An old familiar Urge…

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.” -Charles Dickens (A Tale of Two Cities)

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The above quote, for the benefit of those under 30 who no longer read anything that doesn’t appear on their smartphones, was taken from Charles Dickens immortal classic, A Tale of Two Cities.

Kids (anyone under 30, as I see it) these days think they’ve got it tough. Every other day we hear about Gen-Xers complaining about how futile it is to try to do anything meaningful, including attending and completing college. And with the classic myopia of youth, especially youth who’ve been handed most things on a silver platter by overly permissive (or perhaps handed nothing at all by totally negligent) parents, a neo-socialist, “progressive” government, and a social media environment filled with depressed, substance-abusing peers and malicious hackers who wonder why they have to work so hard to achieve even small improvements in their personal wellbeing (if it isn’t gratuitously conferred upon them by progressive liberals)!

Well, bunkies, I’ve got news for youse. Life in America today is basically manipulated by a painted corporate ‘ho’ (in codependent cahoots with the government) who is going to take you for everything you’ve got unless you start showing a few smarts, develop some guts and a bit of determination. Back in the old days, it was called ‘bootstrap’ self-actualisation.

The sad reality that no one wants to admit is that despite all the ‘free stuff’ and hand-outs that Gen-Xers have gotten used to being given by Uncle Sugar (e.g. the Guvmint), the present reality of life is that it’s a continuing, endless battle to cut off a slice of the Cherry Creame Pie for yourself before vultures swoop in to wrest it out of your tender mitts! And not just for the myopic, idealistic young members of society (read: physically grown-up but mentally still naïve children, in far too many cases), but for everyone!

That statement likely provokes some resentment, anger and outrage on the part of many who are on the left of the socio-political spectrum, but let me lay out Defense Exhibit ‘A’ for you.

Way back before the dawn of pre-recorded history (the 1970s), I had just mustered out of the US Air Farce and returned to the San Francisco Bay Area. More specifically to the East SF Bay communities of Oakland and Berzerkeley, just across the Bay from where I was born.

I was all of about 23 years of age or so at that time, and despite looking like a full-grown adult at 6 feet and 160 pounds, despite having just served my country (grudgingly, since I was and always had been profoundly against the Vietnam War, both before and after the service), I was really just a kid at heart and still trying to navigate through that minefield that we call post-adolescence (but that’s actually just a slightly more advanced state of arrested pre-adolescence).

So, there I was, newly arrived in the East Bay with my lovely 1962 Volkswagen Bug, a blue convertible (it wasn’t technically a ‘rag-top’, to use a popular, if erroneous term for a European convertible, since when it came to VW Bugs, a ‘rag-top’ was more properly defined as a VW sedan with a sliding, waterproof fabric roof-panel). The Bug’s name was “Heinie”, named after the German poet, Heinrich Heine (who was also an ardent pacifist) but also a partial nod to actor Curt Jurgens’ executive officer on the WW2 German U-Boot trying to elude the depth charges of an American destroyer in that classic war movie, The Enemy Below, who was also named ‘Heinie.’ [Quote, as the barrage of depth charges contue hammering the sub: “They make ‘em gut in Germany, Ja Heinie?”]

As I have chronicled elsewhere, I had picked up the Bug at my initial USAF duty-station and it served me faithfully and uncomplainingly for the first half of my enlistment (at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota), taking me through snow-drifts that would have brought David Lean’s Dr. Zhivago character to a complete standstill (in his Russian Troika rig), like a hot knife through butter-laced Borscht.

Volkswagens were for a very good reason regarded as one of the German Wehrmacht’s ‘Geheimwaffen’ (secret weapons) during the war, since regardless of whether they were used in the trackless, sandy wastes of the sere Libyan desert of North Africa or the desperately frigid, inhospitably frozen hell of the WW2 Russian Front, they were virtually unstoppable. As air-cooled vehicles, they neither boiled over in extreme heat nor did they freeze solid in sub-zero temperatures. They were, therefore, indeed Nazi ‘Wunderwaffen’.

And that was merely the start of their incredibly long-life as an auto engineering singularity in design that lasted over three-quarters-of-a-century before production actively ceased (and that doesn’t account for the fact that there are still many thousands of Volksies in daily use all over the globe, not a small number of them in America alone). At one point back in the 60s, Volksies were as common among college students as fleas are on dogs (or perhaps head-lice on grammar school kids)!

