That 70’s Show

It was the spring of ‘76 and we were reading Edward Abbey’s “Desert Solitaire” in my Sophomore English class.  Somehow we convinced our teacher that the best place to read that book would be in Arches National Park, half a day’s drive from Salt Lake.  Even more miraculously, she convinced the school administration that it was a good idea too.  We got Thursday and Friday off school and spent a long weekend down there.  An unmarried teacher and her boyfriend and a dozen 16 year-olds of both genders.

We drove down in a caravan of a half dozen cars, I borrowed my dad’s full-sized ‘74 Dodge Van packed with me, 6 of my closest friends and all our camping gear.  True to the show of the same name as my title, one of my passengers was a Foreign Exchange student (from Germany, not some unnamed third-world country) who was part of our group.

For the most part, we camped in my parent’s big 8 man Army looking tent.  One night we discovered a big, natural bowl cut into the rock and spent the night in there.  Now, this wasn’t too smart, because as it was we had a hard time climbing out of it the next morning, but if there had been a rain storm, famous for flash floods in the desert, the wet rock would have made it all but impossible to get out.

But we survived, as 90% of teenagers do.  Which, considering their stupidity, is an amazing statistic to me.

A couple days ago I found a box of old VCR tapes in the garage and in it was a tape I had transferred a bunch of old Super 8 movies onto.  This clip, from that trip, was among them.  You’ll have to forgive the quality, this was 35 years ago and has been transferred from Super 8 to VCR, to DVD and then uploaded to YouTube.

Did I mention that none of us even remembered to bring the book?

Fun with Cops, Part II

About a month after the incident at the party at my house, I had another run-in with Officer Napoleon.

There was some issue with students from my high school parking their cars, or just sitting on the lawns, on the small street right by the school.  The big issue was that that was where they went to smoke pot.  The neighbors complained enough about the “Douglas Street Squatters”, as they were known, that the city made the street a no-parking area during school hours.  Now Douglas Street runs parallel to the main street in front of the school, which seemed to have caused some confusion for Officer Napoleon.

It was lunchtime and there were a whole bunch of students out at the 7-11 across from the school, which happened to be where my unofficial parking spot was; right on the main road in front of said 7-11.  We were standing there eating lunch, and watching a cop give tickets to all the cars along the main road.  I was wondering what he was doing, and when he finally got to my car I decided I now had the right to ask.  I walk over to him, and as I get close enough to talk to him I realize it’s the same Napoleon wannabe cop that was strutting around my house just a few months back.

“Whatcha doin’?” I asked him.

“What?” He responded.

“This is my car, I was just wondering what you were giving me a ticket for.”

“Parking illegally.  They changed this to a no parking zone during school hours.”

“No, that’s Douglas Street, we can still park here.”

“Nope, they changed this street to.”

“Not according to that.” I said as I pointed to the parking sign right in front of my car.

He didn’t say much, just looked at the sign, ripped up the ticket he had started and then went back to all the other cars along the street and ripped up their tickets too.

“I fought the law, and the law (didn’t) won.”

Fun with Cops, Part I

It was sometime around October of my senior year.  My parents had taken off to some convention somewhere and left me and my younger siblings alone in the house for a week.  Which, at 17, meant “One Big 7 Day Party.”  My  best friend, and a dozen of my closest friends, had pretty much moved in for the week.  A house full of unsupervised teenagers, something the ultra-conservative neighborhood (SLC in 1977, EVERWHERE was ultra-conservative) must have just loved.

Not that we planned this, but they were in the process of building a couple of condominium buildings almost across the street from my house.  Now, other than partying, what other things do teenagers, or did they in 1977, like to do?  Well, explore unfinished buildings.  And these had working elevators. 

While we were partaking of our bootlegged bounty in the house, (let’s call them) J.T., Eric and some other unknown friend, decided to explore the high-rises.  At about 10 at night.  Well, they had done this a couple nights before, and came running in the front door, yelling “Cops, Cops”, and as we all just started peeing our pants, they started laughing.  Yeah, funny joke.

Well, this evening JT comes running in the front door, screaming “Cops! Cops!”, and just like in the story about the kid who cried wolf, we didn’t believe him.  Until he ran out the back door, jumped off the balcony and ran out into the field.  Then I thought “Hmmm, maybe he is serious?”, went to the front window and looked out. 

Flashing red and blue lights right in front of my house.  Holy $%!%, he wasn’t kidding.  That’s when I followed him, running through the house screaming “Cops! Cops!”, out the back door, off the balcony and into the field, with half the party in tow. 

About a third of the way down the hill, I look over and there’s my older brother running right beside me.  He looks at me, I look at him, and he says “That’s OUR house, we gotta go back and see what’s going on.”

