 My first "real" car was a '68 GTS that had
been slightly wrecked and my dad, who had paid $60.00 for the car, said "Half the engine's in the trunk, good luck"
and walked in the house. I raised the hood and sure enough, I'm looking at pistons. Well, might as well go to the
trunk and see what's in there...the rest of the engine.I was excited,I now have a car, a real live muscle car and I'll
be the fastest guy in town as soon as I get this thing fired up! (Hey, a boy's gotta have a dream right?) The old man
supplied me with all the stuff I needed but he hardly turned a wrench he wanted ME to build this car. The
hardest part was torquing the heads. Picture, if you will, a 15 year-old kid with arms as skinny as angel-hair pasta
trying torque a pair of small block Mopar heads to 95 ft/lbs. while his father is getting 500 ft/lbs. of amusement
watching his junior mechanic trembling like an earthquake aftershock by bolt number nine.I painted that motor Hemi
orange, got the chrome air cleaner and it already had the Mickey Thompson valve covers and it looked totally bad-ass and
I couldn't get that engine to start to save my life.I was playing high-school tennis at the time and would come home
and work on the car until my mother shouted out death threats to bring my skinny ass in the house. In this particular
month, my dad was working 12-hour days and basically working, grabbing a quick meal and hitting the hay... HARD. On this
special Wednesday night, I was just sitting in the car turning the engine over and I was making a game of having the engine
turn over while the Emergency Brake light stayed lit because I had tried everything and I was just out of ideas.As luck would have it, this is the only way that the car could
fire up due to a flaw in the switch and fire up it did. For exhaust I had manifolds and two short pipes that were
waiting for glass packs. I was totally stoked! I blipped the throttle a few times, dialed in the timing a little and
then buttoned it all up and ran in to tell the old man that I got it running, like he and the Town of Sodus hadn't
already figured that out. I burst into the kitchen "Dad,Dad I got it..." and then realized that this man,who otherwise
would have been very happy for me, had been all but having his mail forwarded to the job that he was now living at and I might
have waken him up from a sound sleep. (The bloodshot eyes and wrinkled brow was my first clue) Now, you can't make it 15 years
on the planet being as much as of a pain in the ass as I was without some quick witted survival skills and I never
skipped a beat. I looked at my watch and said "Will you look at the time, I think I'll go to bed now." and just walked
into my room, closed the door and didn't come back out. I figured if he was going kill me (and he had the look) he was going to have to come and
get me out of hiding. When I got got up the next morning, Dad had already gone to work and Mom was still smirking
from the previous night's event. She told me that he sat at the table and just laughed for 20 minutes about that while asking "He's not coming back is he?".
He waited for me to get home that night and told me that it was ok and that he didn't know what was funnier, the fact
that I pulled that moved or my not coming back out for the rest of the night. -Dan Davis | |