Judy and I borrowed her parents' car (a 1957 Plymouth Fury similar to the one in the picture but light green instead of blue) to take some of our worldly possessions to Austin in. We didn't have a lot of worldly possessions, so the Fury plus our Ford would do the job. When we arrived in Denton with the car early in the evening, we stopped to get gas, and there was Ray Peterson of "Tell Laura I Love Her" fame filling his car. I recognized him immediately, having seen him on TV a few times. It was easy to see that he wasn't like the rest of us. Nobody else I knew had hair like him. What surprised me what that he had a serious limp. I didn't know until years later that he'd had polio as a child. I also didn't know that Denton was his hometown. I wish I'd gotten his autograph, but I was much too shy to say anything.
The next day Judy went to work as usual, leaving me at the apartment to pack the cars. The day was August 1, 1966. Here's why I know the date. I turned on the radio to listen to music while I worked, but there wasn't any music. There was just talk because somebody was on the Tower at The University of Texas at Austin, shooting at people. His name, as we found out later, was Charles Whitman. He killed 14 people and wounded a lot of others before he was killed himself. I found out when I read accounts of the event in the paper that one of the wounded was the brother of one of my high school classmates, and of course I heard a number of first-person accounts after I got to town. It was a terrible thing, and it made me a little apprehensive about our move, but we were committed to leaving.
The Tower had always been one of my favorite places on the UT campus. I'd gone there on my first visit to the campus, and my college roommate, Walter Funk, and I made it a point to go up and check out the view at least once every semester. The photo of us was taken in November, 1960, our sophomore year. I'm the one on the left. You can sort of see the Capitol Building between us. The skyline is a lot different now. After the Whitman incident, the Tower was closed for a while, and it's been closed and reopened a number of times over the years. I don't know if it's open now.But I've digressed again. On August 2, Judy and I got into the Ford and they Plymouth and left Denton for the last time.
15 comments:
My aunt and uncle had the same car, only red and white. I put in a lot of miles in that car. Cousin Georgie had in one day and Drive went out on the push-button transmission, so he backed up from Ossining to Peekskill, a good 20 miles.
had it one day. And mean I put in miles as a passenger.
Judy loved that push-button shifter.
Jackie agrees with Deb - you need to think about publishing this.
Jeff
We owned two '57 Plymouths, one a Savoy, the other a Belvedere. One was a black convertible with push button drive, the other a gear shift.
Great cars!
Great cars! Great times! And most especially Great Criders!
Love the 57 Plymouths. Dig those curb feelers!
I'll add my vote to cobble these, and many more together and publish the resulting biography.
I remember that day. Little did we know it would ecentually be a common occurrence.
my next door neighbor is a car nut. a lovely old Caddy convertible sits in the driveway we share and an old Chevy (college) is in the garage. there are 6 cars there for Stan and Regina. I've never cared much about what kind of car I had as long as it got me where I need to go. But over the years of listening to Stan talk about his - mostly with love, but sometimes telling me of their trials and tribulations, I have developed an appreciation. So keep posting car stories and photos to entertain your fans. Fins - I like fins on the oldies.
I miss fins and being able to see out the back window.
Seeing out the back window is probably an unconscious reason I've stuck with station wagons, and the minivannish things they sell instead of wagons such as my current Matrix, so far. The Moving Wall of Steel/the Death Machine, my family's 1979 Sport Suburban wagon with the Fury dashboard, also co need out in transmission as I was leaving the Metro station in Vienna, VA...just as I was entering US 66, and it, too, would only go in reverse, suddenly, though I was fortunate enough to just have to roll back up the ramp into the parking lot. So, another Chrysler tradition perpetuated.
That was a hell of a night, too...I'd been able to go to the after-partt of the first Thelonious Monk Memorial Concert, after attending, and so got to meet David Amram, Wynton Marsalis, Gerry Mulligan, Urszula Dudziak and T.S. Monk III, who was one of the organizers as well as a musician in his own right. Very heady for a young lifelong jazz fan...and I was on my way to a late study date with a very nice woman name Deidre, who was from Barbados and very geekily charming, but treating with the car (which was scrapped after that, as the repair seemed to my parents too expensive to be worth doing) pushed that to too late a date, and with one thing or another I never did get to get too close with Deidre (another woman was already interested in me and finally let me know, and we were together for nine years, so there was that). Some nights are more memorable than others.
Meanwhile, Whitman has been most relevant to my experience because of the film TARGETS, which succeeds in part on the brilliant performance of the actor playing the Whitman analog...I hope to keep real-life Whitman analogs pretty much out of my life indefinitely, thanks...
Thanks for continuing the reminiscences! These put me in mind of a superior version of the likes of Bob Greene's memoirs, in their casual clarity in bringing back the places at their times...
After-party, of course.
And the spell-checker, which I really should disable, changed "conked out in transmission" (not the clearest phrase) to "co need in transmission" above. Ah, well.
Great memories, conked or not.
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