Too Many Eggs in the Basket

The Goats in Spain did not stay mainly on the plain

                   
I don't know how many people have told me that as you go through life you tend to only remember the good parts.  Somehow you are supposed to forget the struggles, the disappointments and all the problems and only remember the happy times.  When school started in the fall of 1977 it seemed like smooth sailing to my graduation from college but there were a lot of stumbling blocks along the way.

By October the Boys and I were settled back into school.  Enrolled in eighteen hours of some really tough classes like pathophysiology, cell biology, zoology and quantitative analysis meant my sleeping time was reduced to three to five hours a night. No problem with that as I had always thought that sleep was a waste of time and going to class everyday was a requirement.  The problem arose when Dennis announced we had to go to Spain in a Ford trip. There was no "not going" because of school and in reality how could someone pass up a trip to Spain for seven days.

The view from our hotel

                                      
                   

Dennis's Mother came down to take care of the boys and off we went to the sun-soaked Costa del Sol.  Too bad it was a tinge off season and the weather was slightly cool and sometimes rainy. There were five hundred people on the trip that Dennis, as a host, had to make sure had a good time.  It was an interesting feat to try to take care of some of these people.  One man from Tulsa filled his suitcase with food as he was afraid to eat anything in Spain while another man brought his wife who was dying of cancer and then there was the assortment of people who were never happy anywhere at any time. Need I say there was never a dull moment.

                   
Actually I had a great time touring Granada, the Alhambra, loved all the Moorish architecture, the Cathedrals and the food.  One day we took the ferry to Morocco across the Strait of Gibraltar which was an interesting trip complete with me getting to ride a camel. It was really a fun trip until it came time for us to leave.  Seems like there was a strike at the airport and no planes could take off.  That was a huge problem as we had to vacate the hotel since another group of Ford people were on their way.  

Granada

                                                    

Somehow the tour company came up with an interesting solution.  Four Hundred and ninety-eight people were loaded onto buses and two into an ambulance for a trip across Spain.  There was something very nice about going through the countryside filled with olive orchards and beautiful scenery to the Portuguese border.  The border was a small river that we crossed on a wooden flat-bottomed platform a few people at a time.  Then it was back on more buses and off to Faro, Portugal where we met the Ford group that was just arriving.  We got on their plane only to be taken to Lisbon for twelve hours since the flight crew was out of flying hours.  We finally arrived home after a fourteen hour flight and two days late. The trip was fun, at least for me, not so much for Dennis as usual.  Since I had filled my suitcase with a couple of text books the extra travel time created some study time.

                                                   Touring the Spanish countryside

Christmas came and went.  Wes always hated the artificial tree decorated with red velvet bows and apples.  But in the picture I can't seem to remember if they were amazed at the amount of presents or disappointed. When the semester, hopefully my last, started I found out they were not offering the Botany class I needed to take. My adviser let me take three hours of graduate research instead.  This actually was his master plan to get out of teaching Zoology labs himself and have me do biological research by ripping the sciatic nerves out of live mice resulting in their death. Nice that I had just taken Zoology the semester before so it was fresh in my mind - not so nice killing the little mice.

As if trying to finish my last semester of school wasn't a chore in itself with the extra hours added on from teaching and research the home front got more complicated.  Dennis spent a couple of days in the hospital when his blood pressure went to 240/140, he decided he did not like the 37' Ford he dragged home and traded it for a table saw, another Ford trip popped for the month of June and he found out that he was being transferred to Kansas City.  Even though Dennis thought I could snap my fingers and make everything perfect I had to take one event at a time.

I finished up the semester in great shape.  Somehow I managed a composite average of 3.65 for the fifty-tw0 hours of math and science which was pretty unbelievable to me.  I graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree with a double major in Biology and Chemistry.  With all the college classes I had taken at the three previous schools I could have also had a degree in Liberal Arts with only three more hours in art but I just wanted to be done.  Graduation Night was a pretty proud moment and I no longer had to hear how Dennis never thought he would have to put his wife through college.

