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The Midnight Ride Before the State Fair of Texas
The year was 1958 and I was fourteen years old. My friend John was about
the luckiest guy I knew. He had a Cushman scooter with "Tequila" painted
on the side. Now before you get excited, it wasn't a Cushman Eagle, it
was just a regular Cushman. He could go anywhere he wanted to, without
pedaling. He let me use his scooter to get my license and he would drive
me all over the neighborhood. I didn't really have anywhere to go, but I
loved to go by the pretty girls' homes and hope they would see me
whisking by with my hair flying and my teeth shining.
The summer
before my fourteenth birthday my parents shipped me off for a few weeks
to stay with my sister Joan Kay in Jasper, Texas. As luck would have it,
my brother-in-law Marcus suggested that I learn how to drive a car!
Imagine, not quite fourteen and I was going to learn to drive a car. The
next week another friend, Ronnie, came down and we learned how to drive.
It was a stick shift, no less. Up and down the dusty red dirt roads we
would go and about the time we got into third gear it was time to put on
the brakes and turn around and go back to where we had started. The road
was about a half mile long and I think we ran through a tank of gas a
week. By the time the visit was over, it was time to go back to Oak
Cliff and get my motor scooter license, start school, and get ready for
my second-favorite holiday, the State Fair of Texas (my favorite was the
Fourth of July).
I couldn't wait to get back to Dallas and tell
John that I had learned how to drive. If I played my cards right, Mom
would let me drive John around the block. Yeah, right. I got the lecture
about the difference between Dallas and the dusty roads of East Texas
and that idea went right out the window. I think John believed that I
could drive, but he was taking my word on faith, I am sure.
The
weeks came and went and before you knew it, the State Fair was starting.
For those of us lucky enough to live in North Central Texas, that meant
cooler weather. Cool crisp nights were welcome back then, since there
was no air conditioning for the most part, at least in my neck of the
woods. I invited John to come and spend the night at my house and we
planned to ride the bus to the fair the next morning. That night, we
talked about our first few weeks in our brand new junior high school,
Oliver Wendell Holmes. We were the first class to attend and it was a
big change from grade school the year before. Many of the guys rode
scooters to school and there was even one guy that had a '58 Impala that
he drove to school. All of us guys thought he must have had terrific
parents. The girls just thought he was terrific, but he dated a girl in
high school (fortunately).
One thing led to another during these
discussions and I bragged to John that I had learned to drive a car this
past summer and thought it would be a great idea to drive by a couple of
the girls' homes in a car and not on a scooter. John agreed, but said we
didn't have a car to do it. "Oh, but yes we do," I said. "Mom and Dad
are asleep and if I go into the bedroom and get the keys and get them
back before they wake up, they will never know we were gone." Encouraged
by the smile on John's face, I sneaked into Mom and Dad's inner sanctum
and snitched the keys. John and I slipped out the window so as not to
disturb anyone and went to the garage. We got into the car and I was
about to start it when John said, "Wait a minute, what if they hear the
car start?" Thinking for a microsecond, I said, "You're right. Let's
push it out and roll it down the street and we'll get a rolling start
and pop the clutch to start it."
Well, to make a long story
short, we did and it did. We drove around from 2 a.m. until 4 a.m. and
drove by every girl's house we could think of. When it was time to go
home, John the Judicious warned that the sound of driving the car into
the garage might wake my parents. He was right, of course. We needed to
get a rolling start, I thought, and turn the engine off, put the car in
neutral, and coast into the one-car garage. The only thing was that I
forgot about the three-foot incline heading into the driveway. At thirty
miles an hour, the car hurtled up and over the incline, nearly leaving
the ground, and slammed into the right side of the garage--BAM!. After
several expletives, we surveyed the damage and waited for my parents to
come to the garage and bring the razor strap. Nothing happened. We tried
to repair the car, to no avail.
At the break of dawn, we caught
the bus and went to the fair. We stayed all day. About 6 p.m., I called
home. "Hey, Mom, what's going on?" "Terry Gordon [family always used my
first two names when I was in trouble], do you know what happened to the
car?" I said, "Something happened to the car?" When I got home, my Dad
taught me the value of telling the truth and always discussing with my
parents when I did something wrong or made a bad decision. That lesson
has served me well all these years. I am grateful to have had the
(painful) experience.
Terry McIntire
DeSoto, Texas
Published:
November 14,
2005
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