MEMORIES OF GROWING UP IN POLK COUNTY, MISSOURI
by Stan Hitchcock
WELL, THERE GOES CANDY APPLE RED, that’s what the people said, If he doesn’t slow it down a bit he’s gonna wind up dead. . . .
Stan Hitchcock....Epic Records 1964
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I managed to bring a certain level of foolishness to our little family, but I probably excelled in the area of foolish driving more than anything else. I saved my money from working in the hay fields one summer, and when I was 15 bought my first car, a 1936 Pontiac sedan, for the grand total of $150.....three months later I wrecked it in a head on collision while I was playing bumper tag with another friend, Bucky Goss and his folk’s car, with the lights off on a gravel road. It was kinda like hide and seek except it really hurt when I got found. I still have a scar cutting through my eyebrow where the wing window frame creased my skull. Loretta Noe, riding next to Bucky in the front seat of his folks car had a bad cut on her knee where it hit the dashboard ashtray, Denny Wright got a bloody nose and Jon Glenn got a heck of a bump on the head from hitting my windshield. My old Gretsch guitar flew all over the back seat, but survived to play again.
We were about two miles out of Pleasant Hope when we had the wreck and I ran all the way in to get help, just scared to death. We had an Osteopath doctor in town that was just one step up from a witch doctor and I still remember him putting four stitches in my eye brow, without deadening it at all.
That wreck, and us boys putting the manure spreader on the School Principals front porch on Halloween night, was the big events of that year, 1951, which tells you how exciting those Ozark hills could be.
A year later Dad bought me a 39 Ford Sedan, paying all of $300 for that one. It was a cool car, but I couldn’t keep it running. When It would go on the blink I would borrow Dads car or truck and do equal damage to his transportation. One night, coming home from Church, I took a curve on the gravel road too fast and turned the farm truck over on top of a barbed wire fence. The crash ran the fence posts through the steel body of the truck and the barbed wire wrapped around it like a spider wrapping up a grasshopper in its web. I like to have never got out of that thing since one of the fence posts came right through the cab and stopped about an inch from my head....I’ve still got barbed wire scars on my body.
Finally, when I was a senior, in 1953, I bought my dream car....a 1948 Chevy Fleetline. This was the 50’s and I was hog wild over my car. I got a mechanic friend to split the manifold on the six cylinder engine, I bought a bunch of flex pipe and hangers and hooked up the darndest set of twin pipes you have ever heard.....I’ll swear you could hear those pipes backing off coming down the hill about 5 miles from our house.....music to mine ears. I put two inch lowering blocks on the back springs, but that wasn’t low enough, so I piled some concrete blocks and a one hundred pound sack of horse feed back in the trunk and man it set just right. It was painted candy apple red and I still have dreams about it sometimes....it was a beautiful thing.
You baby boomers will never know what you missed not growing up in the 50’s........ go on, eat your hearts out. You know this was before the free love bullcrap of the 60’s.....the drug outs of the 70’s.....and all the craziness of the 80’s and 90’s. Yeah, we just sat real low, scrunched down in the driver’s seat, circled the drive-in with the girl that looked just like Natalie Wood and pretended we were James Dean.
That worked out ok until the night I backed up, and ran over a car hop at the Corral Drive-in, in Springfield, and who just happened to be carrying a whole tray of root beer floats at the time. Well I didn’t exactly run over her, I more or less run into her with the rear end of my car. Oh friends, it was an awful sight what a whole tray of them big root beer mugs can do to the back of a lowered, piped, moon hub capped, candy apple red dream car. Worse yet, the ice cream melted and ran down through the cracks around the trunk, mixed with the concrete blocks, the horsefeed and old sweat socks and a week later you have never smelled anything quite like it. Anyway, the girl was bruised and embarrassed and it flat ruined my chances of picking her up after work some night. Ah, romance, so fickle.
You know, it sounds kinda corny now, but all those high school years when I was courtin’, I would carry my guitar in the back seat of my old car, go out on the back roads and up by the creek, park that car, whip out my guitar and sing to the girl... pretty wild, huh? Deep kissing, mild petting, heavy breathing, windows steaming up....just like in the movies, and me singing the sound track. That worked out alright until the night Loretta Noe and I went parking by the creek and fell slap asleep, woke up around 3 O’Clock in the morning and had to go face her Father who was waiting on the front porch. Boy, I don’t know how I got out of that one but her father, Jack Noe, didn’t beat me to death so I must have talked pretty fast.
If I could give something magic to my sons, I would give them the innocence of a boy growing up in the 50’s, so they could experience that uncomplicated, sweet time that we will never see again. Where dope was never heard of, sexual preference was all hetro, of course, virginity an accepted virtue, it was still all right to want to grow up and be President, you could call a waitress honey and not be slapped with a lawsuit and the skies were not cloudy all day...does kinda sound unreal, now, looking back, but that was life in the back roads (fast lanes hadn’t been invented yet).
Your friend, Stan!
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