Singing in the car.

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I know a place where the birds sing bass,
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And a jackrabbit laughed in a bulldog's face.
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And the train doesn't stop at my hometown,
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'Cause the woodpeckers pecked the depot down!

 My grandfather taught this little ditty to my father when he was young. I am under the impression granddad, who was born in 1910, also learned it as a youngster. Very recently, thanks to the internet, I believe I've found the origin of the song.

A soundtrack is included in this website. It is not the same tune that I learned from my dad.
Way Out West in Kansas  I liked the poem better when my imagination supplied a fantasy town in some far off place instead of Kansas.

When riding in the car, my granddaughters listen to songs like The Wheels on the Bus on their i-pads. When I was a kid riding in the car, my dad sang. He knew all the words to dozens of songs and the choruses of many more. For a guy who didn't go to church, he knew a lot of hymns by heart.

These are some of the songs I remember singing.

On Top of Old Smokey
By the time I was through second grade that folk song had morphed into the parody verses of On Top of Spaghetti.

Little Church in the Wildwood

In the Garden

John Brown's Body to the tune of The Battle Hymn of the Republic which he also sang with gusto.

Love songs like Burl Ives' Lavender Blue. Dad would ask, what was the first love song? or what did Adam say to Eve? The answer, naturally, was Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree With Anyone Else But Me.

Counting songs like This Old Man, and The Ant's Go Marching One by One to the tune of When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again.  Hurrah! He knew the words to that one as well. And of course 99 Bottles of Beer. After listening to that countdown a few times, Mom proclaimed a new rule that said the song had to start with only ten bottles of beer.  Who could forget singing Roll Over?

He liked Gathering Flowers for the Master's Bouquet so much he requested it for his funeral service.

Cowboy gospel by Marty Robbins. He didn't sing it but was crazy for The Master's Call.

Old Rivers sung/spoken by Walter Brennan. If you know the name of the mule in this song you are a music trivia expert.

Cattle Call and Red River Valley. Don't forget the Streets of Laredo.

Yodeling. My dad could yodel. I don't know if he did it very well or not. When I tried, my mother made me stop. Perhaps the car isn't the best place to practice yodeling.

Kawliga, the cigar store Indian.

Ghost Rider's in the Sky by Sons of the Pioneers.

Mom liked to hear How Much is that Doggie in the Window.  That song was always followed by How Much is that Hound Dog in the Winder.

A naughty little ditty called Sweet Violets. I specifically recall a grade school classmate teaching me the words to a moderately risque song called "Two Irishman", not to be confused with "The Scotsman."

Sometimes we'd learn a new song in music class at school and teach it to him. By the way, my mom didn't sing.

We kids sat in back the seat. Until he got too big to fit, my brother rode on the shelf under the back window. Another rule was that we couldn't lean on the back of Mom's chair and touch or breath on her hair. The eyes in the back of her head told her when we were too close.

Maybe my kids will tell theirs about riding in the car and singing Achy, Breaky Heart, John Deere Green, My Grandfather's Clock or especially There Once was a Woman Who Swallowed a Fly.

I would be glad to hear what songs you sang in the car.

Steadily By Jerks

When I was in high school, my dad was employed by National Trailer Convoy. It was a little different sort of job than picking up freight in one place and delivering it to another. Specifically, he moved mobile homes. A house trailer is a pre-fab structure built on a flatbed trailer. It has a hitch and wheels making it portable. 

The home's owner had responsibilities to fulfill before it could be moved. He should have removed the skirting, unhooked the utilities and made sure the tires were sound. According to the checklist Dad went through with every owner, they also should have secured the cabinet doors and furniture inside the home.

This didn't always happen. Dad came home from one location telling about a trailer anchored in a sea of children, dirty diapers and dogs. The only adult he saw was a young woman. She did not have the trailer ready to move. Some of the tires were flat, but she had spares. He had wrestled the second tire onto the lug bolts when he heard a voice right behind him say, "That's poop."  He looked around and saw a three-year-old boy poking at dog droppings with the handle end of his tire wrench.

Once or twice, Dad was accused of damaging a home in transit when it wasn't his fault. In an instance I particularly remember, the owner showed up during the process of situating the trailer on its new foundation. The guy exclaimed that the outer wall had pulled away from the frame at the back corner. What the heck did the so-and-so driver do to his house? Dad invited the guy to take him inside so they could try to see a reason for the separation. The culprit turned out to be a Chevy engine block in a bedroom closet. The wall didn't pull away from the floor. The floor pulled away from the wall.

Moving a mobile home can be a logistical nightmare. The trailers are over-length and over-width. To be legal, the driver must purchase a permit from the state highway department. Much like an aircraft flight plan, the route and time frame must be observed. It is illegal to pull an over-width, over-length object in the dark for obvious reasons. A front escort car was required to alert oncoming traffic of the road hazard. If the trailer was over a certain length, a rear escort was needed as well.