(See, my parents had drilled some sense of responsibility into us.)

Damn, he’s right.  So we head back up to the house, to find the half of the party that had remained being interrogated by 4 or 5 of Salt Lake City’s finest.  Well, not all.  One of SLC’s finest was sitting on the couch in the living room, drink in one hand, smoke in the other, talking to (we’ll call her) Tory, a female freshman friend of mine.

We walked into the kitchen to find a room full of kids, with the head cop pacing around, barking questions, like a modern day Napoleon grilling the troops on what went wrong at the last battle.  Seems that two of the three that had been up at the condos had frozen right in their tracks, while JT ran for his life, leading the cops right to the party.  Napoleon got his name from the other two, and damn well wanted to get his hands on that danged fugitive.  He got everyone’s name, asking each one where JT was, getting the same response from them all: “He’s out in the field.” 

When we walked in and he asked us, we told him who we were, and that it was our house.  I don’t remember any specifics of the grilling, but he did write down my sister’s name when she came home in the middle of the mess, my 11 year old little brother’s name when he woke up to see what was going on and even my sister-in-law who showed up near the end to pick up my older brother.  We half expected him to put his ear to her very pregnant stomach and demand to see the baby’s identification.  They made us pour out all our alcohol, and then spent an hour walking through the field looking for JT, passing by but not stumbling onto a single one of the 15 or 20 friends  that were hiding under sage brush and other such natural cover out there.

An hour or so later, they gave up looking, and left.  No citations, no arrests. (aahh, the innocence of the 70’s).  My little brother went back to bed, my little sister went to bed and my older brother and his wife went home. 

Now, we all knew better than to raid my parent’s liquor cabinet, they never needed a lock on it because what restrictions they did put on us were to be taken seriously.  But after this ordeal, we were glad that the cops hadn’t discovered it, and we carefully partook of what we thought we could get away with.  (We didn’t – I had to pay the parents back, twofold).  We had to do something to calm ourselves down as we waited for the absent party goers to take the chance the cops were gone and risk coming back in.  And when they did, they needed something to warm them up, after all it was October, and although there wasn’t snow on the ground, I do remember it being cold out there. 

It was about midnight when the cops left, and people started trickling in around 1:00.  We heard stories about  cops walking within feet of them and shining their spot lights on them from 20 feet away, and then going right past them.  The very last person to return to the party was the fugitive from justice, JT.  He showed up just past 4 in the morning, shivering like a soaked Golden Lab and was immediately wrapped up in a warm blanket and given something to warm his innards.  He’d been hiding up a tree next to the Church at the end of the road, the cops had even shined their light up into the tree, but never noticed him.

This, of course, was the end to the visits to the unfinished condos.

Dummy in the Road.

When I was in high school, the family car was a 1974 Dodge Van.  For various reasons, I would often be stuck, or allowed to, drive the van instead of my Colt.  Which made it a lot of fun to cruise around with 20 of my best and closest friends.  (And at 73 cents a gallon, I needed that many people to pay for the gas.)

The Harvard/Yale area around 17th East was solid middle class at the time, so a good portion of my friends lived in the area, which meant I spent a lot of time driving around there.  One of these times we were headed up 17th East, just north of the now defunct Emigration Market, when I had to bring the van to a screeching halt, within feet of hitting a body in the middle of the road. 

Once my heart was back out of my throat, I noticed it was not a body, but instead a home made dummy.  So, I pulled up next to it, my friends slid open the side door, hauled it into the van and we took off as a group of kids came screaming out of the bushes after us.  My theory was “the spoils go to he who peed his pants”, which meant the dummy was mine. 

Now, they shouldn’t have used a new pair of Adidas, nice pair of corduroys and shirt and stuffed it with mom’s good towels if they were going to put it in the middle of the street.  Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Life lesson A-567.4-B7BstrokeR:

Don’t use mom’s good towels and your good shoes for a practical joke that may blow up in your face.

Headlights.

My first car was a 1972 Dodge Colt wagon, that was so rusted out my friends nicknamed it “Cancer”.  It had other issues, like the time I went 6 months without a starter motor.  Good thing both home and school were on a hill, so I could compression start it.  But it did limit the places I could go without bringing several friends to push it.

But this story has to do with the headlights. It must have been my junior year, late one weekend when we were just cruising around in the car (just like on “That 70’s Show).  It was well past dark when my headlights decided to just go out on me.  Pfft, they’re gone.

Now, any thinking person would have gone home, parked the car and spent the next day figuring out what went wrong.  But I was 17, with my friends, having a great time, and that just wasn’t an option.  So we just kept driving around.

Until a cop pulled me over for driving without my headlights. 

