Orion Chapter 5 Short term fix! By Craig Johnson Before I tell you about the summer of 1969 I have to review one of the more stupid decisions I ever made the year prior. My Grandfather in in 1967 had decided to buy a brand new Chevrolet Corvette for himself and give me his old car so I could have a car for high school. The car was eleven years old and had been babied by my Grandfather since he bought it new in 1957. It had less than sixty thousand miles on it and had never been in bad weather. He lived a mile from the International Harvester Plant in Springfield, Ohio where he was the head electrician and had walked to and from work since the 1920s. So my Grandfather had come to our house on the other side of town to show me his new car and take me for a ride. We had been driving around with the top down when he says lets go see your Grandmother for a few minutes and away he flew with the 427 engine drinking large amounts of gas. When we get to his house he pulled into the two car garage next to his old car the 1957 hard top convertible Thunderbird turquoise in color. As we start to leave the garage to see my Grandmother my Grandfather handed me the keys to the Thunderbird and told me to pull it out of the garage and bring it to the front door of the house and that he would meet me in the kitchen. When I entered the kitchen both of my Grandparents were waiting and they told me that they were giving me the thunderbird as my car. Now I was forced to drive the 1957 Thunderbird for my senior year of high school graduating in 1968. I had joined the Navy on a delayed entry program and was going on active duty June 25, funny how you remember that date. So a few days before going on active duty I took the Thunderbird and gave it back to my Grandfather, which is one of the stupendous decisions I have ever made, Grandpa I am going to be in the Navy onboard a ship at sea and wont need a car or be able to take care of it. He took the car back and sold it while I was in boot camp. Now back to the summer of 1969 and I am stationed on the submarine tender USS Orion AS-18 in Norfolk, Virginia. This is a ship for those of you that do not know that goes to sea for one week a quarter for training and is in port servicing submarines and occasionally a surface ship. This meant that it would have been wonderful to have a car, any car let alone my beloved Thunderbird. Well I was walking out in town past a used car dealership and was looking fondly at the cars but did not have money to really buy a car as an E-3. A salesman on the lot saw me and asked me if I wanted to buy a car and I told him I did but explained my finances to him and smiled. He goes look I have not been out that long and if you have twenty -five dollars I will sell you a running car that is old and I really cant sell to anyone but it passes inspection and does run. He then showed me my new used Plymouth Valiant with the push button transmission. I drove that car for about two months all over the Norfolk area and was having a great time. Several of us had spent the afternoon at the amusement park in Ocean View and I had taken the road through the Naval Air Station to get back to the ship at D&S piers and was in line to go through the main air station gate and could see the strip just outside the main gate of the main base when a huge cloud of black smoke started bellowing from the hood of my car. We got out and pushed the car through the gate over to one side of the road to find out what was wrong. When we opened the hood and the cloud of smoke dissipated we found that the dip stick tube had broken off at the block. Just behind the bars on the strip was a metal and car junkyard that you could see the sign from where we were. I called the number on the sign from a pay phone located just outside the gate and told them that the title to the car was signed over to them and was on the front seat and were it was. About that time a cab came by and we took it back to the ship. To this day I feel that twenty-five dollars was a great short term value as a short term fix for my transportation problem. https://facebook/groups/seastories/
Posted on: Sun, 31 Aug 2014 17:48:23 +0000
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