I favored one dress—an electric-blue sateen-spandex thing—that was cut down to here and up to there. It threatened to expose my left breast every time I reached for the bass notes.
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What to Wear: A Musician’s Wardrobe through the Decades
Homemade Wearables
There was a time when I unleashed my creativity and started making stuff cause what I wanted to wear was not available in stores. It caused me to dabble in all sorts of crafts. For starters there was leatherwork.There’s a certain confidence gained when you make your own shoes. Just get some materials, trace your foot and voila.
Wore these with a patchwork dress I made. Granny glasses and love beads completed the look.
One of my first jobs after high school was working in the Green Giant asparagus cannery. Good experience for me, learning what it was like to work 12 hour shifts, learned to order breakfast in Spanish, gained admiration for what hard workers the Mexican contract workers were. Cesar Chavez had been working for improved migrant farm workers conditions so when it rained we all got a day off. For entertainment we would hitchhike to the next town 30 miles over to go to the movies.
In the off hours one of my co-workers taught me the magic principle of sewing 2 lengths of fabric onto one increasing length and flounciness of subsequent layers. I wore my 3 tiered black calico skirt quite comfortably with my hippie peasant blouse. Another co-worker showed me the magic of transmuting an extra large classic men’s tshirt into a comfy and feminine top. Cut out the neckband and in the scoop shape that’s left run an elastic or a ribbon through the casing made by the hem for a gathered neckline. Carefully take off the pocket if there is one. Also slightly adjust the angle of the sleeve and run a ribbon or elastic through the hem casing creating a bit of a puffed cap sleeve. We were upcycling before it was cool. Huraches completed the ensemble.
There is one look that I probably wouldn’t bring back. Wearing Osh Kosh overalls was a thing for a while. When I was feeling militant or lazy I didn’t care that that in their bagginess they weren’t too flattering. We would cut them off into short shorts or modify them into dresses. At least it was easier to use the bathroom with the dress.
Thinking back to one of my earliest endeavors I embroidered some simple vines and flowers around the ankle hem of my jeans. I didn’t know how to use embroidery hoops or thimbles and just winged it even though it made my fingers sore and took forever. They turned out well enough that a couple of girls hired me to do it to their jeans. I think I collected the princely sum of $3 each pair.
When dashikis were popular I bought some India print bedspreads to cut up in order to make shirts and skirts. I may still have the maxi wrap skirt in storage somewhere. I think I wore it with my Danskin leotard.
CColorful times.
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Wait Until Your Father Gets Home
My brother, five years my elder, and I, were remarkably well-behaved children. He was quite passive, liked to read, listen to classical music and watch “The Mickey Mouse Club” on TV. I was a little more obstreperous, but still knew how to mind my manners. I just wanted attention. Our mother was always frazzled, our father owned a car dealership, worked six days and two nights a week. We had a maid in our little Detroit house when our father was gone. She did all the cleaning, laundry and cooking. Even some childcare. Mother drove us to and from school and participated in ladies’ clubs while we were away.
During the quiet dinners when Dad wasn’t home, Rick teased me, to see if he could get me to giggle until milk came out of my nose, which he could and it did. We would also kick each other under the table. This would infuriate my mother. She never punished me. The threat was always, “Wait until your father gets home.” Then he would spank me for the infringement of good table manners. This left me with distain for my mother and fear of my father, who was actually a very gentle human being and I’m sure hated carrying out my mother’s edict.
I acted out in other ways as well. I took a pencil and scribbled on the wall paper in our Dining Room seen in the Featured Image (this photo taken at my 7th birthday party). An art gum eraser took care of the offense, but I am sure I got a terrible spanking for such a horrible crime.
The worst ever happened on our screened porch. We spent long summers there. The room came off the dining room and was a haven in our non-air conditioned house. We had rattan furniture out there and kept one canvas shade pulled permanently down, as it was behind the couch, offered screening from the near neighbors and was difficult to get at because of the furniture arrangement. The other two shades only came down during storms. But I took a brown crayon to this particular shade and scribbled on it. That was indelible. We didn’t have anything in the late 50s to erase crayon and the marks stayed until the day we sold the house in 1963. I don’t even remember how I was punished for such a crime. I’ve blocked it out entirely.
