Many times I have told of the adventures that John Boguslawski and I had as kids. I remembered another one today. John got a demo derby car that had been in one of the early demo derbies in the park. It hadn’t been wrecked too bad and he brought it up to the farm to have some fun with it. The glass had all been removed and most of the interior was gone. We tuned it up and proceeded to run the crap out of it. It was a red and white ’58 Dodge two door sedan. We put in two sets of seat belts and each put on a helmet. I had a place in the pasture where I used to abuse a few old junkers while they still ran. I drove the old Dodge first and made a track around the pasture for a race track for us. I had it down pretty well and was missing the trees by inches, much to the amusement of Big John in the passenger’s seat. We tried to get it to roll over several times but it would always slide and throw dirt and grass, but not go over. He said, “OK, it’s my turn.” John didn’t have the ‘nack’, so to speak. He was a great inventor and builder, but the driving part—well, not so good. I told him to be careful when we make the run through the trees as they don’t give us much room and no forgiveness! About his third trip around the track, he misjudged and hit a big tree smack in the middle! I threw up my arm to protect my face and slammed my helmet down on my wrist on the metal dash. To say it hurt would not tell the whole story! We stopped so fast that had we not had the belts on we both would have flown out the windshield. The fan went through the radiator and the steam and water shot out all over. We laughed it off and got it going again and made it back to the shop where we hooked a chain to the radiator housing and a tree and backed up a few times to bend things back out. The radiator was shot so we just ran the poor old engine with no water in it. A few times up the road and it got so hot the head on the old flat six engine turned black! Big John just giggled when he saw it. We parked on a hill about a half mile west of home so we could roll it down to get it started again when it cooled off a bit. John was at the wheel when we headed down the hill and she fired up one more time. It started to knock really bad and then just as we got to the gate there was big bang and it quit knocking. As we came into the yard, we knew it was about to die permanently so I pointed to a big rock I had pushed out with the Cat and yelled to John to kick it and put her on the rock! Her just about made it to the rock and the engine locked up—we were done! We went back in the shop to work on something we should have been working on instead of goofing around. Later, Dad went down to the mailbox to get the mail. As he came back with the mail, he stepped into the shop and said, “Did you clowns lose something?” He threw a connecting rod and wrist pin on the welding table and just shook his head. The bang we heard was the rod leaving the side of the engine block, by the gate! We did go over to the car and open the hood to see how big a hole the engine had in the block. You could throw a softball through the hole! Another escapade by some crazy kids, but we survived another one! Thanks Gary!

Dick

Here are a couple poor quality pictures from that day