1970 Colonial High-part 2

I was sitting in the school parking lot as the rest of the car drivers pull in, and at Colonial it was an odd assortment of vehicles. There were Simca’s, Saabs, and all kinds of funny looking old cars. I’m fuzzy with names, but Jon had a beat up VW bug, covered with spray paint, looking like a moving piece of graffiti art, loud tuned muffler and no brakes, if I remember right. Scott had some funny-looking little sedan with tail fins and something on the rear windows that made them look like stained glass.

There was a girl I went out with for a while, and she had a really nice Camaro, light yellow, with a black vinyl top and the cool automatic stick in the middle. She let me drive it once and it was a dream. I must have inherited at least one gene from my dad, because he always wanted to drive everybody’s car. Cars meant a lot to me back then, and I can’t lie, they still do. A car equals freedom, and someday when they take my keys away, I’ll know what it means more than anybody.

As I looked around the parking lot, I didn’t think about who could afford a nice new car, but I did think about who could really fix something up. Somebody had a really nice van. Back then, a van wasn’t something easy to have. What a kid could have, is a worn out Ford Econoline from the Post Office. One kid had one that was painted perfectly and it had shiny chrome wheels, looking like a hot rod in a magazine. Another kid had a beat up van that he had fixed up with stuff from around the house and the junkyard….and I liked that one too.

And this is where my story gets strange. I started off with Ralph, the red 1961 corvair. I’d show up loaded with kids and full of pride that I made something cool out of an old junker car. Ralph did not make if far in my life, and my mom threw in the towel of making her oldest son learn about paying cash for everything…after Ralph got towed 6 times in 6 months. Ralph got traded in a a brand new AMC Gremlin X, electric blue with a big racing stripe, and mags and big fat white-lettered Goodyear tires. The little car had 3 on the floor and a giant 6 cylinder engine, with way more power than it needed. Suddenly, I had all the flash I could ever want. I didn’t think much about how well-made this car was, but it sure loved going to the beach, full of surfing buddies, or as my brother Paul would say “kids that were will to pay gas money”..

The new Gremlin was an amazing car, but some things fell apart quickly and were never fixed correctly, like the fancy new all glass tailgate. Ralph Nader never wrote about this car to my knowledge, but it did have one little dangerous feature for a young driver: hydroplaning. You take a very light car, give it a powerful engine, and really wide tires, and some summer Florida highway with puddles from afternoon rain, and your little Gremlin could go ice skating down the road. That is what we did one summer afternoon, heading west on Highway 50 out in Bithlo, near one of the Salvage yards. I was going the Speedlimit, or too fast for conditions, depending on who’s telling the story, and suddenly we were spinning and went off the road sideways. We came to a stop about 3 feet short of T-boning a telephone pole. I can still remember one kid praying in the back seat….if I remember correctly, he became a preacher later on.

~

i told you the story would get stranger…the deal with the Gremlin X, was that I had to SHARE the car with my brothers and sister. Nobody else had a drivers license, so I didn’t really listen to that part of the deal, but when the time rolled around that Paul got his license, I knew I was going to have a problem. Okay, I had a few quirks, but mostly I was the nicest guy you knew, at least that’s what they wrote in my yearbook. Sharing was not my forte, and my wife will easily tell anyone that will listen that if we were out to dinner somewhere and she wanted a French fry from my plate, I might growl. I mean, I wasn’t going to bite, it’s just an involuntary reflex. And I sure don’t like sharing a car.

I found a solution that still informs me to this day. No matter how fuzzy my memory may get about what I liked or things we did, on the day Paul got his license, I bought my neighbors 1965 Impala convertible. I realize that right now, if I could get one in perfect condition it would be worth a small fortune, but Les Gerol was not the person that loved a car the way I do. There was not a 1 foot section of the car that didn’t have a dent. It had a 283 V8 that could sorta pull that big old car around. It was wine-red color with a used-to-be white convertible top and used-to-be-white interior. I looked at this whale of a car, and decided all it needed was glass packs and an 8 track deck and I’d be in business. That car never made it to the beach that I remember. What I do have burned into my mind, is me cruising with the top down, heading to J. Harley Wadworth Volvo. heading down Curryford to Orange Blossom Trail, with the new Deep Purple tape, Machine Head, blasting about me being a highway star. I don’t need a photo…I can see it all.

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Colonial High 1970

It’s 10am on a fall day, and I’m feeling pretty good about this, because it’s one of a very few days I can wear this wool Letter-sweater. Yes, it was for the high school band, not for a sport, so it’s not as cool as it could be, but it proved I did something. I’m sitting in a classroom with the smart kids. I can remember the exact feeling, somebody decided that I was supposed to be smart, so here I was. Math was not my thing, and little did I know that later in life, my job would depend on things I did not pay enough attention to right now. Instead I was looking down at my chukka boots and wishing I had a pair of real Levi’s instead of the wanna-be’s I was wearing. I was in the uniform of the crowd I wanted to be associated with, the surfers. I had on a cotton surf t-shirt, 100% certain that it did not say Ron Jon’s on it. Wearing a Ron Jon shirt was the main way to tell everybody you were a tourist and not really a surfer. The t-shirt was tucked in and I had a really cool leather belt from the Canterbury shop at the Mall. Styles came in slow motion to Orlando. Whatever we were doing was what they were doing last year in California. Surfers were wearing cut-off jeans unless somebody in the family could sew, and then you got real baggies to surf in. Boardshorts hadn’t made their way to the stores in Orlando yet.