French-style
Freshman year in high school, the musical was “The Fantastics”, which it really was. I got called back for the female lead of Luisa, but the role went to a junior, which was fine. I was thrilled to be called back. With such a small cast, I worked on make-up. It was a great, friendly environment and, though still rather shy, I gladly went to the cast party in Bud’s basement. We all mingled and had fun. Claire’s older brother, home from college, paid a lot of attention to me. I was flattered and enjoyed the flirtation.
In 9th grade, I wasn’t yet dating. We went to “make-out” parties at friends’ houses, but always in large groups. We sat in darkened rooms, listened to music and mooshed our mouths together. I suppose the more adventurous did more, but I didn’t.
As the cast party wound down, Claire’s brother asked if he could escort me home. I lived literally around the corner, but the offer was too good to refuse, so of course, I didn’t. His car pulled up in front of my house and he pulled me in to him. We started to make out. Suddenly, I felt something push into my mouth. A primitive instinct took over and I bit down, hard. I could taste something salty, which I later realized was the blood coming from the tip of his tongue. He pulled back quickly, like the wounded animal he was. He didn’t take me up to my door. I went up, shamed that this was how I had responded to my first French kiss. I was sick to my stomach. I tasted the blood for days. I never saw the guy again.
Is that a mini skirt?
Fashion catastrophe at a junior high dance ...so I did what any resourceful fashion dork would do...
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Secret Family Recipe
Perhaps because he was the youngest of eight, raised by an older sister once his mother was institutionalized when he was 12, or maybe because he didn’t marry until he was 32; for whatever reason, my father liked to cook and was good at it. If we had Thanksgiving at home, he did all the cooking. He loved to hold barbecues and entertain friends in the summer. He was a sociable guy.
He loved to make breakfast or brunch for family or visitors and that often meant bringing out the griddle and making the “Sarason Secret Family Recipe” for the sweet batter. He added a little vanilla, some syrup, melted butter to grease the griddle and added the rest right into the batter, so the pancakes tasted terrific and were, indeed, his speciality and his delight to make. He made them for me any time I visited, even after I left home. He’d make them for us any time he visited us in Boston. They became my stock-in-trade also. The featured photo is in our first apartment in Waltham, MA, making brunch for some friends in the autumn of our first year of marriage. The griddle was part of a box of household necessities given by my two bridesmaids (you know who you are!). I still have it, though not much call to use it these days. Pancakes are not on my diet.
Dad making pancakes for David. Last visit, Oct, 1989.
My husband was a management consultant who traveled all the time, so I frequently did “breakfast for dinner” with my kids and took great delight in passing along their grandfather’s recipe for pancakes, particularly since he died when my boys were 4 and 8 months old, respectively. It was a way for me to talk about my dad and share his legacy with his grandsons who would never know him. The kids loved that the recipe was a “family secret”. One came home from nursery school fairly distraught one day. What was the problem, I enquired? He had spilled the beans and told the teachers about the secret family recipe. I assured him it was OK to share such a good thing with other people. His grandfather would be happy to know that his grandchild cared enough about his pancake recipe to share it with others he liked.
The pancake recipe continues. Feel free to eat and share. Ken Sarason would be pleased.
I Like Ike
Being a Boomer, I have lived through all the style changes through the years. I wore pretty organdy dresses with patent leather Mary Janes to birthday parties in my youth. I had a dress coat with matching hat each season as I grew. I remember the introduction of velcro into the wardrobe (it made a funny crunching sound and we weren’t sure how it worked at first; did it really stick to itself?). We were awestruck, since it came from the space program. It was on the belt my mother wore to my brother’s bar mitzvah party, a fancy party at a downtown hotel. I wore a pretty pink organdy dress. I was 8.
We only wore dresses or skirts to school. Pants were verbotten. They would either rot our brains or somehow drive the boys crazy, no doubt. Hemlines rose, I grew my hair long, but some emulated Twiggy and cut it very short and painted on twig-like eyeliner. We liked the Carnaby Street look, brought over by the British Invasion musicians and their “birds”. We were sent home from school if our skirts were more than 3″ above the back of our knees. Dresses were A-line, sometimes with a Mondrian-style print and shoes had a clunky heel. We wore Mary Quant make-up, white or orange lipstick and a line of white above our regular black or blue eyeliner. I spent time putting on my make-up every morning before school. I got contact lenses in 9th grade, so my eyes were visible to the world.
