Black Bart: Part 2

First of all, read the previous post if you haven't already.  It introduces you to Black Bart and chronicles my drive to Oklahoma City.

Unfortunately, due to my neglect and recklessness, Oklahoma City turned out to be Black Bart final resting place.

Like many people that join the military, I was feeling my oats and I was aching to get out on my own.  I was tired of being under the rule of my parents.  I longed for the day when I could do anything I wanted to do with no grow ups watching over me.  I was longing for some 'get into trouble' time I guess. You know--teenage boy time.  Sometimes I'm surprised I survived.

It seems like I have had always gotten into trouble with cars.  In my first two years of driving I got stopped by police quite often.  I never seemed to get a ticket though.  It may have had a little to do with the size of the town, or maybe it was because whichever cop that pulled me over happened to know my dad.  I don't know.  My job at Karl's Chevron in Auburn may have helped too because they had the contract to service the Auburn police cars.  Whatever the reason, that luck didn't follow me when I left town.  Within the first month of my arrival at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma City I had gotten one ticket for speeding and one for reckless driving--both on base.  Those two tickets totaled 9 points, putting me 3 points over the line and placing me into mandatory remedial driving class.  The reckless driving ticket was kind of funny really because I got it while stopped.  I was cruising through a housing area on base (20 mph speed limit) and for whatever reason a little puddle of water in an intersection caught my eye.  I must have been really bored.  I stopped with my rear tires in it and started doing a power-brake burnout.  The tires had just started smoking good when I heard woop woop.  I looked in the rear-view mirror and there was a cop--sitting right behind me with his lights on.  I was busted at that point, so I just let off the brake and finished the burnout, rolling to a stop a little ways ahead.  I must have been a pretty oblivious kid back then.  He was probably behind me the whole time.

There is something about driving that always clicked with me. I have always been one of those guys that, when behind the wheel of a car, almost had a sort of symbiosis with it.  When I am driving a car, it's like I feel the car. I notice the way it feels when I corner or brake or accelerate.  I feel the little things about the road surface and the car both.  Some of the moves I make tend to seem reckless to other people.  When I was younger my driving skills were constantly being tweaked and improved. I wasn't content to take a corner fast and call it good--I wanted to know how fast I could take the corner.  I wanted to know my limits, and I wanted to know my car's limits.  I was learning laws of physics (inertia, momentum, gravity, etc) by the seat of my pants.  Trial and error.  I had my share of spin outs and other boo-boos but they just added to my experience.  I like to think I might have had enough ability to have been good at racing, but I know I lacked the focus and determination that such a thing requires.  Oh, and money--there was none of that either.  I was in it for fun.  Most of what I learned about aggressive driving was learned while driving Black Bart.

The car was powerful, it was fast, and for a big car handled great. After all, it was a cop car, right? Sure, it didn't handle as well as something newer and designed for handling would have, but I think it's safe to say that it probably handled better than most cars did in its 1961 model year. It was a cop car. It had to.  I learned to do 4-wheel drifts through corners. I learned how to do a reverse turn (when you go fast backward and spin the car around without stopping).  Black Bart taught me how to steer with the gas pedal.  I pushed the car far enough into (and past) its limitations that I learned what I could and could not get away with. I did things with that car that many young men (okay--boys) only dream of doing. Many of the things I did were not very conducive to keeping the car healthy either. Slightly airborne while racing on dirt roads for instance.  (By the way, the picture above shows the left rear damage that was caused when I lost the wheel on the freeway in Part 1.)  I managed to blow yet another rear end out of it during my time in Oklahoma, but that might have more to do with the first replacement being an unknown junkyard item.

I didn't have a huge circle of friends there at Tinker Air Force Base, but the ones I did have were pretty good ones. Not many were good drivers though. Tom had a white 65 Mustang. It was a quick enough car all right, but Tom was no driver. He eventually ended up buying a screaming fast Plymouth Duster and sold his Mustang to me, but that's another story.  Wendell had a 67 Corvair with a 327 V8 in the back seat. While it was seriously fast (it hardly weighed anything), it was fraught with problems and treated a little more respectfully. In other words, it was not a "daily driver".  I believe it was Wendell who first coined the name 'Black Bart'.  There were plenty of guys with fast cars but not many that really put them through the paces like I did. The only one of my friends that ever gave me any serious competition was Ken Shelly in his 68 Pontiac GTO. He had a lot more muscle in his car than I did, but my low-slung cop car could easily out-maneuver him. He was also a good driver.

Some of my fondest experiences where playing "cat & mouse" with friends. All it took was for someone to decide (for whatever reason) that we were collectively going somewhere else. It didn't matter where we currently were or where we were going--we just loved to turn it into a competition.  It was one of those 'last one is a rotten egg' things. You know, "Race ya!" To the cars we'd run. Most times there were at least two of us in each car. That's just the way things always seemed to be.  I remember one time when I was getting off a highway cloverleaf, going from the upper roadway down to the lower one. Ken was behind me, and as usual we were playing.  To aid in my eluding him I cranked the wheel hard and took the car off the road and down the grassy slope--seriously cutting the curve and putting me inside the loop of the cloverleaf. I knew he would never take his car off the road and into the grass like that.  I was wrong.  To my surprise he didn't bat an eye and stuck behind me the whole way.  Sometimes nothing but driving skill or luck would lose him.

Actually, one of the funnest experiences I ever had in that car had nothing whatsoever to do with speed or recklessness.