“I’m sorry sir, they just barely went out, and we’ve got to drive the girls back to their house, and then I’m going straight home.  Promise.”

The cop said OK (it was the 70’s), and told me not to drive the car any more than absolutely necessary.

After another hour or two of cruising around, during which time we actually did drop the girls off, we run into the same cop.

“Yes, sir, I know sir.  See, we went to drop the girls off and then hung out at their house for the last couple of hours, and we were just now heading back to my house.”

“Ok, go straight home.  Drive careful and get those lights fixed right away.”

“Yes, sir, no problem, sir.”

Another undetermined number of hours cruising around and we run into the same cop again. He walks up to the car, I roll down the window, shrug my shoulders and say:

“Sorry, I don’t even have an excuse this time.”

“That’s OK, I wouldn’t have believed it.”

And then he wrote me out a ticket.

My best friend, Ed.

It’s been over 30 years and still every time we meet someone new together they get to hear this story.

I was 16, it was Christmas break of my Junior year.  The department my father worked for was having a conference up in Park City, so there were professors from all over the world coming into the Salt Lake airport.  I was one of the people hired to shuttle them from the airport to Park City in my dad’s 1974 Dodge  Van, about a 35 mile drive.*  Ed (who was brand new to Utah, and whose brother worked in the same department) was hired to assign people to the different vans.

I was getting paid good money, for a 16 year old, so my parents tacked on the added responsibility of taking care of my little brother.  No big deal,   there was room in that big old van.  Except…

When I picked up Tanja.  If you’ve ever watched “That 70’s Show”, Tanja was our Fez my junior year.  She was a Foreign Exchange Student from Holland that hung around with my group.

So, my little brother, Tanja and I walk up to the table where Ed is sitting in the middle of the airport and somewhere in the conversation I con him into watching my brother while I drive up to Park City (and back, alone with Tanja) shuttling professors to the hotel there.  For the next 3 or 4 hours my brother had the run of the airport, and I had 30 minute stints alone with Tanja on dark, and fairly deserted, I-80. 

I didn’t know it at the time, but as Ed tells it now, he was a little bit impressed at my manipulations that night.  He says that as I walked away with this  tall blond Dutch girl, my brother  sitting next to him, he thought “I have to hang around with that guy.”

A month later we ran into each other on the stairs at school and the rest, as they say, is history.

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*Yes, it was 1976, when a 16 year old was allowed to drive University professors 35 miles in a big old van without seat belts, and you could stick a complete stranger with your 10 year old brother in an international airport.  And nobody thought twice about it.

Sadness, memories and humor.

I just got news that the older brother of my best friend in high school passed away this week.  The details are not important, but it did remind me of this story.

E was my best friend in high school, and we are still close as ever 30 years later. We met because his older brother, C, taught in the same department as my father, and in the winter of ‘76-‘77 E came out to Utah to live with his brother.  (The night we first met is a whole other story).

I was 17 the one and only time I got myself arrested.  I had some beer in the car, and a little bit of an illegal substance.  As I was coming home from E’s apartment on the Avenues, I flipped an illegal U-turn on the U of U campus.  I was pulled over several blocks away, and immediately went for the registration on the visor.  Oh, crap! I was driving my mother’s car, and she didn’t leave the registration on the visor.  It was in the glove box, with my –ahem- substance.  Now, mind you, this was 1977.  Cops would still have their faces in the driver’s window as you went through your glove box, which made it really hard to hide anything you didn’t want them to see in there.  But hell, I was 17, I was smarter than any adult, I’d just quickly move the papers around and that dumb ol’ cop would never know.  Yeah, not so much.  He noticed, and I got handcuffed, stuffed in the back seat and brought down to the U of U cop station.  

As luck would have it, my parents were in the middle of hosting a party when I called home with my one phone call, and my dad and C were elected to come pick me up.  They got there right as the cop told me I had to pour out the beer (Heineken imported from Evanston, Wyo.), and the first thing my dad said to the cop was “Uh, I’m over 21, can I take that home?” Nope, it just needed to be poured out.  Some lucky squirrel had the night of it’s life.  I don’t even remember how long all the paperwork took, but I do remember the drive home.  I got some of the best advice of my life from my father that night - “Don’t break two laws at once.”  If you have illegal stuff in the car, drive p-e-r-f-e-c-t-l-y.  This has helped me many times in the last 33 years, for things as simple as making sure my registration is up to date before I go on any long trip, because I never really had many heavily criminal tendencies (and there’s another story to that). 

C, on the other hand, gave me a big lecture on how you NEVER hide your marijuana in the glove box.  Dumb, dumb, dumb.  Under the seat, in the trunk or even in your book bag, but never in the glove box.  Might as well sit it right up there on the dash.