Pants became hip-huggers with wide bell-bottoms. Tops were ribbed poor boys and we wore long beads. I wasn’t a hippie, but sometimes I looked like one (much less messy, though). Skirts were mini or maxi, equally acceptable and by my college years (1970-74), coats were midi. We wore crocheted caps to look like Ali McGraw in “Love Story” (and had posters on our dorm room walls that said “Love Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry”; we were pretty untutored in romance). I loved going to school dances and developed a uniform: hip-hugger, bell bottom jeans worn with a hot pink long-sleeved Danskin leotard with a velvet ribbon that could cinch the decolletage, revealing better cleavage. I had lots of freedom for movement. I wore tie shoes with a little heel and danced the night away. I loved to dance. We drank Moose Punch, a concoction specific to Brandeis, made by a guy a year older than me. It tasted good, but had a kick. Guys sat on the side of the stage in the Levin Ballroom to watch me dance. I had a following.
Campus clothing was functional, but as I look at the better clothes I wore at the end of my school years, one style was particularly flattering. The Eisenhower Jacket had come back into vogue; that short, fitted jacket made popular by the head of the Allied forces during World War II, then our president during the staid 50s. I wear a plaid pant suit with big legs but the short jacket in my senior photo (an informal shot taken by a student photographer, outside at my favorite spot on campus). The Featured Image shows me in my “going away” suit at the end of my wedding. Obviously a group shot, I have blocked out the others around me. The dress is one piece, though the top is a poor boy, ribbed fabric and bottom matches the short jacket with wide lapels. I hold a bottle of our wedding champagne that we would take to be opened for some later celebration. This was June 16, 1974. We opened it a few months later on the day Nixon resigned.
Ice and Snow
Winter in Spokane is an unpredictable thing. There is usually at least one really good snowfall each year, and months of cold weather. But there are some years where there can be a serious snow accumulation, followed by a warming trend to get things melting, then another cold snap. And that could result in epic icicles.
Our old house had a “daylight basement”, meaning the main floor was several feet above ground level. Added to that, the ceilings inside were tall. So the deep eaves that wrapped all around the house were nearly ten feet off the ground. My sister and I would sometimes amuse ourselves by taking a shovel and knocking the icicles off the edges of the eaves. It’s a wonder we didn’t take portions of the roof off with this maneuver.
This photo is from 1974. My mom is gazing up at the icicle that got away from us, from the edge of the roof and down through the tree to the ground. At that point there was nothing to do but wait for the warm weather to melt the whole thing.
Dad took a break one day and we made a snowman. He used to spend hours in what would now be called his “man cave.” Pretty primitive — it was the last bay in the four-car garage, to the right of that classy blue ’57 Chevy. He put a potbellied stove in there and burned trash to keep it warm enough in winter to escape a houseful of women for a few hours. On this particular day he ventured out and we spent some fun times putting together a snowman and as I recall capping the day with a good snowball fight.
I went to college in California, and have lived here ever since. And very glad I am not to have the challenges of the homeowner who has to deal with ice and snow.
Blizzard Betsy
With minor modifications, this story was originally written for the prompt Snow, in 2017, but it will be new for most of the current readers.
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The weather report called for snow, but none had come yet, so we all went to work; no call for alarm. It started snowing around noon on Monday. I watched from the sixth floor as the cars started leaving. I thought I’d wait a while, hoping the single-lane driveway would clear out a bit. Big mistake. Two hours later, when I decided to take the 18 mile drive home from Waltham to Acton along Rte 128 up to narrow Rte 2 through Lincoln and historic Concord, the roads were barely passable with creeping cars. The Blizzard of 1978 was in full swing.
I drove an ancient Valiant, no 4-wheel drive or snow tires, so driving was treacherous. I planned to stop at the supermarket a mile from my house, as Monday was my regular grocery day and I needed to shop. I arrived at 4pm and they were closing up. They told me I couldn’t take a cart, could only get what I could carry in my arms and be quick. I felt like I was in an episode of the old game show Supermarket Sweepstakes. I quickly prioritized what was essential and ran from lane to lane, got to check-out as they closed the store. It then took me an hour to drive that last mile home. Dan had been home from Cambridge a while. We checked in with his family, still living in the area. His mother, a teacher in Stoughton (south of the city), almost got caught in an historic back-up of cars, abandoned on Rte 128 (not unlike the backup in Virginia on I 95 in early January, 2022). She barely made it home to Newton. Everyone else was safe.
