I love the back roads. I much prefer them to the big highways and especially the interstates. They are more pleasant, less stressful, more scenic for the most part and many times, it takes about the same time to get from Point A to Point B as it takes using the big roads. Driving in Atlanta is an absolute nightmare, as anyone who lives here knows. The interstates outside of the city are just as bad, I-75 through Henry County in particular. I don’t know the reason, but it is backed up in both directions day in and day out from Stockbridge to Locust Grove. Things usually back up again around Macon, where it seems like they have been working on the road for the last thirty-five years or so.

For these reasons, I avoid I-75 South like the plague. One of my favorite back roads is Ga. Highway 212. Its northern terminus is in south DeKalb county and the southern end is in Milledgeville. The road winds through Klondike, Conyers, across Jackson Lake, and through Monticello before terminating in Milledgeville. The stretch between Monticello and Milledgeville is my favorite, with rolling hills, large farms and beautiful scenery. Recently, Jackie and I took a trip to Fernandina Beach. We took 212 from Conyers all the way to Milledgeville, picked up U.S. 441 through Dublin to McRae and then went out U.S. 341, aka The Golden Isles Parkway to Brunswick, where we got on I-95 South. While we were on 441 heading toward Dublin, Jackie said, “Are we in The Twilight Zone? There’s no traffic. Where is the traffic?” “Probably on 75 South,” I answered. A little while later, I looked to the right and pointed. “There’s something you don’t see every day,” I said. On the side of the road were three wild boars, upright and feeding. A few miles down the road there were three more. You never know what you might see on the back roads.

There are really only two towns on The Golden Isles Parkway between McRae and Brunswick and those are Baxley and Jesup. The rest are pretty much little wide spots in the road where the speed limit will suddenly drop from 65 to 35 and you have to be careful because Barney might be behind a bush on his motorcycle with the sidecar, wearing his helmet, goggles, gloves and scarf.

 Another of my favorites is Ga. Highway 42. Highway 42 begins in Byron and end at its northern terminus in Brookhaven, a suburb of Atlanta. It sort of has a special place in my heart for several reasons. First, it runs concurrently with U.S. 23 through East Atlanta, where I was born. This stretch of road is known as Moreland Avenue, which the road is known as from Conley Rd. to Ponce de Leon Ave, after which it becomes Briarcliff Rd. The portion of Highway 42 from the I-285 interchange to Ponce is part of the National Highway System, a system of routes determined to be the most important for the nation’s mobility, economy and defense.

The second reason Highway 42 is special to me is because when we moved from Gresham Park to Rex in 1973, our house was right off of the highway. I thought my parents had moved us to Hooterville, but that’s another story altogether. Not long after we moved there, I pulled up to the stop sign at Double Bridge Road and Hwy 42 and the street sign for the highway was laying on the ground next to the stop sign. I took it home and put it on the wall of my room. It eventually made it downstairs to my father’s workshop and disappeared when the house was sold in 2015.

Highways 162 and 36 are great stretches of road for driving and 42 from Forsyth to Musella is a beautiful stretch of road. As far as North Georgia, Highway 53 stretches in an arc from Watkinsville, just outside of Athens to the Georgia-Alabama state line, just north of Cedartown. Georgia State Route 60 runs off of 53 in Dahlonega and goes through Suches and Morganton to the Tennessee Line. It is a beautiful ride through the Blue Ridge Mountains, but in places it is definitely not for the faint of heart!

The longest Georgia State Route is Highway 11. It is 376 miles long and runs the length of the state from north to south. Its southern terminus is the Florida state line below Statenville and the northern terminus is at the North Carolina line north of Blairsville.

I don’t really use GPS when planning a route on a back road. For one thing, I don’t really trust it because not all of the back roads are in the system, at least not in the way it wants you to go. I prefer to do it the old fashioned way, looking at a map, plotting a course and writing the route down. I will admit I have grown to depend on the dash map on the system, comparing my notes with the system’s map. And while technology is wonderful and GPS was a scientific breakthrough, I kind of miss the old days when you would get the U.S. Atlas from State Farm in the mail each year, or pick them up at gas stations along the way. To me, something has been lost in not being able to read and follow a map.

Okay, I will admit that sometimes I get turned around and have to backtrack. But, I’m lucky enough to have a pretty good sense of direction, so I’ve never wound up in West Nowhere when I was headed to East Jesus. At least not yet.    