There were four of us out this one particular day. We had left the base to go out to John's place and catch a little buzz after lunch. Afterwards, we were headed back towards Oklahoma City when one of the guys in the back seat started whipping his upper body forward and backward in a straight line as far as he could. Then the guy next to him joined in--both in perfect unison. They got the two of us in the front seat to join in, and pretty soon the four of us were in perfect sync, bobbing our upper bodies forward and backward wildly as we drove down the road. The street was a 35mph main drag that consisted of two lanes going in either direction with a turn lane in the center. I was driving, so that made it a little harder because of the steering wheel. Actually, the very act of driving while all this was taking place was hard.  Imagine the looks we got. Here were four guys wearing matching Air Force fatigues and hats, doing this wild, forward & back motion while going down the road in a resurrected 15 year-old cop car with huge windows. All the while we wore expressionless, deadpan looks on our faces and stared straight ahead. We could see the stares out of the corner of our eyes though, and there were plenty of them. We even kept it going when we were stopped at traffic lights. Great fun! That was one of Black Bart's best moments.  I wish we had YouTube then!

One time four of us were headed out to the northeast corner of the state for a weekend canoeing trip and we got pulled over for speeding. (Imagine that!)  I was sitting in the front seat of the state trooper's car while he wrote me a ticket. He was making comments about my beloved black cop car as he wrote.
"Is that thing even safe to be on the road?" he asked as he looked up at it momentarily then looked back down and continued writing in the ticket book.
"It'll probably outrun this Plymouth." I said, not caring what he thought about it.  I was already in trouble.
"Maybe."

Another example of blatant vehicle abuse came one day when me and Ken decided to have a pushing contest with our cars out in the middle of the barracks parking lot. I carefully eased Black Bart up against the rubberized nose of Ken's GTO. When we got the signal from whoever it was that was there with us, we both floored it. Amid screaming engines and smoking tires, Black Bart steadily pushed Ken's car backward. When we let off the gas I found my throttle to be stuck and had to shut the key off to stop it. Ken parked his car and got out laughing his ass off.  When I got out and opened the hood to unstick the throttle I was surprised to find the engine sitting at a slant! Obviously, my antics caused the motor mounts, already weakened from age, to break completely apart.  With nothing to hold the engine in place, the torque took over and tried to spin it.  I'll bet it would have been interesting to see while it was happening.  After I freed up the throttle linkage the best I could I started the engine back up. With me gently playing the gas pedal while in reverse and a friend prying with a 2x4, we got the engine popped back into position.

I started to neglect Bart and it slowly spiraled downhill.  The wheel covers were probably the earliest casualties.  Over time they ended up coming off during driving stunts, and at some point I removed the remaining ones.  Although that made the car start to look a little more like a beater, it also had a kind of a stealth car look to it.  It had an almost evil "Get out of my way... I've got nothing to lose" look to it.  The paint ended up getting touched up with spray cans here and there, and wherever that happened the gloss was gone.  The fact that I lived in a barracks building didn't help either because there were limited places anyone could wash a car.  Over time I ended up adding to the cars that I owned, and that caused Bart to get more idle time and sit in the parking lot collecting road dust from passing traffic.

One day I came back to the barracks after being out partying with friends.  At that time I had four cars, and the three that weren't being driven were always parked on the outermost row of the parking lot, facing the street so they were out of the way.  I don't remember if I went to swap cars or went to get something out of one of the other cars, but I saw something was in the windshield of Black Bart.  I got in the car and across the whole top of the dash was a long piece of cardboard with a scrawled message across it that read, "Why not stick around?"  Apparently, my parents had dropped in during a vacation trip.  Remember, that was before cell phones.  I had no idea they were there.  I contacted the motel they were staying at, but they had already checked out and gone the day before.  That was strange to think that my parents had driven there from Washington state to visit me in Oklahoma City and never saw them.

One night I had driven Black Bart to a party at someone's house off-base.  I don't know what exactly (or how much of it) clouded my judgement, but Tom asked to borrow my car to go get some beer or something and I mistakenly let him take it.  Someone else went with him, but who it was isn't important.  A couple hours went by.  Tom finally showed up--without my car.  He said he got stuck or something out at Draper Lake.  I was mad obviously, because he was going to a store.  Draper Lake was a man-made reservoir that was surrounded by miles of fun, curvy dirt roads.  We liked to race and have fun on them and we all knew them well.  The next day a couple of us went out to retrieve my car.  When Tom led us to it, I found it straddling a 3-foot deep ditch with its oil pan bashed in.  It started right up, but sounded bad for obvious reasons.  After all, the crankshaft was spinning against the oil pan.  It also had no oil pressure--again no surprise.  In retrospect, I should have towed it.  I could have taken off the oil pan and fixed it right where it was.  No, I was stupid.  I jockeyed it off the ditch and drove it all the way back to the base.  I don't remember how far it actually was, but 'm surprised it made it.  It was sounding pretty bad and starting to overheat.  When I shut it off it stopped turning instantly.  No wind-down.  I basically killed my beloved Black Bart by stupidity on multiple levels.  Yes, I could have fixed it, but I had other cars to drive.  Instead, I called a roll-truck to come and get it.

I argued with the guy that picked it up and managed to get $35 cash out of him.  Regretfully, I watched my poor car go down the road.  I had let him down.

Black Bart had personality.  Black Bart was one-of-a-kind.  And his spot light even still worked.