Cars

However the battery would quickly go dead again and we would coast it as far as it would. So the theme became - jump the battery, take off and drive eighty miles an hour without lights behind the companion car for about ten minutes until it went dead again, coast-it and do-over all the way home.

Fire works were legal in Wisconsin and illegal in Illinois. So we went up just across the state line to buy some in essentially a vacant lot on the highway. While there - some older guys from our high-school backed their white Oldsmobile convertible top-down, up to the stand. One of the guys while we were standing there, engaged the fireworks proprietor, a man in his late thirties or early forties in a fist-fight while his compatriots grabbed boxes of fireworks and threw them in the trunk. Then they all got in by jumping over the sides - and the take-off left one guy running for his life behind - brakes applied and he dove over the trunk - slid and was pulled into the rear seat ! We decided it would be prudent to leave without a purchase and headed back to Illinois. We did see the gang with the car-top now up, heading back into Wisconsin the opposite way of which they had left the scene of the crime, to throw-off any police who might have been in pursuit.

In the space of ten years, cars went from slow jalopies to large cubic-inch, eight cylinder race cars. Accidents were ongoing tragedies especially in the summer when many people came up from Chicago. Kids were hitting trees at one-hundred twenty miles an hour on a regular basis and various stories concerning the nature of the gore was spread mouth to mouth throughout the communities.

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