There were a lot of cool crazes in the Sixties. From surfing, both the aquatic and sidewalk varieties, to superballs, tie-dyes to troll dolls, mini-skirts to mood rings, go-go boots to granny glasses, the Twist to turtlenecks, the decade was defined by these fads and a host of others. In 1965, a craze hit the States and took off, bringing millions of boys, teenagers and dads along with it. I’m talking about slot cars.

Slot car tracks opened in just about every suburban neighborhood in the country. The tracks were big and made from wood. Most tracks consisted of eight lanes had featured hills, hairpin turns, high banked curves and long straightaways where you could really open up your miniature Maserati. You bought time on the lanes, generally in fifteen or thirty-minute increments. My father built and raced model airplanes, so naturally he and I jumped into the slot car scene with both feet, along with my cousin Herb and Uncle Tub. Herb and Uncle Tub lived in Forest Park, south of Atlanta. There was a slot car track called Buddy’s at the corner of Ash Street and Forest Parkway, which was then known as Central Avenue. There was one track in Buddy’s. The place was always jam-packed and smelled of cigarette smoke and oil of wintergreen, a tire additive. After a year or so, Buddy moved the raceway to a shopping center at the corner of Ash Street and Morrow Road. It was a bigger place and he added a second track.

In Gresham Park, Clifton Springs opened a track in a building that was originally a dance hall and then a bowling alley. If memory serves me correctly, Clifton had two tracks. It was great because it meant that racing could now be reached via bicycle.

One night a week, usually on Friday or Saturday, my father and I would ride down to Forest Park with a couple of cigar boxes containing cars and equipment, or Herb and Uncle Tub would ride up to Gresham Park. We would spend some time hot-rodding our cars by re-winding the engines, putting higher gears on them or custom racing tires. Herb had a blue MGA with a Tiger X motor in it. It was fast as lightning but had trouble holding the track. One night before we went to Buddy’s, Herb put two wide tires on the back. My father laughed and said that it looked like Fred Flintstone’s car. It may have looked funny, but the trick worked. After that, the little blue beast held the track like glue.

The cars I owned were a red Ferrari formula racer, a Mercedes gull-wing, a ’64 Mustang and a 1931 Ford woody surf wagon that my father built. It was a little top-heavy and very slow. It was fun to run around the track and always got a lot of comments, but it got pretty boring after a few laps because of the lack of speed.

The woody may have been a little top heavy, but it was nothing compared to Huey’s Hut Rod. Huey’s Hut Rod was one of the Weird-Oh models that were popular in the Sixties. Huey was a typical Weird-Oh character in a dragster built from an outhouse. I put the kit together and my father modified it onto a slot car chassis. Huey always got a lot of laughs at the track, but he was hard to control because he was so top-heavy. If he was on one of the outside lanes he would always topple over in the high banked curves, simply because he was too slow to stay upright. He was so tall that he would block two or three lanes until a track attendant could reach him and set him upright. This would cause problems, particularly if a couple of cars were seriously racing. People began to complain, so I quit taking him to the track and eventually gave him to one of the other kids in the neighborhood.

The first controller I owned was one that was pistol-shaped with a trigger for the throttle. The problem was that it got very hot after about ten minutes of racing. I saved up my grass-cutting money and bought the industry standard, a Cox controller, which used a plunger throttle and was designed to remain cool in your hand. I still have it stashed away in a box somewhere along with some other slot car gear that was in my father’s workshop.

One Saturday night, my father and uncle took Herb and me to the old Peach Bowl racetrack in Atlanta to watch a new class of racers called super modified, or “skeeters.” The cars were fast, loud and furious. An Atlanta racer whose name long escapes me won that night, driving a blue car that was the back end of a ’32 Ford sedan and the front end of a Fiat Topolino. The next week I went to the drug store, bought a model of a ’32 sedan and a Topolino, chopped them down, put them together, painted the car blue and mounted it on a slot car frame. Daddy rewound an engine, hooked up a top-end gear and we had ourselves a race car. And boy would it run! I won several heats with it both at Clifton Springs and Buddy’s. One night I won a feature race at Clifton Springs and the best part was my cousin Herb and I finished first and second, with me just nosing him at the checkered flag. I didn’t win a trophy, but to the best of my recollection I won an hour of track time and a ten dollar gift certificate. Herb won a half-hour of time and a five dollar certificate. In those days, five and ten bucks went a long way at the slot car track.