But I was still, to a fair extent and despite my by-then distinctive mustache, the not-so-wise young man who decided to trade his beloved, if quirky, Bug in on a brand new beige 1969 hardtop sedan (having been talked out of his blue convertible by a smooth-talking, Brylcreem-slick car salesman at Berkeley’s then sole franchised VW dealer, Oliver Imported cars, at 2567 Shattuck Avenue, in Berkeley).

My new ’69 Bug (whose name was Oscar) was like a fine Swiss watch, compared to weary (but faithful) Heinie, running smoothly and efficiently, entirely free from road-wear, scars, scratches and the accumulated patina of thousands of driven miles in harsh Dakota Territory terrain. Frankly, it was therefore a bit boring. I like my cars the way I like my girlfriends: familiar, perhaps a touch mildly neurotic, always unpredictable, somewhat eccentric and quirky, and very much a known quantity (brunette, stunningly attractive and intelligent).

Brand-spanking-new Oscar, my new 1969 Bug, was soon baptized several times in succession, thanks to the sort of typical Berzerkeley stoners-behind-the-wheel drivers we had to cope with, back then. Its first scar was inflicted by a hippy-dippy driver who was smashed on Mary-Jane (quaint term, that) and failed to notice that I had stopped for a red light. Colliding with the poor Bug’s susceptible aft end at a (thankfully) slow speed, the damage was fortunately limited to a moderately crumpled rear bumper and a small dent on the engine lid, but this metallic ‘kiss’ occurred a mere week or so after I had bought it.

Not long after, and somewhat leery of jeopardizing my new Bug on Berkeley streets, having left it parked on the street in front of my rooming house digs on Spruce Street, I came home from work one afternoon to find that the Berkeley Sanitation Department truck had creased both front and rear left-side fenders, earlier in the day. There was a standing joke in Berkeley, back then, that the Berkeley Sanitation Department’s truck drivers and crews were all out-of-work UCB PhD grads, since jobs at a doctoral level were largely all already sewed up by the hundreds of such grads cranked out at UC, each year in Berzerkeley. Budding post-docs or not, they were apparently just as bored with their demeaning jobs as today’s youth are with theirs. Groan.

At any rate, this was the final insult to my otherwise fresh, new and uncomplaining ’69 Bug, and not long thereafter, feeling the same as I would if my one-eyed, head-case girlfriend (Linda) had been attacked and raped, I sold it to another inmate of the UCB Student Internment Camp and started searching for another vehicular mount, perhaps one with a bit more local color. [Linda herself was a VERY satisfactory mount, by the way…a screamer among screamers, thank yew Jebus!]

The new hoss turned out to be, by sheer kismet, a veteran 1955 double-barn-door Type 2 delivery van that had belonged to a couple of UCB grads who were had just completed their studies and were leaving to join a Mendocino County hippie commune on California’s North Central Coast.

This little milk-carton-shaped VW beast, possessed of its stock 36 screaming horses of brute power, was ‘decorated’ by the previous owners in a manner that suggested they frequented Bill Graham’s psychedelic concerts in The City on a regular basis, and had been stoned to the gills on something when they painted up their van. We’re talking psychedelic designs all over it that would have given Tim Leary an acid headache, just looking at it. However, for me, tired of exposing expensive (back then, $1800 was ex$pensive!) new cars to the vicissitudes of Berkeley street life, it was absolutely perfect! Love at first sight!

Of course, with its psychedelically vivid personality colorfully aura’d in post-Picasso designs, such as it was, a suitably distinctive name to match the day-glo embellishments was required. Fortunately for me, I’ve NEVER had any difficulty coming up with imaginative names for my vehicles and the van was quickly christened URGE. This name was, most likely, a suggestion planted subliminally in my head from having read Ken Kesey’s book, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, in which his former school bus-cum-Electric Koolaide-Acid-Test-hippie-mobile was named FURTHER.

And URGE it was, from that day forward.

Urge and I had many interesting adventures over the next few years (before I got a mid-engined Eye-talian sportscar). Fortunately for me, as a newly-landed emigre from Straightsville to Berzerkeley Land, there was a recently established pulmonary medicine clinic up and lab operating at Providence Hospital, a Roman Catholic hospital run by an order of nuns known as the Little Sisters of Charity (a branch of their organisation in Portland, Oregon) and they needed Respiratory Therapy trainees, so I quickly submitted my resume (as a former Air Farce medic) to the new post-doc Fellow who was its director, one Mitch Tarkoff, MD.