And home is where everyone stayed for a week. Governor Dukakis declared a State of Emergency and a travel ban. No one was allowed to drive or come inside Rte 128 for 5 days, so we all stayed put and watched the governor on TV with his wonderful sweaters. We got two feet of snow in 36 hours with white-out conditions. After, the weather turned fine and Dan and I went cross-country skiing next to our condo complex. It seemed like a lark.
The following year I had moved to Chicago, city of big shoulders and wind! In January of 1979 we were hit by a nasty blizzard. Again, two feet of snow and hideous winds. It started on a Saturday and lasted into the next day. But the weather did not turn fair after and the mayor and governor did not shut the city down. The weight of the snow was so great that roofs collapsed. I was glad that I paid a little extra money every month for covered parking. By that time, I had a VW Rabbit with front-wheel drive and thought I could drive through anything, though I usually took the bus around town. But after this blizzard, the temperature dropped to -18 with wind chill causing it to feel like -40! It was ridiculous. And we all tried to get back to work on Monday. Everything froze. Side streets couldn’t be plowed. I tried to take the bus to work, but each bus was full and humans dressed for work weren’t meant to stand on street corners in such cold weather (even if I lived two buildings from a bus stop). I finally got my car and drove to the office. Only the few people who lived in town got to work that day.
Mid-afternoon, it started snowing again and I headed home, dropping off the other two hardy souls who had also come in. They both lived on major streets, so I could get to their buildings. I lived on a one-way side street, off Sheridan. I had to go past my street, turn down another and turn up my street to get back to my building and the safety of my covered parking spot. I tried the first street. A car was abandoned in the street…and another, and so on. I finally turned the wrong way up a street, came down the street above mine – so close – and got stuck! My little front-wheel drive car was in too deeply and couldn’t get any traction. I hailed down four strong-looking guys and begged for help. They lifted my car out of the ruts, got it back into some tracks as I made the turn onto my street and I safely got home, vowing to not take my car out until spring. It was like that for weeks. The mayor was voted out of office.
The following week, others started coming back to the office. Stories about people going crazy from cabin fever were on the news. Many of the side streets were still in terrible shape. Two of our newer sales reps, friends since they had served in Vietnam, returned. They were big, strong Black guys who liked to tease us petite women in the office, but they were kind and well-liked. One was separated from his flight-attendant wife and had an adorable little girl who shared a birthday with me. He had been baby-sitting her the previous week. We were joking around as he left the office that Monday afternoon, rubbing my shoulders (yes, we still did stuff like that in those days), singing along to the radio to some sexy Rod Stewart music. He went home to get his suitcase, as he was heading to the airport. He lived on Addison, near the ballpark. The street was blocked by a car. He laid on his horn. Three people came out of the building, two men and a woman, high on cocaine. Darryl was a big guy and was vehement as he got out of his car to tell them to move the offending vehicle. One of the two men swung at him with a 2 x 4, knocking him down, the other stabbed him repeatedly. The woman stood in the doorway and watched. Darryl tried to fend off the blows but couldn’t, he dragged himself to the doorway of his building where he collapsed and died. This news greeted us as we came into the office the next day. We were stunned, numb, beyond grief. We all attended his funeral on Friday, and prayed that the criminals would go to prison for a long time, which I believe they did.
We were set to perform the Mozart Requiem on Saturday, January 24, 2015. We had a great dress rehearsal the night before. It started snowing mid-afternoon on the 24th, nothing big, but the mayor declared a parking ban and we were done. Concert canceled. The snow had stopped by the time we were due to sing that night and we only had about 4 inches of accumulation. What wimps! How disappointing. I went grocery shopping the next day, amid reports of a big storm coming on Monday. The grocery store was a zoo. Even with all our SUVs, you’d think we were hunkering down for hibernation. The next day, I tried to go my Pilates class in the morning (no snow in sight). My gym is in the same building as a Wegman’s grocery store. I drove around for half an hour and couldn’t find a place to park. I gave up and came home, put on an old DVD with a Pilates class…thoroughly disappointing all around (the DVD and my inability to find parking).