When I was sixteen or seventeen, a friend and I drove the big hobby shop in downtown Decatur and ran cars for a couple of hours. It was the last time I ever went racing. The craze had just about wound down and it wasn’t long afterward that the last of the tracks disappeared.

Only two of our cars survived and are pictured above, the woody and the skeeter. They sat my father’s big glass cabinet in his workshop until we sold the house in 2015 and are now in the display cabinet in our den with all of our memorabilia. I often wonder if they would still run. I wonder if there are any tracks around?

The following is an excerpt from “Bikes, Boards and Coaster Wagons”, a chapter in “A Place And A Time.”

“After we outgrew the old coaster wagon it stayed propped up on one side in a corner of the garage.  My father suffered a heart attack when I was fifteen years old.  While he was recovering and not long before he went back to work he began to work on projects around the house.  One day when I got home from school he said, “Come on downstairs, I’ve got something to show you.”  We walked down into the basement and sitting there in the middle of the garage floor was the old coaster wagon.  It had been drastically modified.  He had put a wide seat of plywood on the bottom frame and built an outhouse around it, complete with a half-moon on either side so that you could see out.  It was open in the front with a footrest horizontally across the frame and it still had the original steering rope.  It looked just like Huey’s Hut Rod from the old Weird-Oh model kits we used to build not too many years before.  “I got bored,” he said, “and this is what happened.”  Even though we were fifteen and had outgrown such toys we rode the Hut Rod down the street all the time.  The only problem was that the Hut Rod was a little top-heavy.  Once while trying to show off I made a hard left turn at the bottom of the hill and turned over on the side.  I scrambled out and managed to get it upright before a bus came barreling down the hill. 

I took a picture of the Hut Rod parked out in the driveway.  It was taped to the door of the big cabinet in my father’s workshop for years.  I don’t know what became of the Hut Rod or the picture, but I have my suspicions.  I’m pretty sure that the Hut Rod became scrap wood when we moved from Gresham Park.  The picture was filed away elsewhere after my father had passed away.  Whatever happened, the picture is gone now as is the cabinet.”  

As it turned out, the picture was not gone after all.  I was going through one of the many photo albums my mother kept and ran across a number of pictures from the old neighborhood in Gresham Park.  And as I turned one of the pages, there was The Hut Rod.  I took the picture out and scanned it immediately.  Thanks to my mother and modern technology, the Hut Rod is saved not only as an Instamatic print developed at K-Mart in November of 1970 but as a digital file as well.  Below is a full-sized shot of the picture.

The memories are there.  They always will be.

Kombi was a little green and white microbus. He lived in a garage with his parents and sister in the little town of Wolfsburg. His parents’ names were Käfer and Cabrio. His sister’s name was Karmann.

Kombi’s cousin Carrera lived in the garage next door to them with Uncle Coupé and Aunt Targa. Kombi’s Papa delivered mail in the town with the man who lived in the house next to the garage. Twice a week, his Mama took the man’s wife to the shops and to the grocery market. Sometimes the man’s wife would take her to town when she had to pick up a package at one of the shops.

Kombi’s sister Karmann was beautiful. She was a light blue convertible. She took the man and his wife’s daughter and her friends on rides through the countryside. Karmann had won blue ribbons at car shows in Wolfsburg and some of the other little towns close by.

His cousin Carrera was very sleek and fast. He ran races on the roads and tracks around town and won many of them. His trophies were proudly displayed on a shelf above where he parked in the garage.  

But Kombi didn’t have a job at all. He felt very odd and left out. One day in the garage he told his mother, “Mama, I have no purpose.” “Why, Kombi,” replied Mama, “why would you ever say a thing like that?” “Papa delivers the mail in town,” replied Kombi.   “You take trips to the grocery store and the post office. Karmann wins blue ribbons at the car shows and Carrera wins trophies at the races. I’m just a dumpy little bus who never delivers or picks up or wins anything.” He looked at his mother with his big, sad eyes. “Oh, Kombi,” said Mama. “You are a beautiful little bus. One day soon you will get the chance to prove to yourself and to others what you are capable of doing.” Kombi waited and waited for the opportunity, but it never arrived.

On the way back home after delivering the mail one day, Kombi’s Papa saw him parked down by the river looking sadly at the footbridge by the bend. After he took the man who lived in the house home, he went to the river to check on Kombi.