Mitch was a very tall individual who, so the story goes, had been such a great collegiate basketball player than he had been offered a slot as a pro on an NBA team. Fortunately for all of us, he had chosen a career in Pulmonary Medicine instead of shooting hoops. Mitch was also Jewish and I soon found out that for some odd reason there were a heck pf a lot of Jewish physicians in the SF East Bay (not that that was a bad thing, of course) and they all went to the same synagogue, so everyone in the Bay Area medical snake oil biz knew everyone else.

Entering employment with Providence, I found myself working with an interesting group of fellow former military medics, including a soon-to-be close buddy, Steve Hartline (who while in the Army had almost started WW3 when he inadvertantly fired  a Hawk Missile in an exercise up near the Korean DMZ), an Irish-American ex-USMC named Terry Riley (also a good friend, as things turned out, who could have taught John Wayne''s immortal Sgt. Stryker a few tricks), and several others of similar military background and medical experience. As strangers in town, all of us began to hang out together as we settled in, and this was the start of some interesting experiences and mutual explorations of the rich 70s San Francisco Bay Area counter-culture that was in full swing at that time.

It was also a time when I regularly saddled up good old Urge and headed off on weekends to climb in the nearby Sierra Nevadas, Soon after I began on staff at Providence, I had discovered the UC Berkeley Hiking Club, a typically eclectic bunch of outdoor undergrads who were as close to being organizational anarchists as they were to being future UC alumni (more about them, shortly), but given the crazy pace we all suffered from, I also found that the best therapy in the world to expiate stress was sitting on top of a storied Sierra peak (such as Kerouac’s ‘Matterhorn Peak’, Yosemite’s Mount Dana, or navigating the glacial crevasses on Mt. Lyle in Tuolumne Meadows, or getting lost on the saddle between Mts Ritter and Banner in the Palisades).

There was also Camp-4 in Yosemite Valley, a die-hard rock climber’s hangout, which in itself became a legendary cradle to some of the best vertical rock wall specialists in the world (e.g. Royal Robbins, Yvon Chenard and dozens of others)!

I also discovered at about that time the American Youth Hostels, which had a chapter in San Francisco. It was through AYH weekend hikes and outings that I discovered what has to be one of the best-kept secrets of Marin County, the amazing little bit of Old Bavaria that is known as ‘The Tourist Club’, the clubhouse and grounds of the San Francisco Chapter of an old and noteworthy German-American organization known as Die Naturfreunde/Touristenverein (or TVN). The Naturfreunde has an interesting history. It was originally begun back in the late 1800s as a recreational venue for German factory workers, who worked many long hours in post-industrial, fin de siècle Germany and had little or no social life. Thus, the TVN began to provide activities in the rural areas of Germany & Austria for these urban workers that included hikes, camping outings, mountain trips and other social outlets. As the organization grew in Austria & Germany, local ‘clubhouses’ were established in particularly scenic locales throughout Europe and soon there were several thousand of these, all welcoming TVN members to use their facilities.

Eventually, the TVN spread to the United States and two chapters were established in the SF Bay Area, one in the Oakland Hills and the other on the south slopes of Mount Tamalpais. That is the one I joined in 1980.

Anyone stumbling into the Marin/Mt. Tam club grounds, perched as it was on the hillside just above Muir Woods National Monument, could easily be forgiven for thinking they’d been transported back in time to Bavaria of the 20s and 30s, for the clubhouse, which had been entirely hand-crafted by skilled German workers and stood a full three stories tall, looked for all the world like a typical kitschy Bavarian chalet…complete with ‘gingerbread’, a dance deck for fests, a ‘bierstube’ (German style pub), and all connected to the many wonderful hiking trails found all over Mt. Tamalpais. All of this surrounded by a forest of lovely trees that provided some of the most spectacular vistas imaginable. You’d have to see it to fully appreciate what a rare jewel it was in an already beautiful locale, north of San Francisco.

Meanwhile, back at the ‘alter’ (Providence), we all met Sister Victoria Veronica Francis Ignatius Joseph Mary (I’m not exaggerating: that was her chosen name as a sister of the Order) for the first time, a dour, weathered, wrinkled-up old prune who ruled the (hospital) roost as the Order’s Providence Executive Mother Superior.