After graduation I spent two weeks getting the house looking spectacular, put it on the market For Sale By Owner and held an open house on Memorial Day. It was an absolutely beautiful day and I guess people don't have anything to do on that day so we were flooded with lookers all day.  I don't know if it was the smell of the fresh baked cookies in the house or the sparkling pool in the backyard but I had nine people on a list that wanted to purchase the house.  I kept a list just in case a potential buyer backed out or could not qualify.  Remember how a year before I balked at buying a house for $50.000.00?  Well, I sold the eight year old house we paid $20,000.00 for with an added $8,000.00 swimming pool for $45,000.00.  Plus because I sold it myself Ford gave us 10% of the selling price as a bonus for not having to fool with it.  Not too bad.

In between selling the house and the trip to Freeport in the Bahamas it was time to find a place to live in Kansas City. Dennis had been looking since he went to work there the first of June and I had to fly up to see what he had found.  Actually I was ecstatic to be moving.  I was sad to be leaving the pool since we had not even had a full summer to enjoy it but the thought of leaving the Dallas/Fort Worth area and all the unpleasant memories that the area brought to mind was sheer happiness. My Dad had grown up in Kansas, went to the University in Lawrence and worked in downtown Kansas City when he graduated from college in the 1920's. Uncle Tom had grown up there and told me many stories.

The actual looking for a house was a nightmare.  The real estate agent kept driving me by shopping centers in the suburbs and possible schools in areas where they were building new houses. If the economy depended on me spending time at shopping centers it was out of luck and who says the shiny new school is the best.  Dennis was looking for the palace befitting a company junior executive while I was looking for the old house with the flowers and white picket fence. All was becoming pretty bleak and I began to wonder why I was even included in the house hunt.

While sitting in the motel room one day waiting for Dennis or the real estate agent I used the time to read the telephone book.  Reading the telephone book had become a habit of mine in travelling as you can learn a lot about a place and the people who live there.  Just by chance I came across something that took my breathe away and maybe my heart even stopped beating.  Suddenly Kansas City and any old house would do.

Turning Thirty Was Great

Watching a program the other day I learned that it was forty years ago that the movie Saturday Night Fever made it's debut. Gads where did all the years fly by to?  It did make me curious about the 70's since I am writing about that period of time so I did a little research to jog the old memory as to the events.  I turned thirty in 1976 and a friend much older than I told me I would have more fun in my thirties than any other decade.  She was wrong as I have had more fun each decade since.  

Way back when I started writing these stories for lack of anything else to write about at the time I did a story on the fact that I have horrible hair.  With the advent of going back to college, the kids, the race car, and all the other things I crammed into a day I resorted to an Afro Style of stupid curls.  I have avoided posting any pictures as I looked so bad a cat would have not dragged me home. Okay, if you really want a laugh it is in a story from 7/24/15.  But two things happened in the mid-seventies to save the world from looking at it.  One - Farah Fawcett was quite popular with her Shag haircut and Two - I spent less time with racing so there was time to fool with blow dryers and hot rollers. I did not end up looking like Farah but it was an improvement.

So, what did we do when all of a sudden the race car was gone that we had poured every thought, every extra penny, every vacation and was the center of all of our friends for ten years?   Must say that for me, although I resented the reasons and the way it happened, it took one form of stress out of my life. I had plenty to do with college, the boys and my little business.  Not so true for Dennis.

A few months after school started in the fall of 1976 Dennis decided we needed a bigger house.  More fitting I guess to him feeling like a Junior Executive with Ford Motor Company. When we bought the "starter" home in Carrollton in 1970 it was twenty thousand dollars and it was your basic three bedroom, bath and a half, living room and family room house. It was also five minutes for Dennis to get to work.  I had no problems with the house and Wes was happy in the first grade at a school two blocks away plus the field in front of our house was where Wes played soccer.  After months of looking at fifty thousand dollar houses that were not much bigger, farther from work and school and only offered few more amenities we decided to stay where we were.

Mother had a pretty bad couple of years after George passed away and I didn't really have much time to spend with her in the racing days.  She had come down to visit once and had Dr. Chandler get rid of the extra tissue (called bags) around her eyes right after I had met him.  In the spring of 77' she came down to get a facelift.  That was pretty interesting as she was really a pretty woman but no one argued with Mother.  Then she started jogging much to my dismay.  I hate jogging but every time she arrived I had to purchase new running shoes as I always managed to get paint or something on the previous ones.  I had to have been the perfect daughter as I did go out and run three miles every morning with her on her visits.  It was a blessing that after all the cosmetic surgery and the fitness craze that she had gained lots of boyfriends and was too busy to visit very often especially since Dennis and Mother were like putting a match to a puddle of gasoline. 