“Good afternoon, son,” said Papa. “”What are you doing this fine afternoon?” “Watching the children coming home from school cross the bridge,” said Kombi. The schoolhouse was on the opposite side of the river. He loved children and liked to come to the river to watch them coming home from school. “It is a beautiful afternoon’” replied Papa. “Very peaceful.” “Yes sir,” replied Kombi. “A little too peaceful.” “Whatever do you mean?” asked Papa. “How can it ever be too peaceful?” “I’m bored Papa. I never do anything useful around town like you and Mama,” said Kombi. “Kombi, you are a young and strong microbus,” said Papa kindly. “There will be a job for you soon, a very important one that only you can do. You’ll see.” “I guess so, Papa,” said Kombi wistfully. “Come on home to the garage soon. It will be getting dark.” “Yes, sir,” said Kombi.

The next afternoon a bad rainstorm came through Wolfsburg. It was raining so hard that Kombi decided not to go to the river but stay inside the garage instead. The mail had to be delivered rain or shine, so Papa and the man set out for their appointed rounds.

Kombi, Mama and Karmann were in the garage watching the rain when all of a sudden the man came running up the driveway, soaking wet, waving his arms and shouting for his wife to come quickly. “What is it dear?” she called as she ran out of the house. “The footbridge has washed away in the storm and the children are stuck at the schoolhouse across the river,” the man cried. “I’m going to take the little bus and get them!” “How are you going to get them from across the river?” she asked. “The little bus can float!” said the man. “We’re going to float across and rescue them!” Kombi’s oil leaped in his crankcase! “Float?” he said to himself. “What does he mean I can float?” But by that time the man had jumped onto Kombi’s front seat and the two of them went roaring out of the garage toward the river. The man’s wife followed in Kombi’s Mama and their daughter in Karmann. The family who lived next door hurried down in Uncle Coupé, Aunt Targa and Carrera.

When they got to the river the childrens’ parents were all gathered at the bank. Their mothers were hugging and crying, their fathers talking excitedly, rubbing their chins and pointing across the river. The children were on the other bank crying and waving at their parents. Their teacher was trying her best to keep them calm but she was just as frightened as they were.

Kombi and the man pulled up right in front of the children’s parents. “Don’t worry, folks, the little bus and I are going for the children right now,” said the man. “But Mr. Kagelmacher, how are you going to get across?” sobbed one of the mothers. “This little fellow can float,” he replied. “We’ll be back across in no time!” And with that, they took off toward the boat ramp. It was raining even harder by now. “All right, little fellow, I know you can do this,” said the man. Kombi was terrified. They went down the ramp and splashed into the water.

Kombi’s front wheels and his face went under the water, followed by his back wheels and bumper. But then something strange happened. He leveled out and began to float. His oil leaped in his crankcase again and a feeling came over him he had never felt before. He could float and he was determined to get across the river to the children! “Ha, ha, I knew it! Full speed ahead!” shouted the man. The boat ramp on the other side of the river was ahead of them but further downstream. The river was flowing rapidly, so Kombi turned first right and then left to move in a straight line through the current. The children saw Kombi coming for them and began to cheer wildly. Their parents were cheering and clapping across the river, too. When they were almost at the other side of the river, Kombi turned to ride the current to the boat ramp. His wheels hit the riverbed right in front of the boat ramp and he and the man roared up the boat ramp. They stopped in front of the teacher and the children. The man swung Kombi’s two side doors open along with the passenger door. “Come on, kinder, your parents are waiting,” called out the man. The children all climbed in the side door and the teacher jumped onto the front seat with the man. They shut the doors, took off down the ramp and into the river. Kombi was not afraid this time.

 

He bobbed front and back like before, then started across the river. The children were all laughing, talking excitedly and looking out of Kombi’s windows. The current was getting stronger and suddenly the teacher shouted, “Oh, no! Look!” She pointed at a big rock that was in the middle of the river, right ahead of them.” Kombi saw the rock, and felt the courage and determination rise up from his crankcase. He turned to the left and let the current take them right by the rock. His right side scraped against it and the children began to shriek and cry. The scrape hurt badly. Kombi could tell there was a big scratch on his side and some of his paint was missing, but he did not care. He moved back and forth, keeping in a straight line until he reached the riverbank. But because he had to swerve to miss the big rock, they were further down the river from the boat ramp. When his wheels hit the riverbed, he dug in with his back wheels and, using every bit of his little fifty-three horsepower engine, climbed up the bank and onto the road beside the river.