Old ‘Sis Vickie’, as we referred to her amongst ourselves, took an immediate, distinctive and intense dislike to our group of upstart civvie-street, ex-MASH type medicos. Most of us had quickly adapted to the youthful ethos prevailing back then in Berzerkleley and sported longer hair, weren’t beyond occasionally sneaking doobies into the bathrooms, and partying after work in standard Berzerkeley Hippie-style with cute student nursies at nearby Merritt School of Nursing. All of this, plus inherent resentment over the fact that we were YOUNG and she was NOT, quickly provoked a sub-rosa, simmering Battle Royale between the old gal and us youthful provacateurs.

That’s not to say we were at all unprofessional while on duty, since all of us had been highly trained as former military medics, and had the vital skills, acumen, medical knowledge and wherewithal to help ‘Tark’ build up Providence’s innovative new Department of Respiratory Medicine on Oakland’s ‘Pill Hill’ (located on Telegraph Avenue, just over the Berkeley/Oakland line). But we were, of course, immersed smack in the middle of the post-Beatnik, psychedelic era of Dr. Tim Leary’s and Alan Watts’ ‘Age of Aquarius’ and we had no intention of submitting unconditionally to ultra-conservative old Sis Vickie’s obsolescent outlook on life, or those of her little Penguin cohort.

Her regime was so austere, so excuciatingly ‘old fashioned’ (as only an elderly ‘Bride of God’ can be) and so restrictive that small clashes and skirmishes were the constant order of our day, when we weren’t pushing Bird and Bennett Intermittent Positive Pressure Breathing (IPPB) treatments off on our wheezing old Chronic Obstructive Lung Disease patients (COPD’ers). All of us worked double and triple shifts on the wards to gain OT pay, so it felt as if we were at the hospital most of the time.

A couple of incidents in particular that I well remember were as follows.

Since it was almost an unspoken rule of Sis Vickie that everyone had to maintain a grim, stolid, constrained and respectable demeanor while on duty in the hospital, a few of us quickly found (we thought) clever ways around all this restrictive constraint to lighten things up a bit.

One that I was particularly proud of involved some graffiti that other parties (not us, ironically) had left on the walls of the hospital bathrooms. Sis Vickie was certain it was our doing, raising ‘Holy Hell’, and laid down the draconian law about graffiti on bathroom walls being grounds for immediate discharge from employment! Of course, she could never have actually done that, since we had proven ourselves to be so very efficient in the conduct of our duties under Doc Tarkoff (read: “money-makers”, black-inkers in the account books) that Human Resources wouldn’t have backed her up, had she tried to enforce the edict, but threaten us anyway she did!

Naturally, as utterly blameless innocents (we all wore invisible, if somewhat tarnished halos), all of us were intensely incensed by this unfair slander by Vickie and plotted our revenge with Machiavellian ardor. The ‘revenge’ we enacted consisted of taking paper towels and writing graffiti on them, then hanging them from coathooks installed on the inside of toilet stall doors. Voila! Master-stroke, we thought! Touché! In this manner, we could indulge the germ of an idea the Sister had planted in our puerile minds without actually violating her iron dictum! Or so we thought.

The next day, all of us were called into her orifice…err, make that OFFICE… and read the riot act, for what she had done was to remove all the referenced paper towels from those stalls and taken them into her office, where she then pulled all our personnel files and painstakingly compared the handwriting and printing in each and every one of them to the graffitos on the towels, managing to match them perfectly with a selected few of us.

Fortunately, good old Tark had by this time been apprised of the whole rhubarb and stepped up to the plate for us. The unanticipated result was ultimately a score of 1-0 for our team. Whew! But we learned a valuable lesson: not to underestimate the sour old bat, in future!

Shortly after, another (nameless) one among us figured out a way to scam the hospital’s public address operators, who were all rather innocent souls. Naturally, all hospitals use the PBX system to page key personnel for urgent or emergency call-back. This included house staff, attending staff, emergency personnel and various emergency CODE team members.

