The Barracuda

I had been stationed at Keesler AFB (tech school) for a couple of months in the spring of 1973 when I started thinking about getting a car (I hadn't owned one for 8 months)... I mentioned that to my father when I called him one Sunday afternoon and it turned out he was in the process of buying a new '73 Dodge Charger and had only been offered $300 to trade in his '68 Plymouth Barracuda convertible. Now - I was familiar with the "vert" (having driven it in New York a few years earlier) and when I expressed interest, my dad's response was something like "I'd much rather see you have it than sell it to the dealer for that."

Now, silly me - I took that to mean that he was either going to sell it to me for what the dealer had offered or (less likely) give me the car outright... I figured that even with the car's high mileage (around 100K, which was considered a lot back then) the "worst case" price of $300 plus $150 for airfare to Milwaukee was still a reasonable deal so I told him I'd fly up there the next weekend to pick it up.

OK... Here's where I go "off-topic" for a few paragraphs:

I could have caught a shuttle bus from Biloxi to the New Orleans airport but that would have taken a couple of hours and I wasn't particularly patient so I booked a seat on a "taxi flight" out of Gulfport instead... That was the first of many times I flew on Gulf Coast Airlines (now defunct), and I was a bit surprised (and amused) when the guy working the ticket counter hauled all the luggage out to the plane and load it into the hold... I was even more surprised when he climbed into the cockpit and sat down behind the controls... Yeah - it was that kind of airlines :-)

Aside: That was the only time I ever flew anywhere in my uniform. I thought we had to wear our "dress blues" when traveling. I guess I'd seen so many soldiers at airports that it never crossed my mind that it was optional... Who knew?

I boarded the flight to Milwaukee in New Orleans and ended up sitting next to a guy who was an obvious "redneck", and the second I saw him I got this really sick feeling deep in my gut. That was because I'd had long hair for many years prior to joining the Air Force and had been mercilessly harassed by guys like him more times than I could count. They never seemed to have any qualms about calling me a hippie / commie / fag / junkie or whatever else crossed their minds. So I braced myself for the barrage of insults and epithets that was surely about to be hurled my direction.

Yeah - I had totally forgotten that I was now a soldier... The guy absolutely beamed when I sat down next to him and at one point he literally gave me the food off his plate... I just couldn't get over the irony. A few months earlier (when I was still a "hippie") he most likely would have cussed me out - and now that I was wearing a uniform I was his best buddy... I felt kind of like I was accepting his kindness under false pretenses... It was just too weird :-)

And back to the story:

That was the first time I had visited my dad since he moved from New York to Milwaukee. His new job was managing an obscure division (medium scale power generation?) of Allis Chalmers and he was living in a condo at the corner of East Kane and Summit. The building only had 8 units (one per floor) and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (who was then playing for the Milwaukee Bucks) lived a couple of floors up.

I don't remember a whole lot about the visit (it was for less than a day), but when I got there we drove around Milwaukee for a while. Here's the proof:

As you can see, I was in uniform and my hair was still pretty short.

When we got to the condo dad found the car title and made what seemed like a really odd comment. He said "I've been looking at the classifieds and people seem to be asking around $500 for cars like the Barracuda, so I think that's a fair price"... I remember thinking "Well, that's interesting, but I don't see the relevance..." and then it hit me. He was saying he wanted $500 for the car...

Now - that wasn't an outrageously high price, but it was probably a bit more than he could've gotten selling it locally. And when you add in the $150 I'd already spent on airfare it was a horrible deal... So I had 2 options: Spend another $150 for airfare back to Biloxi ($300 total for a wasted trip), or write a check for $500 (almost every penny I had) and get a car out of the deal... So I chose the latter...

(Note that these amounts are in 1973 dollars. To adjust to 2013 dollars multiply by 5... )

You know - I really should have seen it coming... After all, we're talking about the same man who 18 months earlier had promised to pay my college tuition and then later claimed it was an advance on my child support (causing me to be evicted)... Of course, many years later he would deny ever having done anything like that to me. But that was dad - clueless to the end :-)

I don't remember very much about the 1000+ mile drive back to Biloxi. I know I left really early Sunday morning because it was still pitch black when I passed through Chicago. That's where I had a close call with a semi. (I got "squeezed" between the truck and a concrete barrier in a construction zone. I have no idea how I avoided making contact with one or the other.)
I remember going through Illinois and tiny bits of Kentucky and Tennessee on my way to Mississippi, and it was around 10PM when I finally got back to Keesler... That was a long day's drive :-)

Aside: I didn't transfer the title on the Barracuda until I got to Oregon in December and when the guy at the DMV checked the VIN against the title he discovered one digit didn't agree ("8" vs "B"). I had the paperwork from when my dad bought the car new and it also showed the error... So the thing had been titled in Massachusetts, New York and Wisconsin without anyone ever noticing the discrepancy... It took some extra paperwork, but we got it all straightened out...

Yeah - despite the "excessive" cost it was nice having wheels again :-)