The storm, named Juno, started around mid-day. It was quite lovely. We didn’t need to go out. I took photos on my phone and posted them to Facebook, first at mid-afternoon, then later in the day. We got about a foot of snow; a real storm, but we were all around and about within a day or two.
But that winter was unrelenting. And cold. We never got a thaw, only melting cycles on the roof and we came to learn about ice dam damage…in almost every room in our house. We got unrelenting snow throughout the winter. In all we got 101 inches of snow. It was the snowiest winter on record for Boston. Ice dams are formed when heat from inside the house causes snow on the outside to melt a bit, then refreeze over and over again. We had icicles that came from the roof down to the ground and found their way inside any crevice or weakness in the roof or wall. It was raining along the recessed lights, window frames, down walls…tens of thousands of dollars of damage to the inside of our house that winter, as I described in my story Ice Dams, Feb, 2015. We have a slate roof. We finally had someone shovel off the roof carefully and crews from Minnesota (who had less snow than we had) came and used steam to clean the gutters free from the ice. Insurance paid for some of the damage and we put new insulation in the attic, heat wires in the gutters to keep them from freezing. and other measures to ensure that this never happens again.
Snow is lovely in small measures, but not when real damage is done.
View from the Mountaintop, July 1972: Sisyphus is Headed this Way
Dear Kids —
This week I have a true adventure story for you. The stars are:
You, because the fact that you are far away gives me the excuse to write it down.
Ken Wasil, a truculent megalomaniac who never knows when he’s beaten. His favorite activity is driving at just over top speed in his racing car. His second favorite activity is describing to anyone who will listen, or to anyone who won’t listen, how fast he went in his last race and how much faster he’s going to go in his next race. Wasil wears glasses with lenses thicker than Coke bottles, and he can’t read a printed page more than six inches from the end of his nose, and nobody understands how he can see to drive as fast as he does, but he does drive very fast.
Lotus Europa number 66DP, Chinese red with two broad black stripes down the middle, a very well prepared race car that Wasil bought last winter after his first Lotus Europa fell apart from being driven too fast and then being put back together too fast.
The supporting players are:
Me, a patient and responsible citizen (where you live, perhaps better known as an absentee father), who drives race cars just for the fun of it and has a good record of bringing them through the race in one piece. Or two at the most, as in the Bryar three-hour enduro last year when he yanked the shift lever out of the car and had to finish the race in third gear, being without options.
Dick Sonderegger, my pit crew chief, whose job is mostly to keep his head when all about him are losing theirs, and to make sure that the race car and the driver get all the help they need to win without seeming to break any rules. He does his job very well.
A cast of thousands of freaks who answered Wasil’s ad in the Phoenix, an underground newspaper in Boston, for volunteers for his pit crew. Really only about half a dozen of them, but that turned out to be plenty.
Here’s the story.
A couple of weeks ago I offered to co-drive Wasil’s Europa in the three-hour enduro scheduled for Thompson Raceway in Connecticut on Sunday, July 9. Wasil hadn’t heard about the race, but his eyes lit up like glowworms trapped in Mason jars, and he began explaining to me how we could win the race outright simply by driving consistent one-minute-and-eighteen-second laps for the three hours, with two quick stops to refuel and change drivers. I had seen Wasil and his car at Thompson the previous week make one staggeringly fast lap at the beginning of the D-production race before coasting to a dead stop with a broken battery terminal, so I knew that Wasil was right. But I also knew there could be mechanical problems that would spoil his plans.
