Close Calls

Back in the late '60's I was driving my parents '62 Plymouth wagon with a bunch of buddies. I was flying down a two lane road when I suddenly noticed a right angle bend in the road...and I was going too fast. So I yanked the wheel to the left as hard as I could. That's when the engine stalled and the car slid sideways. Then I had to yank the wheel to the right without any power steering to stay on the road. That's when the car slide out the other way.
We came to a stop backwards a few feet from a busy four lane highway.

A year or two later I had a '63 Dodge Dart and took it out for a ride with a buddy one night while drinking a few too many beers. It was getting close to midnight and I was in a hurry to get home so I had the pedal to the metal doing about 100 mph. As I was flying down the road I again noticed a bend I wasn't going to make. The car rear end kicked sideways and I noticed I was headed right for a telephone pole on the opposite side of the road. So again I yanked on the steering wheel as hard as I could to the right which spun the car around backwards and caused us to shoot off the right side of the road. We landed two feet lower in a wheat field and the car was mowing down the wheat sideways. We had our windows open and the car was filling with wheat dust. As we flew along sideways my buddy said something to the effect that if we stopped we might get stuck in the field.
I agreed and hit the starter figuring the engine had stalled. It hadn't so as we slowed I started driving through the field looking for the road.
Eventually we found it and pulled out. That's when we noticed something was wrong so we pulled into someone's driveway and discovered we had a flat rear tire. We tried to change it but the car kept falling off the jack as we were too drunk to figure out how to use the bumper jack correctly.
As we struggled along some guy stopped and asked us if we had just had a wreck. We said sort of but we were okay and he told us he was sitting on his porch and heard this horrible squealing of tires and figured somebody was dead.
Anyway we made it back to the local gas station where we pulled all the wheels and popped the tires off to get the wheat out that was stuck between the wheel rims and the tires. Then we vacuumed out the car.

A year or two later....in the same car....one of my Marine buddies just got back from Viet Nam where he earned a silver star and purple heart. So we got a couple bottles of wine and some weed to celebrate. After we finished the weed and wine I was taking him back to his parents house on another two lane road at about one in the morning.
I used to see how far I could coast downhill to his house to save gas money. Many a night we would visit closed gas stations at night to drain the pump hoses into a gas can to get some free gas.
And another bend in the road.
This time the rear end kicked out to the left becasue of some gravel on the road. If I was in gear I could have pulled it out of the slide...but it wasn't and I heard a big bang and the car stopped in the middle of the road.
We jumped out and discovered I had hit a bunch of mail boxes for a trailer park. Thirty three to be exact. They were originally bolted onto an inch and half steel pipe which had entered my rear fender right below the gas cap and was now sticking three feet out of my trunk lid, sans mailboxes. If it had entered the driver's door I would have been cut in half.
The Marine wanted to take off as the car was still running and as we debated what to do we suddenly noticed a crowd had formed.
Anyway, the Marine wanted to kill a few old ladies who were laughing, the owner of the trailer park turned out to be a cop, he gave us a hacksaw to cut the pipe off at my trunk, and we ended up getting off by just buying everybody new mailboxes.
Then I took the marine home, backed out of his driveway, hit his mailbox, and ended up with my rear wheels off the ground so I had to go back and knock on his door to get him to help me push the car off of his mailbox post.
Later on I bought an enter walk around rear end for the car and had my cousin weld it all back together.

Next time:
I almost get hit by a train, see that light people talk about, get rear ended on my motorcycle, and almost die from a stomach ulcer.

 

Yeah, still driving and I haven't been off the road for a few years. Last time was when the rear of my Miata kicked out...wait for it...on a turn. I managed to just kiss a road sign. It was vibrating but no damage to the car.

We used to be pretty wild back in the late '60s, early seventies. Lost a few friends to car wrecks.

I knew this dude that had a brand new 1969 428 Cobra Jet. Basically a 400 HP street race car. Very low production, they were made for Daytona races.
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One time we were out and about driving around while on acid and he decided he was too wasted to drive, so I took over. This happened a lot.
We were cruising down this two lane road at night with me at the wheel when I noticed he was looking at the passenger window and talking away about something. So, I asked him what he was doing. He looked at me kind of funny, paused and said, "I thought I was driving." He was looking at his reflection in the passenger window and thought it was me.
A couple minutes later I looked down the road and realized I was at the end of a long line of cars just poking along.
Then I thought, "Here I am driving a 400 HP muscle car and I'm in the back of a line of cars. I should be in front and people will think I'm a sissy if I stay here." Or something like that.
So I pulled over into the left oncoming lane, and punched it. The four barrel kicked in, the hood scoop snapped open, the front end rose, and the gas gauge started to fall.
With a roar we were off passing cars and gaining speed by the second.

Then I noticed tractor trailer headlights in front of me and realized there were too many cars still ahead. We weren't going to make it. I couldn't get back into the line of cars on the right. If I hit the brakes it wouldn't help and on the left was no berm and metal guard rails.
We were trapped with nowhere to go and an intersection with the truck was imminent.

Then I noticed a side road on the left so again I spun the wheel and darted down the road just as the truck went flying by on our right, air horns blaring away.
My buddy just looked at me and asked, "Did that just happen."

We almost got hit by a train in the same car when I was driving it one time cause he was too messed up on opidope to drive himself and I thought the train was a car and I could beat it to the intersection which was really train tracks. Luckily he also blew his air horns.

 

Oh yeah.

No we never thought we were invincible, we just didn't care. Live for the day. It was a different time, we'd been through the Cuban missile crisis, various assassinations, Kent State, and the possibility of being fed into the Vietnam meat grinder at any time. So who gave a flying F?“

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