This is off
Leo Kottke’s “Chewing Pine” album and has a good vocal. Back in the 70’s, Leo
toured with Procol Harum and I guess he liked their version, but I’ve never
heard it.
This album
came out just as I was preparing to leave Accutronics for Blackburn College. It
brings to mind the trip I made 2-3 times a week from Algonquin to Elgin
Community College. Back in 1975 Randall Road, the route I took, avoided towns
between Algonquin and Elgin. It was a two lane farm road that had 4 stop signs
and a rough train crossing in Elgin.
Today, it’s
a four lane superhighway that has 6 lanes in spots, and I don’t know how many
stop lights between Algonquin and Elgin. I used to be able to make the 13 mile
run in about 20-25 minutes. If you go down Randall Road today it’s probably
30-35 minutes at best. (I just Google mapped it and they say it’s 27 minutes,
if you don’t go down Randall Road.
My car then
was my second 1968 Mustang which replaced my beloved 1967 Austin-Healy Sprite, the
first car bought with my money ($350). People today don’t believe I ever fit in
that car, until I remind them I weighed almost 100 pounds less than I do today,
though I was still 6’4” and still growing. It was a great little car that got
good mileage, perfect for back and forth to school, though ungodly cold in
winter. It barely had a heater and, being a convertible, had loose fitting
window coverage. I would duct tape the passenger side to cut down on the cold
coming in.
It also had
no radio, so, after buying a Radio Shack power converter, which converted power
from positive ground to negative ground (or vice versa, I can’t remember), I
installed a small Pioneer cassette player.
This was in
the pre-1973 “gas crisis” days, when I could fill the tank with a $2 roll of
nickels (6 gallons @ 37 cents/gal). It was the last car I ever had that I could
actually do maintenance on, other than oil change. I replaced the exhaust
system myself, buying the parts from Warshawsky in Chicago.
I ran into
the back end of a Ford LTD in 1975 and did no damage to his car, my front end
was mooshed, It was then I found out that the insurance I was paying to my dad
was only for liability, not Collision, so when they wanted $600 to fix it, I
moved on to the 1968 Mustang which I kept for several years, going so far as to
put money into it, to the tune of $800 or so, to have my buddy Mike C (of the
.45 under the seat, see #6- “1979”and “Disarm”) now working on his own, running
a body shop, put in new floorboards and replace the wheel wells, which were
rusted through.
I could see
the road go by through my feet, like Fred Flintstone, so they welded new metal
floorboards and they took wheel wells from an AMC Pacer and welded them into
the Mustang. It was then painted Illinois Bell green (a dark green that all the
trucks were painted in the 60’s and 70’s).
It got me
another four years out of it until I traded it in in 1979 on the only car I’ve
ever bought new, a 1979 Mustang. Bought it for $6500 cash, and sold it for
$2500 cash 5 years later.
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