Imagine, then, our delight when suddenly the hospital’s PBX speaker urgently blared out “Dr. Knopf, Dr. Jack Knopf.” There was, naturally enough, no such doctor on the staff, and this sort of thing soon caught on as a game we all played in an effort to come up with other new, seemingly innocent bogus persons whose name had…err, ahem…another slang meaning altogether. Seldom has a hospital hosted so many visiting staff members with odd names like “Dr. Flatus, Dr. G.I. Flatus! Please call the operator!” Or another, “Dr. Schlauter, Dr. Osgood Schlauter!” Then there was “Dr. Langerhans, Dr. Lisle Langerhans!”, perhaps “Dr. Proctor-Scoby” or “Dr. Rection, Dr. Hugh G. Rection.” Oh yeah, we were good at this!

The list of prankish names went on and on, until one day Sis Vickie FINALLY caught on, realizing that these oddly named physicians surely couldn’t all be visiting the hospital…surely? But by then, we had scored another point for the home team! Yea, team! And the PBX operators? Amazingly, none of them ever caught on!

And who could forget the annual Christmas Celebration for the hospital staff that Sis Vickie ‘hosted’ for everyone, each year? As we all entered, she would always be standing guard right near the door (like a tall Pitbull clad in black habit), at the table where both the admission tickets were taken and the wine for guests was dispensed!

One would have thought she was serving Holy Communion as she carefully poured each hospital staff member ONE single, tiny glass of red wine (probably purloined from the small chapel’s stash, located on the hospital’s first floor), the contents of which measured exactly 2.5 cm of weak, red-colored fluid that vaguely resembled cheap and long-gone-sour Burgundy in both taste and appearance. No more than that; a single, solitary, tiny glass and no refills! After all, she (probably) reasoned, why ‘enable’ the sort of scandalous holiday frivolities that company Christmas parties usually inspired, back then?

These jolly (not!) holiday parties had a reputation on record as being the most joyless celebrations of Christmas good cheer ever held for employees at holiday-time, anywhere! Good old Sis Vickie!

Another time, the co-victim of our subterfuge was a nervous Catholic Father who gobbled his meals so quickly that we named him “Father Eat-And-Run”. If there were an Olympic competition for Fastest Eater, he would have won, hands-down, since as soon as he sat down to eat, if you blinked, you would have missed him leaving the table, sated! And as it happened, Father EAR was usually joined at his table by Sister Vickie. Shortly after we noticed this, a plot unfolded to spike a pot of casserole on their table with some fast acting laxative meds from the hospital pharmacy (thanks to a pharm-tech we hung with). The plan hatched involved another co-conspirator who worked in the kitchen, who had agreed to thoughtfully spike the dish for us with a non-lethal dose of the stuff (an ExLax type purgative).

I am happy to say that both our targets literally fled from the room in their haste to reach a lavatory in a timely, yet dignified manner, and the good Father probably set a new land-speed record for eating and departing the table!

Yes, those were indeed ‘interesting times’, as the apocryphal Chinese curse has it…

But getting back to Urge, my ’55 VW delivery van, in my spare time I had fitted out Urge with a custom wood interior that was the closest approximation I could come up with, compared to an original equipment Volkswagen Kombi Van’s camper interior. It was actually quite a slick and innovative little piece of work, with all-wood cabinets, a wash-basin, a folding bed, some high-quality carpeted flooring and even an upholstered ceiling. To top it all off, I had found four plexiglass ‘half-dome’ bubbles somewhere at a surplus store and fitted two to the bus’s roof and one on each of the left and right side doors of the van. A bicycle rack in front, under which was a wooden railroad tie bumper, completed the deluxe accommodations and fittings.

Thus outfitted, it served quite adequately as a mobile holiday vehicle for two on short excursions into the mountains, beaches and even to Death Valley (more about that in a bit). I never quite determined what Urge felt about its new make-over, but Urge never talked to me like some of my other Vee-Dubs did (and still do)!

Urge’s free-hand-painted Hippie-Dippy decoration certainly stood out on the streets of Berzerkeley, of course, and I probably struck a rather incongruous pose seated in its driver’s seat, professionally clad in my white lab coat as I drive it to and from the hospital, down Telegraph Avenue to my digs north of the Berkeley campus. On one occasion, I recall trundling down the Ave in Urge, when suddenly a huge American sedan (a Cadillac, perhaps?) pulled alongside me, and an older guy leaned out the window, yelling, “Get that damn pile of junk out of my way, you (expletive deleted) Hippie!”

