In order to fully tell the tale of the summer of 1964 after high school graduation I need to regress a few years. I grew up with a father who only drove Studebaker's until they went out of business. A father who wiped his car off with a chamois every night and only knew where to put gas in the car. This did not fit too well with children who liked car parts covered in oil spread all over the garage. Stuck in between my brothers, Paul and Kenny, I was doomed to be just a little car crazy myself.
I must have been in the seventh or eighth grade when Johnny Tiger would show up at the house in his cream and red '55 Chevy. Johnny was very good looking but I would sit and stare out the window at his car. Then there was the all white '56 Ford Victoria with the side pipes that almost touched the ground that belonged to Mel Rounds. Needless to say I probably thought I was the luckiest little girl in the world the day Mel took me for a ride in that car. Then as Paul got closer to driving age a '34 Ford Three Window Coupe showed up in the front yard. It was rusty, had no seats and did not run but to me at the age of thirteen it was the Coolest!
Paul, who later became very good at restoring old cars, did not have much patience with trying to get the '34 to run. Kenny at the age of eleven or twelve sat in the house reading Hot Rod Magazine and would make suggestions to Paul as to what to do. Well, no macho big brother wants a little brother telling him what to do and Paul ended up giving Kenny the car. No doubt there was some statement to the effect that if Kenny was so smart he could just fix it.
Kenny tinkered away, conned Dad out of some car parts and got the car running. I remember the first test run very well. The car had no seats but orange crates were a good replacement and a rope for a throttle. Mother had to be the test driver since neither Kenny or I were old enough to drive. It was a little scary when she almost ran off the road into Sallee Park but then we flew around the rest of the neighborhood.
Long before Kenny or I were old enough to drive there were occasions when we talked Dad into taking us to Tulsa to the old North Airport to watch the drag races. Poor Dad would sit in his '56 Studebaker Golden Hawk in his suit, tie and hat while we stood by the edge of the runway cheering the cars on. Back in those days the drags had to be on hold every once in awhile for a small plane to land. Later, Paul's friends would talk him into taking me along to the drags with them since I knew all about pistons, rods and camshafts.
The trip to the drag races that stands out the most in my mind was the summer after the ninth grade. Paul and his friends were going to Tulsa and somehow I got to go even though Paul never wanted to be seen with his little sister. I was squished in the back seat of George Highfil's "Christine" type car - the one with the push button shift on the dash and pretty cool looking fins. It must have been quite a sight for other people to see. Here were five really cool (at least they thought that) almost Senior guys followed by this kid with overly permed hair and braces covering her teeth tagging along after them. Little did I know that I would learn a vocabulary consisting of elapsed time, quarter-mile, rail-job and mile per hour that would follow me the rest of my life.
Things got much more serious when we moved to a larger house when I was in the tenth grade. Kenny's car building took place on the back patio of the old house as it only had a single car garage. Mom and Dad bought a house with a two-car garage but it was still not allowed to be used for car restoration. So Dad had a second car garage built on the back of the lot for Kenny and I. At the age of fourteen Kenny had become the go-to-guy for all things car related. The garage was like a huge magnet that attracted every wanna-be hot rodder in town. On any given evening or weekend you could hear the rumble of a car or two coming down the street. Needless to say I would casually stroll out to see what was going on if I was not already in the garage helping Kenny work on the '34.
To be really truthful I did not have many close girl friends. It was always difficult for me to spend much time playing with dolls as running up and down the street in cowgirl clothes or jumping out of bushes dressed in army surplus attire attacking the neighborhood boys was much more fun. By the time I got to drive my '54 Chevy convertible around town I knew where every salvage yard with in twenty-five miles was. Kenny and I would spend Saturdays scouring car parts from places most girls did not even know existed. One of the things I never did do was to go on a "mid-night" salvage where you climbed over a salvage yard fence way after dark, carefully avoiding the man-eating dogs and retrieved the car parts you needed having located them during the day. Not going to claim that my brothers never did that.
Even though the duck-tailed, t-shirt with the sleeves rolled up era for guys was just about gone there were still many around. In Muskogee there were three drive-in eating establishments that the youth cruised through. One was Chet's where you could for the most part find the football, band, cheerleader types. Then there was the Corral. Even though the days of duck-tails and rolled up T-shirt sleeves were a few years back there were still a lot of those to be seen at the Corral. It was the real place for most of the hot-rodders to hang out. Last was Russ's which had a pretty good combination of both. The kind of place you drove through looking straight ahead so everyone thought you were really cool and not interested in who was there. Guess the idea was to be see and not to notice anyone else. My Mother would always wonder how I knew a twenty-something guy with a duck-tail who would say hi in a store. Little did she know that Kenny and I had discussed engine and transmission combinations with him the night before at the Corral.
I had to tell this story before I could write the story of the Summer of 1964. The girl who had just graduated from high school with a scholarship to an all-girl private college was the same girl who was perfectly happy laying under a car covered in grease and oil. There was both excitement and fear in thinking about how my life would change come September. Best thing to do was to not think about it and charge on into my Sunburned, Stock Car Summer.
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