Out and About

This may be my most uninteresting post ever... It's mostly here for completeness :-)

I don't think I've mentioned this before, but my sister Karina didn't get a driver's license until she was in her early 20's. I was quite puzzled by that. I couldn't wait to get behind the wheel but I was perpetually stuck on the waiting list for driver's ed class... I think Karina felt she was just a bit too "unstable" to be driving - a conclusion she probably reached from riding with my mom :-)

The point of the above is that when mom was off at work during the summer of 1969 I was stuck without transportation. Of course, Karina had boyfriends to take her places and sometimes I'd tag along - but lets just say I wasn't always welcome :-) Some days I had band practice (and had to walk to drummer Gary's house) but most days I was plain bored - and some days getting drunk just wasn't entertaining enough :-)
BTW: I should probably point out that this was prior to the "fast food" explosion and I was stuck right in the middle of the baby boom. Hence it was almost impossible for teenagers to get a summer job (I tried). Most who did worked for parents or relatives...

Now - I had always been interested in cars. As I mentioned many posts ago, by the age of 6 or 7 I could identify the make, model and year of almost any vehicle on the road. And by 1969 cars seemed to have become my generation's central focus... It was pure luck that my high school years coincided with one of the most incredible eras in automotive history. Those years saw the introduction of the Firebird, Camaro, Road Runner, GTX, Charger, SuperBee, SS-396 Chevelle, 427 Vette, AMX, Cougar, Mach I and Boss 302 Mustangs, Shelby GT500, Torino Talladega, Dodge Daytona and Plymouth Superbird - not to mention the Mopar street Hemi engine. And the list goes on... The high school parking lots overflowed with muscle and pony cars... And immediately after I graduated the car makers put the brakes on performance... The passage of the Clean Air Act coupled with insanely high car insurance rates shifted Detroit's focus to other memorable models like the Pinto, Maverick, Vega, Chevette, Monza and Gremlin (AKA the dark ages)... I still shudder thinking about it... But I sort of digress :-)

That summer - out of sheer boredom - I often ventured out onto the streets of Escondido... The mall was right down the hill from our apartments but for some reason I didn't find it a compelling place to hang out... Most days I headed over to Finder's Music, grabbed a guitar and played around a bit. But they knew I wasn't going to buy anything so eventually they'd politely nudge me toward the door. I really don't blame them - otherwise the place would be full of teenagers with nothing else to do :-)

And that left the car dealerships... It took quite a while to hike to most of them and the summer temperatures were frequently in the 90s. But it was worth it to see all that Detroit muscle sitting on the showroom floors...
It should come as no surprise that the car dealerships were considerably less hospitable to teenagers than the music stores :-) They weren't really rude and they didn't mind you drooling over the cars for a few minutes - but if you stayed much longer they'd hit you with the standard "C'mon - we're trying to sell cars here - how about giving us a break?" plea. Luckily I was a sucker for sales brochures, posters and trinkets and it didn't take much of a bribe to get me to leave :-)

By the end of the summer I had a pretty impressive collection of muscle car sales collateral. In addition, my mom had snagged a bunch of the Big Three's "press packets" for me when she worked at the newspaper. (Those were really hard to come by - the newspaper didn't do automotive articles and were going to throw them out...) That collection would be worth a small fortune today. That is if I hadn't thrown it all out during one of my early "zen" phases :-)

So - I'm getting close to being done with Escondido... I've got one more band to talk about - some memories from the first part of my senior year - and let's not forget the Eric Burdon story... Then it's on to the strangest journey of my life...