It seems, looking back, that we who lived on Randolph lived on an island of sorts. I was talking with a colleague and when asked about where I had gone to school, I said I had gone to a public school. While technically correct, Randolph High was really more like a private school in those days.
Really. Think about it.
We all lived on the base, we were all military dependents, we had armed guards protecting us, we had sports facilities at our disposal, we had recreation facilities at our disposal, we had free medical care, we had it all. One would have thought we were living in some sort of taxpayer-funded paradise. Of course there was always a cost to be paid (my dad disappeared in the middle of the night in the fall of 1962 and we didn't know where he had gone for six weeks or so, until he got back from wherever he had been sent during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis; then again in 1967 when he was in Vietnam and missed David's senior year and all that happened in that year 1967-1968). Oh, yes, there was a cost to be paid.
But, honestly said, we had it good. And Steve's car is one of the good things. It is a Renault 4CV. It had an engine in the back, suicide doors up front, and barely room for four young hooligans. I'll just bet that there were very few folks in south Texas in those years driving Renault 4CVs, unless they were service connected. Because those who'd had the opportunity to live overseas had also the opportunity to discover oddball automobiles and to maybe bring them home. I don't know where Steve's folks got that 4CV, but no one else I knew had one like it.
Ponder this photo out of the 1963 Talon yearbook.
We see (from the right) Dennis Ruefer and Cornel Walker near what appears to be a late 50s-early 60s Oldsmobile. But in the foreground, we see Buzz Mulkins and Gary Bird in Gary's Mercedes 190 convertible. What other kids in South Texas were cruising, even to the drive-in in Universal City, in such a ride? And I'll bet that Gary just figured it was only the family car. No big deal.
We were on an island. I often use automobile design examples in my classes and the students have no idea what I am talking about. Even had they been alive a half century ago, their home towns were not as interesting in terms of automobiles. Doris Maese's folks had an Isetta. I could not find a photo of Doris' Isetta, but the image is burned in my mind. She let me try to drive it once and it was scary having the world right at the end of one's feet. No one knows that the Isetta was one of the cars that kept BMW going in the 1950s. There are lots of BMWs around nowadays, but an Isetta is rare. Except for us on our island.
For us, it was the car Doris Maese drove to school.
No, none of my millennial students have a clue what it was like to grow up on an air base in south Texas in the 1960s. We weren't special, but the place that we lived was and we learned things from the atmosphere around us.
Neely Little, whose family moved from Randolph between her junior and senior years had a Jaguar XK140. I think I remember that her grandmother had given it to her. Note I said "to her". In my memory, it was Neely's car. Boy, I would have really liked to have been able to drive that one around, but if I was afraid of the Isetta, I was really afraid of the power in that Jag. But where else was I ever going to see a Jag like that, let alone sit in it and dream.
In our sophomore years at MacArthur, Gary Erickson and I had just gotten our driver's licences, but our folks were too cautious to let us go tooling around in the family car. However, Gary knew an airman who worked at the auto hobby shop and if we would wash and polish his car, he'd let us drive it around. Nobody now remembers the Studebaker Silver Hawk, but for a couple of 15 year olds, this was a dream. We probably felt a whole lot cooler than we really were, but it was fun.
And this wander down automobile memory lane began when I noticed Steve Burgoon's truly classic Renault 4CV in the background of a photo. Life on the base was always interesting and we had the opportunity to see lots of stuff and learn about many things that life in another locale might not have afforded. I feel really blessed.
However, reality is always intruding. Yes, our island was full of interesting automobiles, and yes, some of us were able to tool around on Vespa and Lambretta motor scooters (early 1960s hipsters, though we had no idea that we were such style setters, then or now). But when it came to actually being able to drive, I, at least, had to use the family car. And the family car was a 1956 Chevrolet 210 station wagon with a six cylinder engine, a two speed PowerGlide, and no radio.
"Mom, Dad, You're ruining my life. This is so uncool."
4 comments:
Ah the cars! I remember Randy Scott's English Ford, a grey beat up thing that Mike Wagner and I rode in to school with him. There was a big curve between the West Gate and the school that we tried to up the mph on each day (our cerebral cortexes were not yet fully formed). It was also the car we took to Padre Island one weekend (telling our parents we were going canoeing in Lake McQueeney). We got there with a cooler of beer, only to discover we had no "church key"(pre-poptop days), and searched desperately for one. Then, on the way back, Randy's Ford broke down with a radiator leak and his dad had to come and pick us up in the middle of the night. Explaining what we were doing halfway to Mexico instead of Lake McQueeney took some imaginative lying.
The car I lusted after was Monty Mahr's MG Sportster, a tiny sports car that two people could easily pick up, but looking like something James Dean would drive.