A few nights before the race, Wasil trailered his Europa to my shop and we rebuilt the rear suspension to get rid of some sloppiness that would have slowed us down, and Wasil bought some brand-new super-wide Firestone racing tires to let us go around the corners faster than ever. Trouble is, he didn’t get the tires on the car until the day before the race, and they turned out to rub quite a bit. They would have blown out in short order if I hadn’t managed to find some wheel spacers that made the rubbing less severe. Wasil ran the car on the new tires in the fifteen-lap Regional race on Saturday and he won first place easily. I had never driven the car, so I asked Wasil and Sonderegger to get it ready for me to practice the next day at noon. I didn’t want to do all my learning during the actual race, which was to begin at two p.m. I went back to Boston to get a good night’s sleep while Sonderegger camped in Connecticut. The next morning, Sunday, Sonderegger went to a nearby lake to take a swim, and when he came back to get the Europa gridded for me to practice, he found that Wasil and the freaks had taken the rear suspension apart again for some last-minute improvements. By the time Sonderegger got the car back together, the final practice session was nearly over. I strapped into the Europa and went blasting onto the track, but I completed only three laps before the checkered flag came out to end the session. All I had managed to learn was 1) that the Europa can go around corners much faster than my Lotus Elan (something I already knew), and 2) that I would need at least five or six more laps of practice before I could drive the car fast and smoothly around Thompson. But now I would have to get that practice during the race.
Wasil’s super performance the day before had won us the pole position for the enduro, first of about twenty-five or thirty cars, and it looked as if the Europa might actually be able to run all day and win. But just before it was time to grid the car for the big race, Wasil and his freaks had it apart again and were trying to readjust the offset of the rear wheels by adding washers to my spacers. I told Wasil I thought what he was doing was dangerous, because the washers were too small to provide support for the wheel, and under hard cornering the wheels would bend and might break. Wasil said he wasn’t worried. I said I was glad that he and not I would be driving the first hour.
The call to line up for the race came before we were ready. We were still tightening wheel nuts and adjusting tire pressures with a foot pump after Wasil gridded the car. That done, we carried our tools and gas cans to the pits in front of the grandstands and waited for the race to begin. The cars came out of the paddock and onto the track with the usual deafening roar, led by Wasil’s Europa and a huge Corvette. The pack surged and snorted through two warm-up laps, then the green flag came out and the race was on. The Corvette, beside the Europa on the front row and with more than five times the horsepower, stormed immediately into the lead, but had to brake for the first turn and Wasil did not. The Europa nipped ahead, blocked the Corvette on the back straight across from the grandstands, and disappeared under the bridge still leading. The whole pack followed, the roar of engines faded behind the hill, and we waited to see whether Wasil or the Corvette would be leading at the end of the first lap. A minute passed, the roar increased again and the pack came swarming around he clubhouse turn. We were disappointed to see the Corvette leading. But we were much more disappointed when the whole field had roared past with no sign of Wasil. We watched and listened at the clubhouse turn as the pack disappeared under the bridge on the second lap. No Wasil. After another minute the Corvette reappeared, followed by everybody else. Everybody but Wasil. Then, just as we were thinking of going for a swim, Wasil’s Europa came around the clubhouse turn at a tremendous clip, blasted through the oval and away under the bridge in pursuit of the rest of the pack. The race was less than three laps old and we were already two laps behind everyone else. We figured Wasil had tried to win the three-hour race on the first lap and had spun, then had trouble restarting his engine. (I had noticed that the starter was tricky, and on Saturday Wasil had sent some of his freaks to buy a new battery.) We settled down with the pit signal board and the stopwatches and awaited developments, I in my driving suit, ready to take over if necessary.
For several laps the Europa circulated very fast, passing slower cars right, left and in-between, making up the lost time. The only faster car was Al Alden’s Porsche 911S, which had started well back in the pack and was now leading the race. Then our stopwatches showed that Wasil was overdue again. This time he reappeared after only a few extra seconds. More fast laps, then again no Wasil. A few minutes passed, then many minutes. All at once I heard Sonderegger call out, “There he is!” Looking up the pit lane toward the clubhouse turn, I could see no sign of the Europa, but there was Wasil in his driving suit and helmet, flopping down exhausted on the grass under a tree at the top of the pits. Sonderegger ran off to investigate this strange turn of events, then came running back with his report, while Wasil got to his feet and staggered along behind. Wasil had spun the car again at the back of the course and had been unable to restart the engine, because the battery was dead. He had run up hill and down dale in the summer sun in his Nomex driving suit and thermal underwear to get back to the pits, and now he was showing signs of dying from the heat. At one point he had fought off the course physician, who was working at a flag station, saw Wasil stumbling along in his helmet, thought one of the drivers had gone berserk, and tried to wrestle him to the ground. (This part of the story reminds me of Toad and his concerned friends in Wind in the Willows). Wasil now requested that I take battery jumper cables, go back to the car and restart it, and take over the driving. Restart it with what? I wanted to know. You have to have a good battery to jump-start a car that has a dead battery. Turns out there was a good battery in the Europa — but on the floor of the passenger compartment, where one of the freaks had stowed it instead of installing it where it belonged. In fact, Wasil’s spin on the first lap had occurred when the good battery startled him by jumping off the floor as he was putting the Europa through a hard turn ahead of the big Corvette.
