Technology, Innovation & Telecomm

Welcome to the third in a series of tales of woe from the family garage.

So far, I’ve given you a flavor of the range of damage that my father and I inflicted on our hapless garage doors when I was a kid. The fun doesn’t stop there. No boy! We have even more stories of the strange and unlikely carnage visited upon those faithful barriers.

My dad enjoyed running cars pretty hard. He had a good time with all the stuff teenagers love to do with them: doing doughnuts in snowy parking lots, burning rubber, driving fast, and skidding to a halt…long after he had been an adult. No sweat though, ’cause we loved it.

Anyhow, the driveway leading to the garage ran up the right side of the house and it was gravel. The garage itself was situated such that part of it was actually behind the house, while the section that housed my mom’s car was directly in-line with the driveway. As a result, when you wanted to pull a car into my dad’s side of the building (where we did body work, light mechanical stuff, and collision re-builds), you had to make a slight left turn, followed quickly thereafter by a slight right. No big deal.

One of the things that my dad loved to do was to pull into the driveway at a fairly fast clip and then stand on the brakes as he performed the little “left-followed-by-quick-right” maneuver. The effect was to skid in the gravel right up to the door. Truth told, I think it was a personal challenge to him to see just how close he could get, but that’s just my opinion.

He was performing this little stunt one day, when the car he was driving decided on its own that its braking performance was not going to be all it should. Mind you, the brakes didn’t fail completely or anything like that. They simply “faded” rather than “grabbed”. There was a slight gravel skid with the associated left and right…followed by the nose of the car punching yet another hole through the garage door. The car stopped alright. It just wasn’t where my dad expected it would be. Score another repair for my father. …And some points for the pessimists of the world, since now the universe was once again out of balance.

Score:

1. Mom’s door: 1
2. Dad’s door: 2

(I suspect that nowadays, someone might think that the poor garage was some kind of terrorist training grounds, what with the use of various vehicles for dealing that kind of destruction)

Take heart though. Balance was later restored…

I believe I’m well on the way to proving the existence of a genetic pre-disposition toward the ravaging of garage doors. I have two subjects to use for case studies: Myself and my father.

In an earlier post, I mentioned that it had been my experience that garage doors yield readily to vehicles that attempt to pass through them. When my first encounter down that line failed to convince me of this, a few subsequent incidents brought me solidly into the fold.

…

If memory serves me, in the 70’s, Ford had a few “design issues” with the transmissions of some of its vehicles where on occasion they could slip from “park” into “reverse”. This was seemingly a bad thing if the car was running. Go figure. I also seem to recall seeing stickers on the sun visors of said vehicles indicating that they really felt you needed to have the parking brake on in just such circumstances. Got all that? You’ll want to keep it all in mind as I continue…

My uncle, my father, and I were working inside the detached garage behind our house. It was cold out and my dad needed to run the engine of the Ford while he worked. So, we did what you do in such cases: We put a piece of flexible tubing onto the tail pipe of the car and ran it under the garage door so that we could keep it mostly closed. While my dad tinkered under the hood, my uncle and I were working on the inside of the vehicle, cleaning it out and doing some other mostly cosmetic stuff.

Whatever the work was that my dad was doing at the time seemed to require that he rev the engine a bit here and again. He was able to do this from under the hood by means of tugging the accelerator cable by the carberator, and he had done this a few times already. However, one of the times that he did this, the aforementioned “design issue” manifested itself with the result that the car started moving backward toward the closed garage door. My uncle and I were leaning into the vehicle from both the driver and passenger side when it started its attempted escape. You’d think that we would have hopped out of the way, wouldn’t you? Not a chance. Instead, for some strange reason we both grabbed the car and dug our feet in as though we could stop it. It wasn’t moving fast but I can tell you that our combined strength wasn’t near enough to halt its progress. So, the car quietly dragged us both along as it backed into and through the garage door. The only one who had any sense was my dad. As we were being drug along, he walked to the driver’s side and threw it back into park (or turned off the ignition, I can’t remember which), halting the vehicle. Sadly, by that time most of the rear of the car was outside the garage. Anyhow, you can imagine what followed: yet another repair of a garage door and its associated hardware for my poor dad. The upside in this case (sorta) was that this time the door being crunched was on my dad’s side of the garage instead of being on my mother’s, as it had been when I had my “Mustang-through-door” incident. I guess the optimist would say that everything was in balance as a result…

But was that all? Noooooooo….