Thanks, Ron. I love how these posts are bringing back long ago memories.
Interesting idea of Randolph being an island. I never thought of it that way. Probably because my family came to Randolph from southern Spain where the military housing area (Santa Clara) was about forty miles from the main base (Morón Air Base). Santa Clara was an island. Since teenagers were not allowed by the Status of Forces agreement to drive, we were at the mercy of whatever transportation came about. The base ran “Blue Bird” bus shuttles from Santa Clara downtown to where the exchange was located in an old warehouse complex and to the auxiliary base at San Pablo Air Base, which was on one side of the Sevilla airport. San Pablo had the base swimming pool, library, “gymnatorium” which was primarily used for movies a couple of nights a week, snack bar, elementary school, and base chapel. None of these were large facilities, but they were what we had. At about any hour of the day, you could find a group of us kids standing by the entrance to the housing area in hopes that some merciful adult would give us a ride to the BX or to San Pablo.
So, when I arrived at Randolph, I was like the proverbial “farmer come to the big city”. All of my age contemporaries now drove whereas I had never been behind the wheel of a car. And they usually did not go to the movie in the Taj Mahal but to movies downtown. I think I rode with Jim Pepitone downtown to the Majestic Theater to see the first run of “Goldfinger”. At that time, the Majestic was just a remnant of the glorious facility it had been when it was first built, but to a guy who had watched movies for the past three and a half years in a building used also as a gym, it was magic. I stared at the “twinkling stars” in the ceiling which gave the illusion of a night sky. The screen seemed huge compared to the one I was used to. (Even today when I go to the restored Majestic, I remember that first encounter with the place.)
The degree of independence permitted by being able to drive (and by not having armed Guardia Civil on every street corner) was incredible to a guy coming from Franco’s Fascist Spain.
I remember riding around with Jim and with Mike Wagner on the base and having kids sometimes play “bumper tag” – just a gentle tap on the bumper of our fellow Ro-Hawks. Quite frankly I don’t recall a lot about the types of cars kids drove. I was just impressed by the fact that they DID drive. And that they were willing to swing by and pick me up to go to a football game or party when I had no way to reciprocate with the driving.
It took me a long time to get proficient enough to go take the Texas driver’s license test – the practicum, not the written part which was pretty easy. I just scraped by the practicum – failed the parallel parking part but succeeded in almost putting the evaluator through the windshield when he said “stop” and I did so immediately. So, I proudly got the license and got to drive a few times before heading off to the Air Force Academy where I would be carless again for three years except for a few days on home on leave each summer and at Christmas.
I enjoyed Ron’s write-up about the Isetta. I didn’t know that anybody else knew what they were. Since they were built in Spain while I lived there, there were a lot of them on the Spanish roads. While in other parts of Europe, they were no doubt a matter of ridicule, in the poor areas of Spain, they were a status symbol.
And I’m willing to match my family’s 1959 Rambler American to anybody else’s car for being “uncool”.
Now you've done it, Ron, with your reference to cars and our days at RHS! And I'll put my family's 6-banger Chevy Nova station wagon up against any of the other "uncool" cars from that day.
I remember Brock Grosse's hopped-up '55 Chevy, Mike Hale's yellow convertible, and a lot of other really cool cars from that time frame. I remember when Dan Porter got his Mini and how we used to thrash it around the back roads off-base. (I now have two of them!) I also remember when a bunch of guys picked up Mr. Aguirre's black VW Beetle and leaned it up against the flag pole in front of the school. And then there was James Cook's restored Ford pick-em-up truck -- which several of us used to escape from school on "senior skip day" after we did the Senior Class play. We all got suspended the next day but it sure was fun while it lasted!
There are others whose names escape me but whose cars are still burned in my memory. For instance, there was one guy I used to run with who had a ragged old '53 Studebaker. It wasn't much to look at but, with those big 16-inch wheels, we could get off-road with no problem and it was tough enough to plow down any tree that wasn't much bigger than about an inch in diameter while we went looking for a place to party.
But, going back to the crux of your post, you're absolutely right. Growing up on Randolph was like living on an island. We had so many things right there at our fingertips that, in reality, we really didn't have to leave the base to have a good time. But, of course, we did. I think growing up in that type of environment, as well as having the opportunity to live all over the world, has given all of us a perspective on life that few others have today and we should all be grateful for that experience. I know that I am, because it certainly helped me in my 41+ years of doing radio news.
Gloria has e-mailed me that I should have identified myself as the author of the "RHSBlog Admin" comment on Ron's "island" post. I thought the program would do so automatically but I was apparently wrong. I wrote the comment. Jerry Ball, RHS '65.
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