Apparently, the guy mistook me for one of Dr. Leary’s magic mushroom acolytes, instead of the sober medical professional I actually was, but as he zoomed off down the avenue, I remember chuckling over the un-asked-for antipathy of what was seemingly a genteel, conservative older gent who reflexively hated any younger person he encountered as a pot-smoking hip type! Clearly, by his perception anyone driving a vehicle as ‘adorned’ as was Urge, fitted that description, lab coat or not! Most of the time, Urge merely provoked smiles and flashed peace-signs from bemused locals!

One late September, a fellow UC Hiking Club (UCHC) member and I hatched a plan to do a hundred-mile or so bicycle ride in Death Valley. We’d drive Urge down to Stovepipe Wells, park and disembark there, riding our 10-speed roadbikes from Stovepipe, over Gun Sight Pass, then down to the Amargosa Opera House (on the Nevada side of the California state line), and from there to Furnace Creek Campground, where we’d spend the night before returning back to Stovepipe Wells to pick up Urge. It promised to be a great trip and the weather was predicted to be cooperative, as well.

The UC Hiking Club, incidentally, was a rather non-descript, semi-anarchic organization, perhaps ideally suited to the colony of savage, slightly older children enrolled at UC Berkeley. Its members ranged anywhere from total outdoor naifs to experienced, world-class mountaineers and serious rock jocks. There were no rules, to speak of, other than one: ANYONE, regardless of experience, could be a member. Truly outdoorsy anarchy at its finest!

So there we were, my buddy and I, more than half-way down Highway 395, on the eastern side of the Sierras, coming from Reno in Urge, humming along at a blistering 55 mph or so, by virtue of Urge’s 36 horsepower engine. The scenery was beautiful, the traffic was light and we were in no hurry, given Urge’s inbred reluctance to break the sound barrier. In fact, so interesting was the 14,000 foot Sierra Crest on the western side of us that we failed to notice a California State Highway Patrol cruiser surreptitiously pacing us, as it skulked along, from about a mile back.

I think he was trying particularly hard to come up with a legitimate reason to pull us over, since he eventually quickly closed the gap and with lights flashing, motioned us over to the road’s shoulder. Uh-oh, I recall thinking! What’s he got on us?

Sure enough, his cruiser parked, Offkisser Doright readjusted his Ray-Bans, tugged his Smokey-the-Bear hat down and ambled his prodigious, doughnut-fed bulk over to us and stuck his head in my open driver-side window. I didn’t miss the fact that as he did so, he took a long deep SNIFF!

“Where’re you boys off to? Headin’ somewhere in this area?”

I could see that the good Offkiser looked a little deflated by the complete absence of even the slightest, faintest hint of doobie aroma, since we hadn’t been smoking any of them ‘funny-looking cigarettes’ en-route. What a disappointment (for him), since I’m sure he was anticipating a quick bust of some wigged-out hippies for smoking illegal weed.

“Well sir,” said I, as visions of Arlo Gutherie''s immortal ''Alice''s Restaurant'' floated through my head, “we’re from Berkeley, just going down to Death Valley National Monument to do a hundred-mile bicycle loop, since the weather promises to be so nice…and then back home again…and that’s it…Sir!”

Since this was God’s honest truth and since we hadn’t been violating any of Governor Reagan’s pot-smoking laws, things changed immediately and the Offkisser visibly relaxed and suddenly transformed into our best friend, right before our eyes!

Turns out he was a big fan of Volkswagens, having had a Bug of his own when he in the US Armed Forces occupying Western Germany! So we immediately fell to exchanging our mutual admirations for these German cars and he even waxed eloquently about a plan he had of his own to restore an old VW Bug his nephew in LA had recently acquired. It was a downright homey few minutes thus enjoyed by all concerned.

Finally, all smiles and bon homie, he sent us on our way with his blessings (and probably also sent a radio alert to his colleagues further down Highway 395 to NOT bother the two fine young lads driving a bizarrely painted old VW van that-a-way, should any of them spot us ahead of him).

Nice guy, actually! Of course, this was back in Peabody & Sherman’s Way-Back Machine times when cops weren’t the mean, nasty, vindictive monsters the progressive left seems to regard them all as today. How did former President George Bush (Senior) characterize it? Oh yeah, “Kinder, gentler times.”

Urge, my wonderful old VW ‘hoss,’ was usually a complete experience worthy of characterisation in a Richard Brautigan novel.

----------------------------------------------- NOTE: Stay tuned for more of this Saga shortly!