 

The children were all jumping up and down, cheering and shouting. The teacher was laughing and clapping. The man was banging his hands on Kombi’s steering wheel and shouting, “I knew it! I knew you could do it!” They started down the road toward the children’s parents, who were running toward them. Kombi stopped when they reached him, but his two side doors would not open because of the scrape across the big rock. The man opened up Kombi’s back hatch and the children all climbed out and ran to the open arms of their parents. It had almost stopped raining by now. The man rubbed his hand along the scrape on Kombi’s side. “That’s a nasty gash, little fellow. We’ll get you to the shop and have you fixed up in no time,” he said kindly. Up ahead, Papa and Uncle Coupé’s headlamps were beaming bright with pride. Mama, Karmann and Aunt Targa’s windshield washers were squirting and their wipers kept moving back and forth. Carrera gave him two toots on his horn and revved up his turbo. Kombi felt a warm and happy feeling in his crankcase. He was a hero.

 

After Kombi had his side repaired in the auto shop, the little town of Wolfsburg had a big parade for him and the man. All the cars of the town were in the parade, along with Mama, Papa, Karmann, Uncle Coupé, Aunt Targa and Carrera. At the very back of the line was Kombi. The man and the teacher were on the front seat, waving at the crowd. Kombi’s canvas roof was open, and the children were all waving at their parents and friends from it. At the end of the parade, the Mayor of Wolfsburg made a speech and presented Kombi and the man each a big blue ribbon. The teacher kissed Kombi on his face and the man on the cheek. Then a photographer for the newspaper took pictures of all of them together.

 

But the best thing of all was what happened afterwards. The footbridge was replaced with a stone bridge wide enough for a microbus to drive across. When the bridge was completed, the Mayor declared that from that day forward, Kombi would be the school bus. He and the man would take the children to school. Then the man and Papa would deliver the mail. In the afternoon they would pick the children up from school, bring them back across the bridge and deliver them safely home. Kombi had proven himself, just like Mama had said he would and found a job only he could do, just as Papa had said. He was a very happy little bus.  

Last Sunday was, of course, Easter Sunday. It was also Masters Sunday, which to me is a National Holiday all its own. The tournament itself has been tentatively rescheduled for the second week of November. But April 12th was still Masters Sunday. I wore my traditional green shirt and white slacks. Jackie and I had our traditional steak dinner. The final round of the 2019 Masters was aired on CBS. Many have referred to Tiger Woods’ stirring victory as the greatest comeback in golf history and even sports history. As great as his victory was, I have to disagree.

On February 2, 1949, Ben and Valerie Hogan were driving home in their new Cadillac sedan to Fort Worth, Texas from Phoenix, Arizona and the Phoenix Open. This was at a time before private jets, swing gurus, equipment deals and clothing sponsors. Pro golfers drove from stop to stop on the tour. East of Van Horn, a little town in the middle of nowhere about a hundred miles from El Paso, a bus attempting to pass a car on a narrow bridge hit them head on. In the instant before the collision, Ben threw himself across Valerie to protect her. It was an act of chivalry that ultimately saved his life, because the steering column punctured the left front seat. While Valerie was basically uninjured, the whole left side of Ben’s body was crushed, including his pelvis, ankle, knee, ribs, collarbone and shoulder. He also sustained injuries to his internal organs and suffered damage to his left eye, which worsened as he grew older.

At first he was told he would never walk again. After he began to walk, he was told he would never be able to play golf again. When he started to play golf, they said he would never be able to play competitively again. When he started back on the tour, they said he would never win again. Mr. Hogan proved them all wrong.

The first week of January 1950, eleven months after the accident, Hogan teed it up at the Los Angeles Open, which was played at Riviera Country Club. Tied for the lead with Sam Snead after 72 holes, he lost to Snead in an 18-hole Monday playoff. Famed sportswriter Grantland Rice wrote that, “his legs simply were not strong enough to carry his heart any longer.”

The 1950 U.S. Open was played June 8-11 at Merion Country Club outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Hogan made the cut and at that time the USGA required players to play 36 holes on the final day of competition. Hogan almost fell down on the twelfth hole and could barely walk after that. He would later admit that he almost quit after the 13^th, but his caddy admonished him to press on. When he came to the 18^th tee, he needed a par to force a playoff. He hit his drive to the middle of the fairway and faced a two hundred thirteen yard shot to the green. He pulled out his 1-iron and striped it to the middle of the green, then two-putted for par. He would later admit, “I only had one shot left in me.”