If one didn't provide their own escort, the driver had to hire one. After seeing his bottom line suffer from paying for an independent escort, my dad decided my mother should do it for him. She drove a bright yellow Mustang. Add a roof-mounted orange, revolving light and a fold-up sign that said WIDE LOAD and what do you have? An escort car. This endeavor provided my dad with years of fodder for wife-bashing stories.

In one incident, National Trailer Convoy had been hired to move three homes for the same company when their employees were reassigned. The distance was far enough the drivers worried they wouldn't get the job done in one day. The evening before the move they readied the homes and got hooked up. The next morning they fudged a little on the daylight hours by going down dirt roads for the first few miles. When they reached the highway, it was still fifteen minutes until sunrise. Dad and the other two drivers had a brief confab and decided to chance it. Mom was driving the lead escort car.

"Okay, we're going now," Dad told her. He turned to get in his truck when the entire area was lit up with strobing orange light.

"Turn that @#$%@#% thing off," he shouted at her. "Why don't you just use a siren to announce our presence? Every highway patrol in thirty miles can see that light."

It must have been nerve-wracking for Mom to drive that escort car. Rules vary from state to state, but she needed to maintain a minimum and maximum distance between Dad's truck and her car. Dad always said she didn't have good depth perception. I expect he was right because she would speed up to get ahead of him and decide she was too far away and step on the brake to slow down. When he saw brake lights, he said he never knew if he should be shifting down or not, so it was equally frustrating for him to follow her.

When someone asked him how his wife did at escorting wide loads, he said she drove 'steadily by jerks.'

The Honeymoon is Over.

1973

My husband-to-be had just graduated with a degree in Nuclear Engineering, and I had just graduated from High School. Yeah, he's a cradle robber. We didn't particularly care where we went after the wedding as long as we had a few days away from work and studying.

In the days when it was common for friends to do despicable things to your car while you were busy getting married, my fiance had the inspired idea to hide his pride and joy in the Buick dealer's personal garage. He gave his brother a new can of car wax and told him if the guys just had to write nasty slogans and paint lewd pictures on his car, at least don't ruin the paint job with shaving cream.

I hope the artists were embarrassed when they brought the car back to the church. We drove out of the parking lot to waves and shouts of congratulations. One of the college roommates tossed a bottle of champagne in the back seat as we rolled past him.

We had decided to go to Wichita after the ceremony and then mosey up to Minden, NE. Minden is a ways off the beaten path, but it has an excellent pioneer museum. By the time we arrived in Wichita, it was sprinkling a little. At Kellogg and Airport Road we were waiting for the red light to turn green.  There were three cars in front of us.


THUD!

KATHUMP!

My brand new husband stood on the brake, but we were shoved into the car in front of us just as the light turned green. Behind us, a new Honda Civic had either hydroplaned or utterly failed to notice the traffic wasn't moving. Our day was ruined, but that driver had a day he'd never forget. An Olds 88 had plowed into him and turned his Honda into an accordion. Miraculously, he was not injured.

The people in the car in front of us were detained while the police investigated the accident.  Their car only had a scratch on the bumper. There was no visible damage to the front of our car either.

There we sat, holding up traffic, with some horrible art decorating the car. Maybe that guy in the Honda didn't hydroplane after all. Perhaps he was trying to read what was painted in wax on the trunk.

I didn't get out of the car since it was raining harder by then. I didn't want to ruin my gorgeous hairdo. A very nice police officer stuck his head in the window and offered me congratulations.

There was considerable damage to the rear of the Buick. Fortunately, it was drivable. When we got to our hotel, we sheepishly called home and told both sets of folks we had been in an accident, no, we weren't hurt, and please let the insurance agent know. I was SO glad we didn't have to ask them to bring us another vehicle to drive, or worst yet, come and get us.

That little chore finished, we decided to sample the champagne. Remember, it was shaken a good bit when it was thrown into the car two hours earlier. Then it was severely jostled in the wreck. I had given the wire muselet (I had to Google that word) one twist when the cork exploded out of the bottle and champagne showered half the room. It drenched the Gideon Bible on the chest of drawers. There was scarcely enough for us to have a taste.

Our room overlooked a swimming pool one or two floors below us. For some unfathomable reason, I thought that sounded kind of cool when we made reservations. At a truly unreasonable hour the next morning, we were awakened by an instructor with a bullhorn running a swimming class through their drills. Before we could even consider burying our heads under the pillows and going back to sleep, our phone rang.  It was our banker/insurance agent/friend.

"I hear you were approached from the rear," he drawled.

Learning the insurance would cover the repairs, we goofed off in Wichita for half a day. We had a mechanic look at the damage before we drove the car very far. At the small town of Minden, Nebraska, the motel clerk wouldn't check us in until we got our marriage license out of the luggage and proved we were husband and wife.