It was also the time of the mini-skirt, so my mind was rarely on the blackboard, and what our teacher had to say. To be fair, he was young and no matter what I thought of math, I liked his taste in cars. Right outside those giant crank-out windows of our classroom was his new gold-colored Corvette. That wasn’t a color I would have picked, but that was the coolest car in the whole world at that moment. Even the two-piece hub caps looked cool, and this was a time when having hubcaps meant you weren’t serious about your car. He’s asking some math question and quickly Revonda raises her hand and has the answer. Something is seriously wrong in how God handed stuff out when you get to be a cheerleader AND smart at math. All I heard was “wonk wonk wonk…hypotenuse” and the teacher congratulating her while she smiles and the other girls all high-five her….just kidding….the high-five had not been invented yet.

just like every high school, we had crowds. And just like every person that ever wrote a story, my point of view was that I was on the edge of everything, watching more than enjoying. That is some kind of lifelong thing, seeing life as if I myself am the drone flying overhead, recording everything. Some kind of dream until the bell rings and we head to lunch.

Colonial High School, was not brand new or even close to that in 1970. It was not air-conditioned, except for the band room and the administration offices. I never thought about the teachers and how they had to dress up and go sweat in a room with us every day. But, like us, they may have been living somewhere without air conditioning. Back then, an air-,conditioned place was like walking into the diary room at Costco is now, you went from slightly sweaty to freezing in one moment. Our lunch break was spent outside in the center of the hub of this spread-out open concept school. Coming from Spokane, the whole thing about Florida schools was still interesting to me. It must halve been the lastest craze in the 1950’s, because Howard Junior high, a really old school, was more like what I was used to, a 2 story brick building with staircases that every kid had to climb. Colonial had the empty space in the middle of a wheel, spoked with covered sidewalks that were almost dry if it was raining.

The surf crew was there, sitting on top of the concrete picnic tables, talking about what we always talked about, where we would be surfing this weekend. Most likely, it would be Picnic Tables at Cocoa Beach. I would do my best to be there. That was where I wanted to be, but a couple of things could get in the way…work and church. 16 years old, and the biggest waste of my life was Sunday School, where I sat at a round table with 4 other kids and talked about saving ourselves for marriage, and finding a nice Christian Science Girl…harder to remember the days when dating somebody that didn’t go to your church was disallowed….i paid more attention in math class than I did there. But, the guys were making plans for the weekend, and the girls would be there in their bikinis, ‘Laying out’. Now if any girl wants to say she was a Gidget in 1970, I’d need to see photographic proof. I’m certain there were girls that could have done it, but it was guys, and young guys only…..except for one old teacher at Colonial.

Surfing is kind of like fishing, if all you like is the thrill of pulling it off perfectly, you’re not going to stick around, because most of the time it is “you shoulda been here yesterday!’ In 1970, gas wasn’t expensive compared to years later, but it was still a big expense for most kids to drive there and back…especially if there turned out to be no waves. We had the Ron Jon surf report you could call on the phone, but to that dumb place, the surf was always decent. The local news didn’t even know what surfing was. Surfing was a kid sport and we were often down to the only accurate means of determining the surf forecast was the “thumbs-up/thumbs-down” sign. I don’t know where this originated, maybe Hawaii, but how it worked was like this: you are driving in your car, full of kids and boards on the roof. You spot a car coming towards you with boards on the roof. If it’s before 10am, you are crestfallen, because nobody would go home that early if the surf was good, but you stick your arm out the window, make a fist with the thumb sticking out and waggle it up and down. Every surfer in The Whole world knows what that means..”tell me! Is is any good?’ If they stick their arm out the window and hold their fist thumb pointing upward, a cheer would go up in your car, and everyone would start seeing visions of 6 foot glassy waves…for the next 40 minutes of the ride. OR, a thumb down meant “do we just turn around and go home?’ Come to think of it, we put a lot of faith in strangers!

it was Sunday, and maybe I only did this once, but the Gremlin was sitting in the parking lot behind the Christian Science Church on Roasalind ave in downtown Orlando. I would be leaving for the beach much later than I ever wanted, but it was going to happen. Paul and I ran out as fast as we could when Sunday school was over and we raced to Picnic Tables. That place is still there. I don’t surf that spot anymore, since I found that is a wonderful spot for bad people to break into your car.

on this particular Sunday, we just wanted to get our boards wet and see the girls…we get their just in time to see the wind getting on it, while the guys stand around, telling the girls about their best rides, while smoking the obligatory cigarette. Of course, Revonda was in the middle of the group of girls!

As my minds eye drifted overhead, capturing the moment, I knew even then that someday soon we would be old, driving to work everyday, raising kids and certainly be something less than cool, and there was no way we would be allowed in the water. The next group of kids would shove us aside,, and we better start learning Shuffleboard, Bridge, and Golf. It’s pretty bad, when you’re 16 and worrying about being old!

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