Can't We All Just Get Along?

My home town was so boring we used to outrun the cops just for fun.  Sometimes several times a night.  As I said, boring.

Yep, I come from a little town called Chillicothe, Missouri.  Its population was under 10,000 when I grew up there, and it still is.  It's about 5 miles long, beginning to end, with the business district taking up less than a mile of that.  Two banks, one movie theater, a Dairy Queen, and a bowling alley with six pool tables (thank God!).  It's the Livingston County seat, so it has a big courthouse in the middle of town, whichis smack in the center of tens of thousands of acres of rich famland and the famers to farm it.  

What's not to like?

Anyway, I grew up in a time when drag racing was just catching on in my part of the Country.  And God knows, we caught on with it.  And although small, my town had about 20 of the fastest cars in the Nation.  We raced them against each other every night of the year.  At the Old Highway 36.  About 5 miles outside of town.  Right past the Grand River bridge, and over the Bear Lake Bottoms.  An old wrinkled and cracked, dangerous two-lane blacktop highway put out to pasture from years and years of (over)use.  No lighting at all, so as dark as the inside of AOC's heart.     

Except we outlaw drag racers found it and repurposed it.  To the chagin of local law enforcement who tried their best to shut us down.  As I said, "tried."  We pooled our $'s and bought walkie-talkies.  We stationed one volunteer at each end of where the Old and New Hwy. 36's came together.  So if (more likely when) the highway patrol tried to sneak up on us, we'd be alerted and disappear into a cloud of dust.  We thought we truly were something.  And for the time, we really were.

We would cruise the "four lane" back and forth, from one end of town to the other.  Flashing our lights and honking our horns at each other as we passed, religiously, never failing to do so.  For failing to do so would invite an early form of "cancellation."  

We'd park in the Dairy Queen every now and then, just to show off our freshly-polished rides (all rides were freshly-polished back then - we might not have been, but they were) and rub elbows with cohorts.  We'd always back into the parking spaces, and then open the hood.  To show off our sparkly, chrome-splashed engines.  Sort of a male bonding exercise.  We'd then get some fries and a Coke and sit back and schmooze.  

I sit here loving on the memory.

Then we'd call each other out for a race at the Old Highway and the cars would vacate the D.Q. in a rush.  Gone!  And in less than a minutes they'd all disappear, with smoke hanging in the air and trails of burnouts and rubber marks headed south.  And the D.Q. would be a morgue...   

What a thing!  Once the racing was over a few hours later, we'd head back to the D.Q. and then talk all about it.  I had a buddy (Hi Dick!) who worked at a printing company make me up some "BLBTA" stickers we racers could put on our cars.  It stood for "Bear Lake Bottoms Timing Association."  Sort of a middle finger to law enforcement.  But if they were to ask what it meant, we had all agreed to tell them, "Better Leave Betty's Tit's Alone."    

Testosterone is a funny thing.  And in all the years of racing on a dangerous deserted two-lane highway, there was never an accident.  Never an injury.  As they say, God looks out for drunks, old people and stupid kids.   

But then, if there was no racing to be had, and the D.Q. was empty, we'd go cop hunting.  We'd try to position our car going in the opposite direction of a cop, with both at the same stoplight.  And then, when the stoplight changed, and they started heading south, we'd do a world-class burnout heading North.  Screeching our tires to beat the band!  Making a racket that would raise the dead!  Laying two black strips of rubber for a dozen yards!  The cops would do a "U-ey," of course, and chase us.  In a tan, four-door plymouth with a 318 cu.-in V-8 and a two-barrel carburetor.  I, on the other hand, was driving my Dad's '58 Oldmobile Super 88 at the time.  And it was fast!  And even full of me and my friends, we easily outran that Plymouth and its 600 pounds of cops.  

Both of them.

I'd do a block-by-block escape, doing lefts and rights in quick succession, laying down world-class drifts, and be gone!  Within a minute or so I'd click that then new-fashioned garage door opener thingie at my Dad and Mom's house and drive in, closing the door rapidly behind me.  

It would be dead quiet, except for the "clicking" of the various mechanical pieces of the motor and drivetrain cooling off after the severe workout I'd just put it through.  We'd be doing our best to hide our laughter there in the dark garage as the cops drove by, slowly, their spotlights dancing all over our house.  They knew it was me, of course, but they had to catch me.  In the act. 

Why?  There was an ordinance in force at the time requiring the cops to actually catch those who flee, as opposed to believing they know who is was that had just fled.  So it was sort of an unspoken arrangement between us goofballs and the cops.  Most of whom we'd gone to school with (I know, never end a sentence with a preposition).  Picture Boss Hogg and an orange Charger.  Except Upper Midwest instead of Deep South.  So we'd run, they'd chase us, we'd get away.  And then we'd sometimes do it again.  Hit rewind.  In the same evening!

Ain't life grand?  

Maybe I'll follow this one up with how our then Sheriff Kelsey Reeter was caught and canned because his Black hooker girlfriend's naked footprints were found on the inside of the front windshield of his police cruiser.

Now today, it seems cops get all butthurt if an ordinary citizen shows them their a*s.  They call in the troops!  A dozen cars and a doggy to bite you and a helicopter to chase you from above!  Is that fair?  I don't think they got the memo!  It's supposed to be fun, doncha' get it?   

Can't we all just get along?