That was 45 years ago yesterday. Someone commented the honeymoon was almost over before it started, but we say it will never be over.

Father's Day

I grew up on my grandfather's farm. It was a coincidence, but when I was born he built a house in town (population 150), a mile away, and we moved into the farmhouse. A four-stall garage sat between the house and barn. It was originally designed to protect farm vehicles, not cars. My grandfather had built a massive workbench on the long side that only a very tall person would enjoy using. I remember my mom climbing up on it to get to her painting and gardening supplies stored in the cabinets on the wall. 

My brother and I liked to stand outside and throw a ball back and forth over the garage roof. I didn't get any sympathy the time the ball hit my nose because I didn't see it coming. The standard response from Mom for any kind of owie was, "It's a long way from your heart." That was her version of "Suck it up, Buttercup." 

Not long after the baseball in the face incident, Mom or Dad discovered the ball was breaking the slate shingles when we didn't lob it up and all the way over when we threw. That was the end of "Blind Catch" and the garage retired to it's singular duty of providing a roof over the car and pickup.

The doors on this garage were as solid as the work bench inside. They weighed a ton, unlike modern aluminum doors. Perhaps I exaggerate, but they were very heavy. A counter-weight, spring, and pivot system made it possible for weak humans to open them. The weight was a metal box filled with sand and suspended from pulleys by a cable. If the spring tension, pivot point, and the weight were exact, the door would stay in any position.

This was a fine design for anyone over five feet in height. Opening the door was a little like a weight lifting routine. Grab the handle at the lower middle of the door and pull. Walk backward while the bottom of the door swings out and up. Watch out that it doesn't bark your shin and ruin your pantyhose. Once it reaches chest height, turn loose of the handle, take hold of the bottom edge of the door like an Olympic weightlifter doing the clean and jerk, and give it a mighty heave. Momentum swings it all the way up and inside the building where it parks securely on top of a supporting frame. While this maneuver is going on, the counterweight pulls the cable through a set of pulleys and rests inches from the floor.

If you were 6'2" like my grandfather, you just gave the handle a good pull, and the door catapulted into the top position. When my brother and I were little, he would let us hold onto the bottom of the door while he opened it.

For short people like me, closing the monstrosity required a different set of skills. Just jump up like a gymnast mounting the uneven bars, grab the edge of the door and ride it down, while the cable zips the box of sand back to the top.

Like people, even garage doors have a life expectancy. Although the wood was still as solid as the old workbench, the cable stretched and the weight box rusted and leaked sand like an hourglass. The two doors we used all the time were permanently parked in the open position for fear we'd never get them raised again.

Mom was a stickler for keeping the garage closed up. Open doors invited cats, dogs, birds, and possums while dirt and leaves blew in. She tried to keep the garage as clean as her house and didn't appreciate the extra work if she had to sweep it out. Why even park the car in the garage if birds could perch in there and whitewash it?

Sometime in the early 1980's, out of necessity, Dad replaced the worn-out, most-used middle doors with light-weight fiberglass roll-up doors. Mom had the luxury of a remote opener on her stall. A third door was removed from the pulley mechanism and fitted with hinges to swing open from the side. Instead of a farm truck, the lawn mower lived behind door number three. No one used the fourth door.

My mother worked the 5-9 shift at a restaurant for twenty-two years. The only exception was on Sundays when she worked two shifts. She went to town (a real town, not the one my grandparents lived in) at ten in the morning, waited tables through the busy noon hour, and came home at two o'clock for a nap before driving back to the restaurant.

One Sunday, Father's Day, in fact, she was rushing around to get to work. My dad had already been somewhere that morning, probably looking after his cattle, and had left the door open behind his pickup. His was the stall closest to the house. In her haste, Mom just walked through the open portal, jumped in her car and shifted into reverse. The rear bumper just fit in one of the spaces where a fiberglass panel should have been. In her new automatic garage door. The one she forgot to open.

Can you imagine a bumper protruding from the left door, just below the handle?

Naturally, she blamed Dad because he hadn't closed the other door. She would never have entered the garage through that door if it hadn't been open. She would have remembered to push the button and raise the door on her side if he had just closed his door like he was supposed to.

Since her car was wedged into the door, Dad had to take her to work in his pickup. She was late. 

You can't imagine my dad's delight in this minor auto accident since she never did anything wrong. It didn't matter that Mom thought it was his fault.

Mom didn't plan to give Dad the Best Fathers' Day Gift in the history of the world, but she did. He didn't mind the cost of the replacement panel. He didn't even call the insurance agent. He derived years worth of mileage from that incident.

I hope all you fathers have as pleasant a day as he did.

Thanks to my writing friend, J, for helping me with some descriptions.