Benard Marx and Rusty from the Rusty Hammer Hardware Store were over at the Grounds for Divorce the other morning. Benard found a listing on Bring a Trailer that apparently stirred some memories. That’s what old cars and trucks do, isn’t it? While trying not to intrude, I tried to jot down what was said as the two of them skipped down memory lane. It went something like this . . . .
Great looking truck isn’t it? Man, seeing it really takes me back. I used to drive four of those. I was working construction in a refinery in Corpus Christi and our company had the trucks to drive work crews around to various jobs within the plant. One of them was robin’s egg blue and had a three on the tree. Pretty sure the engine was a 305. It was my favorite of all of them and the one that the crew I was on used.
The refinery was undergoing a massive expansion and their management had to bring in contract workers to assure that the low-end jobs kept getting done while the plant workers were off doing more important things and the union workers built the new additions to the plant. I was among the lowest reaches of the employment hierarchy in our crew. To make matters worse, the refinery employees tended to think of us contractors as the cockroach scum beneath their feet. I’d been working there for a year and knew the refinery and the job requirements pretty well as did the other young guys on the crew. Our crew was Wolfy, Chuck, Alan, Gino, Frank, and me. We were all in our early 20s. Our company had a few foremen that knew what they were doing and we respected them. Then they hired Larry to be our new foreman.
Larry seemed unsure of himself from the get go. At the start we cut him a lot of slack. Within a few weeks we knew that Larry had no idea of what he was doing. Later still, we found out that he had been a shoe salesman prior to being hired to be our foreman. He would have been tolerable if he had not pretended to be an experienced construction worker, and if he had allowed us to teach him how the work should be done.
In that world about the lowest meanest insult to spit at someone was to call them a “worm”. One day we low level workers were complaining to each other about our supposed superior. I offered, “You know how Fury was the Wonder Horse?”
The guys, “Yeah.”
And how was it always Wonder Woman?”
The guys,”Yeah”
And, how Bobbie, Lemmy, Waffle, and Lassie were all the Wonder Dog?”
The annoyed guys, “Yeah, yeah.”
“Well, I nominate Larry to be the Wonder Worm.” The guys loved Larry’s new name. The name stuck and spread. It spread to the point that even the refinery employees knew his “good natured” nickname and would use it addressing him. I’m not sure why, but Larry didn’t seem to care for his new name.
After the joy went out of calling him Wonder Worm, we dreamed up an upgraded torment for Larry. One of the guys in the crew had heard that if you put an electrical wire underneath a spark plug wire cup at the plug and run it into the cab under the driver seat, each time the plug fired an intense electrical jolt would bite the driver in the butt. Well, we did just that.
Larry had been in the foreman’s trailer getting a work assignment for us. While he was in the trailer we finished pushing the wire to just under the fabric of the bench seat. We all were waiting with baited breath waiting to see if our wiring job would work. Larry came out, assumed his “rightful position” as a big time foreman behind the steering wheel, and turned the key. And…. nothing!
We cruised to our work assignment and set to work as Larry pretended to be important and understood what we were doing. While Larry was away from the truck, we rechecked our wiring job and everything seemed in order. As an attempted fix, we pushed the wire even closer to the fabric and then rubbed a little water into the fabric about the wire.
After our assignment was done, we loaded up in the truck. Again, Larry hit the starter and…. nothing. As we drove back to the foreman’s trailer for our next job assignment, Larry jerked his arm off the windowsill saying, “Damn! This thing is shocking me! Damn!!” He did that about four times, each time he got a bigger shock. He next felt the shock in his posterior. Feeling that, Larry screamed and tried to jump off the seat while still holding the steering wheel. He’d raise up and when his butt came back down to the seat, he was bit again. Screaming, Larry jumped out of the still moving truck. Chuck, sitting next to him in the cab, grabbed the wheel and killed the ignition. The truck chug rolled to a stop.
“There’s something wrong with this truck!”, Larry shouted. We all played innocent, doing our best to not burst into laughter. Larry jerked open the hood of the truck and peered around looking for what might be wrong. The only thing under the hood that wasn’t covered with dried muddy water was the wire we’d rigged up. Amazingly, somehow Larry didn’t see the clean wire. We all pretended to examine the engine looking for something wrong and pretended to be mystified. Larry shouted, “Well, I’m not drivin’ that F’ing truck! Chuck, you drive!”
