| This is another account of my 1955 Ford which was introduced in the previous story. One day I was speeding my way home from a town about 8 miles away when suddenly the whole car started to shake from the engine starting to miss-fire. When I finally limped home, I checked everything I could think of and not finding anything, I wondered if maybe I had a bad connecting rod. I drained the oil and removed the oil pan and saw pieces of piston in the bottom of it! That didn't look too good, to say the least! In those days we could go to the local junk yard a few miles down the road and get an entire engine for $50.00! My brother had replaced the engine in his 1958 Ford when the original one "blew up" from too much "wear" (You get a lot of "wear" from drag racing)! I left my car sitting in its usual parking place and figured to "eventually" go to the junk yard and get another engine to put in it. We used a big hickory tree in the lane to hang a block and tackle to do engine replacements. (see pic of the tree on the bottom of page) If I ever find it, I'll post some pics of my '55 Ford! It was FAST! Anyway, as a result of my life-long habit of procrastination (I'm going to stop doing that "TOMORROW"!), my car sat around for quite awhile. One evening Tim took a sledge hammer and as I was walking across the lawn and in my line of sight, he took the sledge hammer and said, "We're "smashing" prices on our used cars"! (mimicking a current T.V. ad). Just after saying that, as in the ad, he then took a big swing with the sledge hammer and smashed it right through the windshield of my car! One thing led to another, and as a result, BOTH of us were taking turns swinging the sledge and hitting various parts of my car! Oh well, I just resigned myself that this was the end of my '55 Ford! After we "Sledge hammered the daylights of of it", we took a tractor and towed it across the road. Tim and/or myself got the idea to turn it on its side and set it on fire! Before setting the fire with a lot of gas, we went out to the road and kicked berm stones in the road to make it look as if it swerved off the road at high speed then rolled over. After we lit the fire, I laid down on the ground to look as if I was thrown from the rolling car! We can still picture all the passing traffic going very slowly along the road to see the spectacular, fiery "wreck"! |
