t was the first time in my childhood I had an excuse for coming home late for dinner, but nobody — not even the cops — would listen.
In the summer of 1972, when I was 10, Tommy Gillen and I built a dam in the creek on the other side of the Horning Road railroad tunnel.
We’d been building up the dam for days to create our own three-foot pool in which we chased after crayfish and minnows — our own cool spot to while away the hot summer afternoons.
We’d just completed adding another row of blocks to the dam when I heard my father’s voice booming from a few blocks away, calling me home for dinner.
That was the rule for kids then: We were free to roam the hills and fields, ride our bikes and build shacks and dams, but God help us if we didn’t respond when our parents called us home for dinner.
Just as Tommy and I were clawing our way up the bank of the creek, we heard a motor racing and tires screeching. Then we heard a spectacular crash.
As we got to the top of the hillside and ran toward the tunnel, we saw a lime-colored Plymouth Roadrunner, a popular muscle car, roaring away.
The driver was young — 20 or so — and had long hair. I’d seen that car and driver before and figured the fellow lived nearby.
When we ran into the tunnel, we saw Grandpa Johnson’s ’68 Corvair convertible smashed against the wall.
Grandpa Johnson told us that the long-haired fellow side-swiped him as he passed him in the tunnel, forcing him into the tunnel’s side wall.
He and his wife were pretty shaken up, so Tommy and I ran up the street to his son’s house, where he lived, to tell him what had happened.
By the time we returned, the police had arrived. I tried to get their attention but they weren’t much interested in what a lousy kid had to report.
“Did you get a license plate?” said the cop.
Copyright 2024 Tom Purcell, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.