I was reaching dutifully for the jumper cables when Sonderegger told me to relax. The rules of the race forbade me going out to the car. No driver changes allowed anywhere but in the pits, and no help for the driver anywhere but in the pits. Wasil would have to find the strength to do it himself. Poor Wasil! He took the jumper cables and went staggering off.
More minutes passed, and the Europa came flying into the pits under its own power and rushed to a stop in front of us. I began putting on the rest of my Nomex, the crew jumped for the refueling cans, somebody yanked the spare battery out of the passenger seat, Wasil fell out of the car helmetless and — ! SCCA officials converged from all directions, and a tremendous fuss ensued. The Assistant Chief Steward, a notorious exploiter of the power vested in him as Competition Board Chairman for the New England Region, looming like a cross between a bantam rooster and a mannikin from Abercrombie and Fitch, began to bleat: “The driver’s hat! Where is the driver’s hat? The driver must wear his hat!” And to the other officials: “Watch this crew!” It seems that Wasil had been able to restart the car without jumping the battery after all, but that once inside he had too little headroom to put on his helmet, so he drove back to the pits with the helmet on the seat. There was talk of disqualifying the Europa, and the SCCA-ers watched hawk-like for further infractions of the rules. With Wasil out of the car and the refueling completed, I began strapping myself into the driver’s seat. All at once I heard a cry of “Broken wheel!” and felt the rear of the car rise off the ground on a jack. My prediction about the washers had been right. Feeling vindicated, I bellowed orders out the window: “Pull both rear wheels and the spacers! Put on the spares! Torque ’em up! Get rid of those washers!” Etc. Great feeling to shout orders at people when there’s no time to argue. In about a minute the rear of the car hit the ground again and Sonderegger yelled “Go!
But of course the engine wouldn’t start, because the new battery still had not been installed.
So the crew gave me a push, the engine started, the SCCA officials made a note to penalize us three laps for a push start, the signal man at the end of the pit lane waved me onto the track, I nailed the throttle and started through the oval, and the Europa nearly “traded ends” immediately. From being the best-handling car I had ever driven, it had suddenly become one of the worst. The rear tires were the reason — cold, under-inflated and not as wide as the front tires, causing oversteer — a tendency for the rear end to swing wide in the turns and try to get ahead of the front end. I fought the car through one lap and returned to the pits immediately for more air. Sonderegger checked the pressures. They were low, but they would go up when the tires got warm. “Go!” he yelled again, and I went, but I wasn’t happy.
