good for dry skin, sunburn, and wheel bearings.
An upset tummy called for baking soda in water. To this day I haven’t found a better belch than the one produced by a spoon full of soda in a half glass of water. This was one cure that really worked and your mom didn’t get upset when you burped.
Head injuries were always treated with ice. Fall off your bike, get hit with a rock by the town bully, or run into your sister at a dead run and you got ice. Bleeding from the head was not considered a bad thing. It would stop sooner or later. The worry was the goose egg that would remain if not treated aggressively. I never understood this, but I figured it was the “too far from your heart” theory.
Constipation met that irresistible force called castor oil. Now, here was a test of parenting. No matter what they said you knew that stuff was nasty. Promises of candy and special privileges were not enough to get you to open you mouth for that nectar of devil. The description of having the blockage removed manually did the trick. We kids had sufficient imagination to know that that was one experience we did not want.
These remedies kept us more or less healthy, and most of us survived. Not surprisingly, our parents were right; the new siblings did look just like the ones they replaced.

Summer’s Here
Ah, the sweet sensation of the sun on your skin, a warm breeze across your face, and a fine bead of sweat down the center of your back. It just doesn’t get any better and this summer promises to be a hot and hazy scorcher.
Maybe it’s my old bones or ancient blood that can’t keep me from shivering in 50-degree temperatures, but whatever the reason, I’m loving this heat.
I didn’t always like the blazing sun. In olden times (I never thought I’d use those words) air conditioning was something chain stores and the very wealthy possessed. We poor folk, and in actuality the vast majority of people, relied on fans for our cooling needs.
The fan worked on the principle of evaporation. Your body leaked from every pore and the breeze from the trusty fan cooled you down by facilitating the evaporation of that sweat. The fine layer of salt left on your body then fulfilled its purpose by becoming a grinding agent and removing skin from every sensitive area of your body. Chafing is not a pleasant thing. This is why many people of my generation walk bow-legged to this day.
Summer weather also contributed to the phenomenon of those pre-A/C days of kids playing outside. Once the sweltering doldrums arrived in mid-summer there was no wind movement to cool the inside of the home. The rising inside temperatures lead to the shortening of parental patience and the possibility of physical harm to whining and bored children; so outside we went.
We learned many valuable things in the great outdoors that our children, and those of succeeding generations, will never get to experience. We discovered molten asphalt and bare feet don’t mix, that wearing shorts does not protect you from baked buttocks on a metal slide, that the top of your head gets hot enough to fry you brain, that sticking a Popsicle out the car window does not keep it cold in spite of how the rushing air feels on your hand, and that taking a nap under a tree in midsummer requires sharing the space with bugs, especially bees, that find all that salt on your skin tasty.
Another exciting aspect of a really hot summer was the inevitable drought. At that time my parents had an interesting water system that included a well and a cistern. For some reason old timers thought it was a good idea to store stagnant water in a large concrete enclosure. The water in the cistern just sat there undisturbed until the sump in the well started sucking air. Then you had the delightful experience of bathing in brown water that smelled worse than you did before you got into the tub.
It only got better if the drought latest for more than a few days. The cistern would run dry just like the well, so a water truck would deliver a fresh load. The catch was someone got to go down into the cistern to clean up some of the muck so that the next tub of bathing water was a little lighter shade of brown.
As usual, this was a privilege reserved for the eldest male child, the inheritor of many fine family traditions. So the down the ladder I went, bucket and sponge in hand while my father hauled the black oozing residue up by a rope tied to the bucket.
I discovered a new species of critter in the depths of that cistern that I have not seen since. I collected them in a baby food jar and spent many hours observing them. They were red worms less than an inch long with little red legs sticking out of various parts of their bodies. The really neat thing was that they collected all the gunk that I had gathered with them into a ball. If you shook the jar, they’d scurry about reforming the ball. It was awesome. Naturally, I never drank from the faucet again.
I do not yearn for those long gone days of childhood. Though, I do enjoy the warmth of the summer during the day light hours, I’ll take my cool bedroom at night and not having to walk around like a saddle-sore old cowboy.

Prom Night in the Dark Ages
Way back in the days of black & white television and AM radio, prom night was just as big a deal as it is now. The biggest difference out in the boonies of Lorain County was that few of us had the money for limousines and hotel rooms.
The nicest form of transportation any of us could hope for in those days was the family car, if we could talk our parents into allowing us to get behind the wheel. It was quite the stretch since we generally weren’t allowed to drive the “good” car at any other time. There was something about unsupervised and hormone-crazed teenagers in the family sedan that bothered those old fogies. I guess the fact that they had to take the bus to their proms didn’t get us much sympathy.
I personally went to four proms: two each at Firelands and Amherst. What can I say? I liked playing dress up and free form dancing, which I must not have been very good at. My dates tended not to want to get on the floor with me unless it was a slow song so they could prevent my spastic imitation of “American Bandstand.”
For my first prom in 1972 I transported my date in a 1963 Chevy Bel Air, which I had patched together, literally. The nice thing about it was the front bench seat. Kids today can’t make out while they drive like we could. You used one arm for steering and the other was around your honey, who was all snuggled up against your side. Of course, it made separating the body parts after a catastrophic collision more difficult, but that was the coroner’s problem.
In 1973 I was a graduating senior and chauffeured my date in a 1967 Comet Caliente. It was Ford’s idea of a sports car except it had a standard 289 with the horsepower of a small herd of gimp squirrels. It also had a front bench seat with the added safety of the seat belts missing from the Bel Air. Naturally, seat belts only work when you wear them and you can’t make out while driving with seat belts on, so they were just for decoration.
This is the only prom I remember the theme. It was “Stairway to Heaven,” which was one great song by Led Zeppelin, unless you were trying to dance to it. The most of the song is fine, but there’s no way to dance to the final refrains without the risk of poking someone’s eye out.
The After Prom was at some place I’m sure has long since been torn down. It had a piano and that was the first time I heard a classmate play, and quite well I might add. So much for knowing the people you’ve attend school with for 12 years.
My father finally let me use the family car for my last prom night in 1975. It was a ‘73 Cougar, which grown into a 4-door sedan by that model year. I guess leaving my 1974 Mustang II with him as collateral did the trick.
Yes, I owned the Mustang they “took the gallop out of.” It was indeed a dog and it spent more time in the dealer’s garage then on the highway. It looked great. You just couldn’t merge onto a highway without a good tail wind, a downhill slope, and a curse, or two. It couldn’t even pass the other great American car of that period, the Chevy Vega.
I had a great time at all the proms I had the opportunity to attend. I was square and stayed sober even at the after proms. Maybe that’s why I remember them so fondly, because I can actually recall them and not how much I threw up.
I saved the wonderful experience of barfing like a sick puppy for after work at Ford, but that’s another story.
I wish the kids celebrating their final days of high school some wonderful memories and a safe time. They don’t have much choice with bucket seats.