My brother, Kenny, and his wife and girls came down in the spring for a classic car show in Arlington.  Kenny had been building old cars since he was twelve and had a really cool old truck to put in the show.  What a fun weekend that was.  There were lots of neat old cars and lots of contests for the people who came like races for the kids and silly things for the adults.  I entered a spark plug changing contest where they provided wrenches but Kenny had a speed wrench in his truck that I used instead of the ones provided.  An old drag racing trick won the contest for me.

Two things happened after Kenny's visit.  The light bulb went off in Dennis's head and he decided we needed a street rod. Working for Ford and going to a lot of dealerships he came across a lot of old cars in old dealerships and pastures.  One weekend we borrowed a trailer and went to Vernon, Texas to drag home a real "project" car in the form of a 1937 Ford. The kids and I thought it was pretty cool and it would definetly give Dennis something to do.

The second idea came when Kenny took a dip in our pool.  Kinda small.

Since the pool was a little small we decided to build a bigger one.  I vetoed going to summer school that summer because summer school was really tough going everyday and I needed to be home to watch over the construction.  It seemed like it took the entire summer to get finished but the kids were about as happy with the piles of sand as they were when the pool was finally done.

Wes took swimming lessons and we bought Wally a ski vest that we kept by the backdoor.  He learned he had to put it on every time he went out the door even if it was just to play in the yard.  The dog, Boodles, which was the longest resident dog we had, was a problem.  She was an English Bulldog, Dennis's choice and certainly not mine, and sunk like a rock every time she fell in the pool.  If I had been able to be cruel to an animal I would not have jumped into the pool fully dressed on a regular basis to save that dog. Must admit there were times I thought about it.

When school started in the fall I found out that if I took an extra class each semester that I would be able to graduate in the spring of 1978.
That sounded great as I was ready to get all that over with.  Since we no longer needed a nine passenger van to tow a race car with I got a 78' black Mustang 5-speed with T-tops to drive back and forth to school.
Now that was a cool car to drive while the radio blasted with the Bees Gees, Elton John or the one the kids hated, Barry Manilow. Poor Wally learned to hate Disco and Barry Manilow at the age of three.

The pool got finished in time for Wes's seventh birthday party and I must say I loved having the pool. The last two semesters started off quite nicely and as I look back now I can see that at turning thirty a change in attitude began to happen.  Was it going back to college, rocking out to the disco music, having more fun with the cute little boys or actually gaining a little maturity?  Perhaps it was a combination of all of those things. Whatever it was helped prepare me to handle all the events of the coming year.

One of the Best and the Worst Years

There are times when writing these stories that it is difficult not only to remember everything but also to convey how hard it was to juggle the boys, college, the house, the race car and a husband who nothing seemed to make him happy.  It was an odd coincidence last Sunday while attending a concert of the SWOSU Music Department that sort of brought it all back. There was a girl somewhere in her twenties playing a flute while a small child slept on her chest in one of those papoose carriers.  I was extremely proud of that girl even though many probably did not feel the same way.

I can remember back then telling friends who questioned how I went back to college, ran a small business, took care of the boys and tried to be the perfect wife that I wished I was the kind of mother who enjoyed staying and baking bread.  Life would have been a lot easier although I knew that just wasn't me. In truth, looking back now, I wonder how I survived 1976.

When racing season started in the spring Wes was a very active 5 1/2 year old. He operated at high speed from morning until night, racing up and down the street on a Big Wheel or bicycle with a vivid imagination and non-stop talking.  Wally was 2 1/2 always happy and I think rather quiet trying to take in all the commotion around him.  We spent a lot of time together on the drive to Denton to college everyday and I think he enjoyed the quiet without his brother and the children his same age at the TWU Child Care Center.

