My dad’s name was Durward. His brother’s name was Charles. When Durward was a teenager he lied about his age to get into the Alabama National Guard. He loved camping, and the Guard had that. But then Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, war was declared, and the Guard was nationalized. It became part of the Army, and my dad was sent to Virginia for training and then to war in the Pacific. After the war ended, he married a Virginia woman and Virginia is where he lived most of his life. My uncle Charles went into the Army Air Corps. After the war he married and he and his wife settled in Florida in the Pinellas County area.
Charles was a man living in the wrong century. He was an 18th century kind of man. He was physically very strong, intelligent, a womanizer (to the extent he could get away with it without pissing off his wife too badly), and he was a heavy drinker and smoker (as was his brother). He founded a used car company with a $600 loan from my dad. The company was successful. When Charles saw that many of his customers borrowed money to finance their purchases, he did the obvious thing and founded a loan company to finance sales of his cars. He made money from the sale of cars and additional money from interest on the loans. Eventually Charles got into buying and selling mortgages. He made money easily and burned through it even more easily because of his lifestyle. He liked to have a good time, and a good time usually included women and booze.
One day Charles traveled to Virginia to visit Durward. He said he wanted to buy Durward a new car, and he did. He bought Durward a 1960 Buick Electra. The Electra was a 4700—4900 pound luxury car. The engine was a 401 cubic-inch Wildcat V8 with a four-barrel carburetor.
Charles suggested that Durward use his new Buick to drive him (Charles) back home to Pinellas County, Florida. This was before the Interstate highway system was completed, so Charles and Durward drove south on a US highway, probably route 1, which could take them to Jacksonville, at which point they could go west across the state and then head south toward Pinellas County. They almost made it there when an incident occurred.
The two men took turns driving, and at this point in their journey Charles was driving. He was not the kind of man to dawdle if there was an alternative, and there was. Charles was driving at 120 mph. He could have gone faster but he didn’t want to break the speedometer on the new car as he had done to his own car. So he kept the speedometer at (or just above) 120 mph as the Buick cruised down the highway with its Wildcat engine purring.
The highways in Florida in 1960 tended to be long and flat and straight. For some reason, Durward happened to look through the rear window and saw, far behind them in the distance, a flashing red light. He said to Charles, “You’d better pull over. That cop is probably after us.”
Charles pulled off the highway and switched off the engine. A few minutes later the police car, a Plymouth, arrived and pulled up behind the Buick. Steam poured from the Plymouth’s overheated engine. The cop got out and walked up to the Buick and spoke to Charles.
“Don’t go anywhere,” he told Charles. “I have to go back to my car and radio for them to take down the roadblock.”
“Roadblock?” Charles asked.
“You outran two police cars,” the cop explained, “and you were outrunning me, so I radioed for a roadblock.”
Charles and Durward were law-abiding citizens except for laws they considered patently unreasonable, like speed limits. Being law-abiding is why they pulled off the highway and waited.
The cop returned and said he was going to ticket Charles for going 120 mph. Charles protested.
“You can’t do that. You were never close enough to us to know how fast we were going.”
“I was going 120,” the cop replied, “and I couldn’t catch you.”
But Charles was an experienced bargainer and he got the ticket reduced to 85 mph. “If we had gotten into the next county,” he told Durward, “we would have been home free.” Charles knew most of the cops in Pinellas County.
Thinking about the incident now, I am surprised Charles didn’t get ticketed for DUI. But it was a different time. Attitudes about many things were different then. There were no breathalyzers, and a cop might give you a pass unless you were obviously intoxicated. Or maybe both men were sober. I like to think that was the case.
And that’s the story as I heard it from someone who was there.
But that’s not the end of the Buick story. When Charles’ wife found out that Charles had bought his brother a new Buick Electra, her head exploded (metaphorically). She demanded that Charles get the money back. So Charles asked Durward to borrow money on the car and send it to him so he could have peace in his home once more. And my dad did exactly that.
There are more adventures with the Buick, and I’ll try to write about all of them. I’ve already posted a story that included the Buick, titled How I Learned To Drive.
Eventually, after one attempt that failed, the Buick was stolen from its parking spot in front of our house. The thief was never identified.
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