I should have known when my friend Bob went ’splat’ on the ice of the hillside, that trouble was ’round the bend.

We were helping another friend, Steve, move some items from his in-laws-to-be that were destined for his new home. Mainly, we were there to move a refrigerator out of the basement to it’s new residence a few miles away. Oh yeah, it was dark outside too.

The first clue that trouble was ahead should have been the fact that it was January. The next should have been the glare of ice on the lawn leading down to the back entrance to the basement. Funny thing. Did you know that when it snows then melts, then freezes again, the result is ice? Three (relatively) intelligent adult males and that somehow didn’t strike a note with any of us.

Anyhow, as we made our way down the hill and around the back, poor Bob took a pretty hard fall on that glassy sheet, sliding toward the side of the house. Steve and I were having our own troubles staying upright when we finally made it into the “safety” of the basement. All’s well, right? Nope. Besides the fact that the ceiling height in that basement was about 5 feet (the net result being that we all banged up our foreheads multiple times), we still needed to get the refrigerator back to the truck. The thinking was, after our adventures getting to the basement, that we would strap the ‘fridge to a hand truck and try to take a slightly different route back to the U-Haul (or whatever the vehicle of choice was, I can’t quite recall) so as to avoid the nice skating rink on the hillside. Even though there was still snow on the ground in line with the path we were planning, it seemed like a safer bet to have it under foot than the other form of frozen water. We thought it was a great plan at the time…

Steve chose to steer the appliance from behind while Bob and I guided the thing from the front. That part was going ok, and we were making slow but steady progress until we got to the little rise in the lawn that required a bit of heaving on Steve’s part and a bit of shoving on Bob’s and my part.

Now, you need to know that Steve had elected to wear treadless deck shoes for our little moving adventure and you also need to know that neither Bob nor I knew this.

While Steve was heaving to help pull the ‘fridge up the little rise, his shoes’ lack of tread became an issue…and both his feet slipped out from under him. Remember, he had the hand truck and appliance tipped toward him while he was backing up this little rise. When pressure overcame friction, the whole shebang landed on top of him. After a second or so of surprise, I lost my composure. If I had a camera and had been cruel enough to think of it, I would have taken a picture or two. It was like something from a Saturday morning cartoon. There was a refrigerator laying in the snow, with two arms extending from the sides at the top and two legs sticking out of the bottom…and Steve yelling for us to get the thing off of him. He didn’t sound like he had been hurt and frankly, I was laughing so hard that when Bob and I got the load off of him, I had to sit down in the snow to regain my self control. Thankfully, the hand truck and the mushy ground had helped to prevent any injuries to poor Steve.

I’m not sure what the moral of the story is here, but I can tell you that snow, deck shoes and refrigerators are not a good combination in the middle of January, especially when you add three supposedly intelligent males to the mix…

…it’s embarassing really.

Something over 10 years ago, just after we moved into this house, I took it upon myself to remove the baseboard in our living room and hallway. The notion was that I would refinish the hardwood floors and replace the baseboard straight away, adding a lovely country appeal to the rooms.

Well…the floors got refinished.

10+ years later, I finally got around to putting up baseboard. Those who know me will attest to the ongoing ribbing I’ve taken (deservedly, I admit!) over this issue. Well, rib no more fans! I’ve just today finished the work! The funny part is that we’re now going to be putting carpeting back in where I had re-worked the floors… Time has a funny way of dealing with such matters.

In any case, I’m sure that my friends and family will easily find other topics to rib me about, given that I’m somewhat gifted with a virtual bull’s-eye where that kind of thing is concerned. My wife has already coined a new phrase suitable to the situation: “10 Years and 3 days to get my baseboard!” Why three days? ‘Cause that’s how long it took from the time that I started putting it up ’til I finished this afternoon…

Why rush these things?

Lately, I’ve been feeling the need to post some stories from my youth (if you ask my wife, she’d insist that I never left it).

Anyhow, I mentioned in an earlier post (”You just covered your eyes and went with it…”) that I helped my dad in his body shop behind our house when I was a kid. My sister and I grew up not knowing for sure just what car we’d be riding in next whenever the family went out, so it was fairly natural that I learned to handle a car at a pretty young age. I was about 8 or so when my dad taught me to drive a 1950 three speed, column-shift Chrysler. I was fairly tall and so reaching the pedals wasn’t too much of a stretch (groan if you must).