We were not willing to confess and neither was Chuck. Chuck eased onto the driver’s seat, cranked the engine, and waited to have high voltage bite his butt. Fortune smiled! Chuck didn’t get bit on the butt. Breathing a huge sigh of relief, he drove us back to the foreman’s trailer. Larry, still fuming, entered the trailer and the rest of us spent the next half hour rolling on the ground in laughter.
The next day the whole refinery knew what we’d done and were delighted to have an opportunity to laugh with us. Larry had become truly famous.
That was over 48 years ago. I’m still laughing. I’m afraid that this is just one of the reasons I’ll be greeted by Mr. Satan on my first day out of here.
Thanks to Benard for sharing one of his auto-related stories from his misspent youth.
6 responses to “SHOCKING”
Driving the 1991 Glidden Tour for pre-WWII vehicles, we were based out of Lexington, Kentucky. I helped push a Model-T up a wet, grassy area, and jumped back into our 1927 Chevy Roadster. My foot slipped off the clutch pedal and the car would not move in any gear. My first thought was that the transmission input shaft had snapped, or the infamous rear axle had snapped (not uncommon for 4-cylinder Chevys). Turns out that the clutch disk shattered. One friend knew a good shop nearby in Versailles, and another knew of a used disk I could have relined. By 10:00 the the next morning the borrowed clutch disk was relined and installed, and by noon we were back on the tour. All went great until Friday morning. Each time I stepped on the clutch pedal, the engine tried to kill, so I drove the entire day using matching RPM to shift, and only when really necessary.
It didn’t make any sense that the new clutch could kill the engine!
Ultimately the issue was discovered. I pulled up the floorboard and saw the problem. The gent who helped get me back on the road had routed the positive battery cable too close to the clutch pedal, grounding out the entire electrical system each time the pedal was pushed down. I wrapped it with a slice piece of heater hose and electric tape, finished the tour, and replaced the cable when we made it back home the next week.
Mr. Roth a great story as always but I sure hope you knew the Kentuckian way of pronouncing Versailles (“ver-sails” for the unaware) unlike me who was ridiculed unmercifully once when passing through and asking directions.
From that fateful day on, I’ve always wondered if that shining example of malaise era mediocrity, the Lincoln Versailles was pronounced the same way in the Bluegrass State.
And I write “was” because there can’t be any of those turds still on the road.
Pickup trucks certainly have changed in the last 50 years.
How about quietly turning the ignition to “on” while a guy is leaning over to adjust the points with a feeler gauge in a V8 Ford and hearing him yell and bang his head on the hood .
T’would seem that Bernard failed to understand that it was Larry’s arm was completing the circuit as he rested his arm on the METAL door, his arm was the ground resulting in the shock he got. And I am an accountant not an engineer . . .
Another true story from back in the time when several of our little group were competing in stage rallies… My buddy Bill ran a foreign car parts store/repair shop. He hired Kevin, a young man just out of high school, to answer phones and run parts. Kevin was a good kid – smart and eager to learn the business, but without any real-world experience. To follow this tale, you have to understand that most of our cars were modified in one way or another and Kevin thought his Honda Accord (a bone-stock, 4-door, 4-speed grocery-getter) would benefit from a set of driving lights. Bosch was one of our sponsors and Bill’s shop sold their lighting kits, so Kevin bought one for his Honda. He installed the lights himself and was pleased with the new look and better night-time vision.
One day, about a month after the installation, Kevin asked Bill why his lights came on and went off when he shifted gears. We all looked at each other and rolled our eyes, thinking that Kevin was imagining things. This went on for several days, until Kevin offered to take someone for a ride to verify the problem. Sure enough, when he went from first to second, the driving lights came on! The problem? Bosch provided extremely long wires in the kit so that you’d have enough length, even if you were wiring a truck. Instead of trimming the excess from the wire that actuated the power relay, Kevin had just wrapped it around the clutch pedal arm. When the insulation eventually wore through, the wire could short-out to a metal bracket that supported the dash when the clutch pedal was pushed in, turning on the driving lights!