Now I was racing at as close to full bore as I could in a car I barely knew, with the tire pressures wrong and no battery to restart if I should spin it and kill the engine. I circulated raggedly at first, then more smoothly as the rear tires heated up. Each time I passed the pits, the board showed a little faster time. After about a dozen laps I began to settle into a fairly rapid groove, passing slower cars at a great rate and being surprised only about once a lap by bad behavior from the Europa’s rear end. As I tore past the pits on about the fifteenth lap, Sonderegger signaled to ask if everything was okay, and I gave him a combination shrug and thumbs-up sign. I wrestled the Europa through the oval, set up for the left-hand turn under the bridge, nipped the apex of that turn just right, and suddenly found the Europa traveling backwards into a sandbank. I kicked in the clutch and tromped on the gas pedal to keep the engine from dying, but it was too late. I rolled backwards to a stop a few yards from a flag station and tried the starter a few times, but no luck. A couple of corner workers from the flag station pushed me out of danger from oncoming traffic, but the rules forbade their giving me a push to start. Instead I would have to walk back to the pits, get the jumper cables and the good battery, and carry them back to the site of the spinout. So I took off my helmet, gloves and balaclava, left them in the car, and started the long trek back, soft-boiling in my Nomex under the hot sun, scrambling up sand dunes and climbing over wire fences, running from corner station to corner station and waiting for instructions from the corner workers’ Day-Glo signal paddles each time I had to cross the track: there was still a race going on, and I was the anomalous pedestrian. I got back to the pits at last, feeling much the way Wasil had looked earlier, and collected the battery. Fortunately it was smaller than most car batteries and it had a carrying strap. I Iearned then that Wasil had left the jumper cables at the corner station nearest to his own spinout. This station was a hundred or so yards farther along the course than mine — pretty convenient, really. Wasil later told me that as I set out from the pits with the battery, he predicted that I’d never make it back to the car unless I had the constitution of an elephant. He was right, but I do have the constitution of an elephant, and although I fell over a fence, spilling battery acid and ripping a hole in the knee of my $150 driving suit, I did make it. The corner workers were kind enough to bring me the jumper cables (probably against the rules). I put the new battery back on the passenger floor, ran the jumper cables to the dead battery in the engine compartment, and restarted the car. To keep it running while I disconnected things, replaced the deck lid and put on my driving gear, I had to rest a big rock against the gas pedal. Since like most race cars this one had no radiator fan, the engine overheated rapidly, and by the time I was strapped back in and waiting for the Day-Glo paddles to wave me onto the track, things were smelling bad and it was beginning to look like curtains for Wasil’s engine. I didn’t want to be the guy to finish it off, so I pitted immediately, told Wasil the car was badly overheated, and said, “Take over!” He didn’t seem to mind that I had nearly destroyed his car, but he had the gall to ask me why I had taken so long. “We’ve got a race to win, you know.” The man is crazy.
By that time it was four p.m. The race had started at 2:16 p.m. and was to end at 5:16. We had completed about forty laps. Al Alden’s car, running first, had completed about ninety laps. Anybody but Wasil would have sworn we were licked. (I won’t mislead you: we were licked.) But we refueled, strapped the Myopic Maestro back into his seat, push-started him for another three-lap penalty, and off he went, sputtering around with the overheated engine. But as the ambient air passing through the radiator brought the coolant temperature down to the normal range, a small miracle began to unfold. Wasil started going pretty fast, even though it was obvious that the car was just as squirrelly for him as it had been for me. A few of his laps were very fast. I sat in the pits and waited complacently for Wasil to turn up missing again, but it never happened. He drove like a man possessed, as they say. The only faster car was Al Alden’s Porsche, and at one point Wasil actually passed him, regaining one of our many lost laps. With about half an hour to go, Alden holed a piston and dropped out of the race, but Wasil flew on. We showed him his lap times on the pit board, but he gave no sign that he saw anything. After a while we began to think that Wasil must actually be blind and that he was driving wholly by his sense of smell (but there’s some evidence that that’s not very good either). With about five minutes to go in the race, Wasil pitted for a slosh of fuel to prevent running out of gas, and off he went again (another push start, another three-lap penalty).
When the checkered flag finally came out, we had completed ninety-four laps, but we had accumulated twelve laps worth of penalties, so we got credit for only eighty-two laps, which put us fourteenth out of fifteen finishers. The winning car, a Lotus 47, completed one hundred and thirty-three laps. Wasil drove to the impound area, crawled out of the car on his hands and knees, and announced that he was going to die, but first he wanted to see his trophy. The guy is definitely insane.
But a very good driver. He managed to keep an unmanageable car on the track for an hour and fifteen minutes, going nearly as fast the whole time as he had with a manageable car. An hour and a half after the race was over, I got tired of waiting for the results to be published, so I went to find Wasil to say goodbye before leaving for Cambridge. He was still in his driving suit, still visibly sick from exhaustion and the heat, his eyes bleary behind the Coke-bottle lenses. He was a mess.
I felt sorry for him until I remembered that racing is something you do for fun.
That was a long story, which I also wrote for fun. You may find it interesting as evidence of the difference between the ways grownups and kids play. Kids quit when a game stops being fun. Grownups seem to like to finish a thing no matter what. Maybe that’s why working for a living turns out to be so much easier for a grownup than he thought it was going to be.
With love,
Your Dad