So, one Saturday afternoon my dad threw me the keys to one of the cars that he owned (a 1960’s vintage Mustang) and told me to move it out of the way of my mom’s side of the garage. I couldn’t have been more than about 9 or maybe 10 years old and I was in a hurry. I slapped the keys in the ignition and proceeded to turn ‘em. It was a standard-shift… Notice that I didn’t mention pushing in the clutch first?

The car not only lurched forward, but it actually somehow started. Don’t ask me how, but trust me it did (you’d have to guess that the neutral switch wasn’t functioning, huh?). The lurch led the front of the Mustang to end up just in front of my mom’s car…after first passing (not cleanly) through the garage door. Somehow I had the presence of mind to jam on the brake and kill the ignition in time to prevent actually hitting my mother’s Oldsmobile…barely. If the two cars were separated by 6 inches, it was a lot.

Of course, the garage door was smashed up pretty badly and my dad was more than just a little surprised, since he’d been standing there watching the whole thing. I did a Road Runner “scram-in-a-cloud-of-dust” act and ended up in the safety of the space beneath my bed. When my mother found me a bit later, she says that I was praying out loud that my dad wouldn’t be mad and punish me. Personally, I don’t remember that part but given my tender youth and quite possibly hysterical amnesia, I’ll go with what she says.

In the end, my mother was mad at my dad and my dad was mad at himself, but no one was mad at me. I guess they kinda figured that perhaps someone my age shouldn’t have been entrusted with quite that much responsibility. Not sure. Either way, I didn’t end up in trouble and my parents were cool.

When I finally came out of hiding and went out to survey the damage, I remember pretty clearly my father piecing the garage door back together like some kind of puzzle and also his bending the track back into some semblance of its original form. He was a body man after all…

Ultimately, he got it back together ok and I did a little less driving until I was a bit older. But that poor garage door not only wasn’t ever quite the same, it suffered further indignities later on. I’ll reserve that story for a future post.

My grandfather was highly regarded for many things: his intellect, his physical strength, his patience, etc. What he was not so well regarded for was his skill behind the wheel of a car.

When I was a kid, I helped my dad run a body shop out of the garage behind our house, and I remember a number of times having to help him repair my grampa’s vehicles. When you’d ask my granddad why he ran the stop sign or what made him swing into the side of some other car, you’d very likely get an answer like “I didn’t feel like stopping”, or “I didn’t think I hit him that hard”, or perhaps “It’s only a scratch”. He banged up more cars than Mr. Magoo.

So one evening when he was getting on in years, grampa, my girlfriend (now my wife) and I went to the mall in my home town. It was summer and we left the stores about the time the sun was beginning to set. I was busy reading the manual of some doo-dad that I had just purchased, from the passenger’s side, whilst my bride-to-be sat in the back; grampa driving.

As you might guess, I didn’t see it coming.

As I said, I was sitting next to him reading when the car started juggling about, followed very quickly thereafter by a huge bang, a scraping sound, another bang, and another couple of severe pitches. I thought my teeth were gonna come out of my mouth. Naturally I looked up to see what in heaven’s name was happening. It turns out that in the shadows of dusk, my grandfather had driven down a hillside that joined two parking lots at two different elevations. We exited the mall parking lot into the grass of a small hillside, only to arrive at the other lot, first slamming over the edge of the pavement and then rolling over a parking barrier.

I said something to the effect of “Grampa, you just drove down the hill!”. His only response was “Oh.”. I swear that was it. No surprise. No emotion. No further discussion….just “Oh.” By that time my girlfriend and I were laughing so hard that I had to turn my head away to try not to embarrass my grandfather. We were nearly in hysterics and by the time we arrived back at his house, my whole body ached. It was a serious struggle for us to hold it in…the result being that it was probably the closest I’ve ever come to losing bladder control.

Once we finally got home I found out that my future bride had seen it coming and had decided *not* to say anything! All she could do was watch it happen and hold on.

He was a man of many talents and great patience and a lot of what I’ve become comes from him, but a good driver my granddad was not… I miss him a lot.

Move over Mr. Magoo.