Mercurys and Mayhem

On the day I turned fifteen, I got my license to drive a car. There was a written exam and a behind-the-wheel test. My mother took me over to the test center, never believing I would pass—something I didn’t learn until later. On the way, she mentioned that when she was growing up, she went to the drugstore and paid twenty-five cents for her license. I did pass. A week later, I was driving a red and white 1953 Mercury two-door hardtop. It was tired and rusted, but it was mine.

The world changed. First it was just the freedom to go wherever you wanted, pretty much whenever you wanted. After school, we’d all chip in a quarter, drive down to Lake Pepin—birthplace of waterskiing—just to see if the ice had gone out. One day it was up the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to learn if there was snow yet at Indianhead, a ski resort. There was a sprinkling of the stuff in Ashland. When we reached Hurley, they were using front-end loaders to load dump trucks to get the white stuff off the streets.

Evenings we would just go out cruising, meet up at drive-in restaurants. Three would leave their car parked and go off with a fourth. There was a circuit in St. Paul. It started downtown. The first leg was downhill on Fifth Street. A sweet-sounding exhaust helped because the whole point was to get the pipes rapping in the canyon lined by tall buildings. It was all about the echo. Then we’d wind around to Rice Street by the state capitol and hang a left on University. The cool thing about University was it was six lanes, separated by a narrow concrete divider. The really cool thing was stoplights were spaced four or five blocks apart, perfect for drag racing. The end of the circuit was Porky’s, a drive-in where guys with really great cars we aspired to hung out.

Time not spent driving was spent repairing, cleaning, and upgrading our cars, anything to make them better looking and faster. The favored marque in my neighborhood was Ford. It had been manufacturing the flathead V-8 engine since 1932. Over the years, engine displacement and horsepower increased. It wasn’t until 1954 that Ford came out with an overhead-valve engine. If you owned any Ford flathead-powered car, you aspired to get hold of a 1953 engine, which you could find at the junkyard in Hugo. There was a community swing set, which was barely up to the task of carrying the weight of an engine and therefore not ideal, but it got a lot of use when swapping engines.

Chevy was behind the curve, not offering a V-8 until 1955, but striking gold with its small-block V-8. Where is this all going, you may ask? The drag strip, and letting it rip for a quarter mile. Nothing was planned. I happened to be in the right place at the right time and got an invite. The guy with the car, a GM man, had the ability to make anything go faster. That night he was driving a mid-1950s Pontiac. If you won your class, you got your choice of a three-inch-tall trophy or five bucks.

He took the five bucks and took us to this bar on Randolph to celebrate. The bar was located in an older two-story building, apartments on second floor and storefronts at street level. The bar took up two storefronts, but one entrance was closed. I was to learn later that there were two exits on the alley side.

The four of us slid into a booth. I was underage, but had no problem getting a Coke. It must have been a weekend night because the joint was jammed, mostly by guys a lot older than us. So I was feeling cool and grown up until this big guy walked through the front door wearing an old overcoat, a nylon stocking over his head, and the biggest revolver I’d see until Dirty Harry.

Those of us facing the entry were the first to get to our feet and make for the rear exits. I was right there with them until I turned a corner and the guys I’d been following were coming toward me, hands in the air. We all learned pretty quickly that the man who came in the front door had two accomplices who came through the back doors, both dressed like the first man.

We were ushered to our seats. Then things got confusing. One man told us to sit and another told us to stand. A bit of dark humor didn’t lighten the mood, but it did end the confusion of whether to sit or stand.

A frail old wino, standing at the bar, didn’t take kindly to being ordered around and got belligerent. The first guy, the man with the biggest gun, smashed the wino in the face with his gun. The wino collapsed and lay on the floor bleeding.

The robbers got their act together. We were ordered to sit. While the leader cleaned out the cash register, the other two started cleaning out the patrons. I watched guys stuffing money in their socks, in their pants, in their shirts. I wished I had their problem. What I really wanted was to borrow a few bucks. I didn’t want to upset the man who was going to be cleaning us out in a few seconds.

I did the only thing I could think of. I turned my pockets inside out and crossed my fingers. Probably because I looked exactly like the scared teenager I was, he didn’t bother with me.

The ordeal was simply over. The three robbers fled. Some patrons lamented their loss. Other bragged when they pulled their cash out from where they concealed it. The wino still lay on the floor bleeding.

The crime spree the three started a couple of weeks earlier ended a couple of weeks later in a shootout with the police. It was bloody. I no longer remember the details, but there were deaths and injuries.

Many decades later, I was looking to get some bodywork done on my car and get the whole vehicle repainted. I looked around for body shops. I found one operated by the guy who had invited me to the drag strip and to that bar on Randolph. We had lost touch after the robbery.

I remembered him as sort of a bad boy in a really cool way, a James Dean.

I could still see who he’d been through what he was, but he was all grown up. I gave him my business because I somehow felt that my car would be the better for it. I loved my car. It was my daily driver for twenty-seven years.

Funny, but I never went to the drag strip again. It was not a conscious decision. It just never happened.