I loved going to school but I think I loved going to school from the age of six. Something in my personality requires me to never go to class without being prepared as I never wanted  to appear stupid.  That probably comes from being told too many times that I was stupid and maybe that wasn't such a bad thing. When Dr. Chandler, the plastic surgeon and my cheerleader on going back to college, would demand to see my grades at the end of each semester it was fun to show them off.
At the end of three semesters of Chemistry, Math and Biology I had managed not the 4.0 he said I needed but a 3.5 grade average I was really proud of.

The weekends leading up to the first drag race in March were a flurry of activity in getting the car painted and ready to go. Watus, his girlfriend Sam, Jimmy Parker and Dennis and I all got along well together but privately I had to put up with constant complaints from Dennis about this or that.  The first race at La Place in New Orleans I could not go due to an art show and it ended up with Jimmy Parker departing from the team.  Watus bought Jimmy's engine and a friend of Watus's, Bill Burns started helping on the car. Bill and his wife, Pam, were a great help and fun to be around.  Since Dennis knew very little about blown Chrysler engines and Watus was driving we needed Bill and his expertise.

My Ford lease vehicle for that year was a nine passenger van which doubled as a tow vehicle for the race car.  Many weekends all six adults and sometimes my two boys ran down the highway going to places like Carlise, Arkansas, Jackson, Mississippi, Houma, Louisiana, Houston, Tulsa or Amarillo.  Every race had it's funny stories and memorable events.  It must have been bad luck to make reservations at motels in advance but it was at times difficult to find rooms at midnight after driving half the night and racing all day. Then there was the time Dennis backed the van over the front of a Corvette.  Or the night Dennis and I left Dallas after a company party we had to attend and drove all night to meet Watus and Bill at the track in Amarillo. The fun part was that the car came close to winning or won every race we entered.  This was drag racing at it's best for me.

As the summer flew past Dennis became increasingly unhappy with situation with the race car.  I used all my positive powers to try to keep the waters smooth but when it was decided that the car should move out of our garage and down to Reeder Row in Dallas where all the top area racers were Dennis was very unhappy.  It only made sense to me as everyone who had cars on Reeder Row also had the knowledge to make the car a consistent winner. Besides the knowledge there was a lot of parts trading and fine tuning that went on that kept us winning races. In truth the car moved to keep Dennis from tinkering on it as he made no great effort to learn or understand the workings of the Chrysler engine.  It was then that I realized that Dennis did not care as much about winning as he did about simply owning a car that he could spend his time just tinkering on, bragging to his friends about and just sitting in the garage so he could look at it.

As with all racing engines which are just waiting for a chance to blow up ours did right at the end of the racing season.  It was good timing from the aspect that it happened before Dennis, Watus and Bill came to words about the partnership that would not have been pleasant.  We had entered the National race in Indianapolis a couple of weeks after the engine went kaput and no time to repair it. We already had tickets and even motel reservations for the six of us and we all went together but it was not a very pleasant weekend. After that weekend Dennis ended up selling the entire car to Watus and was quitting racing forever.  Needless to say I was not a happy camper.  Racing Top Alcohol with Watus and Bill was really fun even with all the ups and downs.  It was worth all the time and effort, worth all the extra hours of no sleep to stay caught up in school, worth all the money and things we had given up through the years to go racing.  I probably tried to get him not to sell the car but I had never learned how to argue with anyone and successfully make a point.  Instead I just added black stars on my imaginary chart every time I thought about it for years.

So, now what?  

Alcohol and Chemistry Formulas

I never did figure out why this tall, skinny guy named Jimmy Parker wondered into our garage one late summer day in 1975 with an interesting proposition.  He was not someone we knew and why he came to us will always remain unknown.  But he had an engine and we had a car so he offered us the chance to go racing in the fairly new class of Top Alcohol Dragster.

Maybe a few facts very brief facts about drag racing might be in order here.  Drag racing had evolved from the early fifties from guys meeting on Saturday night on out of the way roads (like the road by Davis Airfield in Muskogee where I grew up) to little drag strips out in the country, to multi-million race tracks. The types of cars had progressed from cars people drove to work or school everyday to ones that were especially built for the sport.  Much like the evolution that happened from stock car racing to NASCAR.

There are classes for the basic stock cars and classes, depending on engine size and the type of fuel used, for the dragster, funny cars and altereds. Dennis and I had been running in what was called competition eliminator with a six cylinder Ford engine and then a small block V-8 Ford engine.  Those classes were way down on the list as to how fast they ran, how expensive they were and how much time and energy it took to keep them running. In everyday life you could compare this to driving a beat up 1971 Fiat versus a brand new Mustang.

So what do you do when someone wonders up and offers you the chance to go race with the "big boys"?  Top Alcohol Dragster was the second category down from the fastest cars, Top Fuel Dragster, the only difference being the car ran on methane or alcohol instead of nitromethane.  Dennis was doubtful, I was ecstatic.  Dennis's big question was who was going to drive the car as he did not seem to want to (driving was not his thing).  Jimmy Parker had an idea.

                                           Watus Simpson



The next Saturday Jimmy showed up with an ex-top fuel racer named Watus Simpson. Watus was well known as one of the very good drivers and an all around nice guy.  Somehow that Saturday afternoon everyone agreed to give the partnership a chance.  A flurry of activity began and in a matter of a couple of weeks the dragster was together with Parker's blown Hemi engine.  With no paint on the race car, no fooling around with testing and tuning for weeks on end we were off to the last race of the season in El Paso, Tx. The dragster ran very well, we won a few rounds, learned a lot and everyone got along well. This was "fun" drag racing!  Now we had the winter to get our act together.

            Watus's Sons and friend Sam waiting to make a run

Another interesting fact about drag racing.  Except for some of the National Events drag races were scheduled on a Saturday and Sunday.
When Dennis and I raced the C and D gas dragster we did not travel very far to race, maybe Tulsa and Houston were the furthest.  Switching to the alcohol car the races were a little further away and everyone worked so the final preparations on the car usually occurred on Friday evening.  It always seemed like we did not get on the road until 2:00 or 3:00 o'clock in the morning. The goal was always to get to the race track about 8:00 in the morning.  Since I was the only one who did not work guess who got to tow the trailer down the highway in the middle of the night. Somehow I always managed to get us there and back home on Monday morning in time for everyone to go to work and I to school.  A few bottles of Pepsi and chatter on the CB radio and I could have driven to Canada.

Of course I was back in school juggling studying, the house, the boys and the race car.  That fall I jumped into Calculus, Biology and Chemistry.  I guess I figured if I took what looked to be the hardest for me first I would know if I was smart enough to make it.  I was terrified of the Calculus class but it turned out to be one of the easiest classes I ever took.  The Chemistry was a challenge but Biology was fun.  With taking twelve hours including labs it wasn't easy and my sleeping time on test days was severely cut back.  I can remember going to bed at 9:00 and getting up at midnight to study. Also probably guilty of distracted driving as I would make index cards of formulas and stuff and study them on the thirty mile drive to Denton.


That semester I met another gal a few years older than I was trying to get her degree.  We ended up in a lot of the same classes and it felt very good to not be the only "old Lady" in school.  Actually all the teeny boppers came to hate us as we always managed to set the grading curve pretty high.  The other nice thing about being an older student was that all of the professors understood the balancing act we were doing to come back to college.  After Wally started going to the child care center at TWU they would send me a note to class if he was sick. I then had to go get him and there were many times he sat in my lap for some lecture or sat on a stool in some biology or chemistry lab.  Missing a class was definitely not in my playbook.

Have to admit that one occasion occurred that I did miss a few days of class.  Ford Motor Company did annual trips to honor dealerships and guys in the service departments that met quotas or whatever.  In the spring of 1976,  Dennis as Owner Relations Manager, we got to go on one to St. Maarten Island in the Caribbean.  Was I, who had never seen the ocean or been out of the country, going to turn that trip down for Chemistry class?  Not Hardly.  Of all the future Ford trips I got to go on that was my very favorite.  It was the most beautiful place, the nicest people and the only one when Dennis did not get sick or lose his luggage or throw a "fat fit" or end up not talking to me for two weeks after we got home.

                                  Wally and Wes on Wally's 1st Birthday

Spring also meant the beginning of racing season after working on the car and trailer all winter.  What a season it was!