Hy Peskins, a photographer for Life magazine, positioned himself behind Hogan and caught him at the end of his follow through, facing the green in perfect form with the 1-iron parallel to the ground. The fairway and green are lined with the gallery and the photograph became one of the most iconic pictures in golf history.

Hogan would defeat Lloyd Mangrum and George Fazio by four strokes in an 18-hole playoff the next day. Seventeen months after being run over and maimed by a bus, Ben Hogan was the U.S. Open champion. He would defend that title in 1951 as well as winning The Masters. In 1953 he won The Triple Crown of The Masters, The U.S. Open and The Open Championship. All told, he won twelve tournaments and six majors after the accident.

Tiger Woods was run over by a bus as well, although metaphorically and largely of his own making. Hopefully he has conquered his demons and will continue his march toward nineteen professional majors. Was his comeback win at the Masters in 2019 great? Absolutely. Was it the greatest comeback in history? Not by a long shot.  

   

Forty Seven years ago this week, the Storm Of The Century hit Atlanta. The ice storm in January of 1973 was like none we had seen before or since. Snowjam ’82 was bad, the storm in March of ’93 has also been called the SOTC, but none can compare to 1973. We still talk about it today and remember the events vividly.

It was my senior year of high school. We were living in Gresham Park and to the best of my recollection we never lost power. We were lucky. The temperature dropped below zero. Transformers blew due to the extreme cold. Trees began to bend from the weight of ice, eventually snapping and taking power and phone lines down with them. But for kids in school fresh off of Christmas vacation, a week off due to the storm seemed like an extension of the holidays.

The roads iced over and driving was treacherous. I had a ’63 Volkswagen I had bought from a buddy at school for $75. That was back when a $75 VW could be both practical and dependable. The old ’63 was the famous VW seafoam green and had a left front fender that was unsanded and unpainted Bond-O. Like all ’63 VWs, its heater was non-functional, but I didn’t care. The little car ran and that was all that mattered. I let the air about halfway out of the back tires, put a concrete block in the cubby hole behind the back seat and, to my mothers chagrin and my father reminding me that I did not possess the intellectual capacity of a burro, cranked up the old 6-volt Seafoam Green Monster and headed up the hill on Rollingwood toward my friend Kerney’s house.

The power was out at Kerney’s, so his dad climbed the pole out in front of the house and with a pair of jumper cables managed to jump the power from the main line to the line going to the house. The cables stayed up there for months, until Georgia Power discovered them while doing routine maintenance. Kerney and I climbed in the Bug, backed out of the driveway and took off for a great adventure. We decided to head up Mary Lou Lane. The most fun was making right hand turns. I would punch the Bug about halfway through the turn, the car would make a three-sixty and we would continue on our way. After chugging about halfway up the hill on Mary Lou, the old VW couldn’t make it any further, began to spin his rear wheels and slowly at first, then picking up speed, slid backwards down the hill to the bottom before coming to rest with the rear wheel resting against the curb. Giggling and laughing, we headed back the other direction.

I spent the night at Kerney’s house that night. The next morning we rode over to my house and my father had softened his stance the parallels of my intellectual capacity and a burro’s. That was because he needed cigarettes. He gave me five dollars for two packs of Lucky Strikes and gas for the Bug. Kerney and I made it to Gresham Road and the Tenneco station was miraculously open. We bought the cigarettes, filled the Bug up and headed home. My father was happy and we were set up with gas for the rest of the week.

We took off again and picked up a few buddies. Emboldened, we decided to ride to Cedar Grove. The little car chugged along and as we passed a Georgia Power work crew on Bouldercrest Road, one on the men gave us the finger. We looked and laughed because, bundled up under the layer of clothing and the hard hat was a friend of ours who was a few years older and worked for Georgia Power. While were playing road warriors, he was getting paid double time. And we wondered why he owned a yellow and black ’70 Mach 1.

It wasn’t all fun and games, though. We made a couple of runs to the grocery store for my parents and Kerney’s. We picked up his little sister who spent the night with a friend and brought her home. We also made a cigarette run for his dad. So Kerney, the little ‘63 and me emerged the heroes.

Eventually the snow and ice melted. Power and phone lines were restored, life returned to normal and we all went back to school. My father talked me into letting him build a dune buggy out of the old Seafoam Beetle. Then he never let me drive it. Spring came and then graduation. We had to make up the days missed from the ice storm at the end of the school year. That’s one thing that kids never think about during snow days. We graduated on a Wednesday night and I had to be at work at eight o’clock the next morning. But the memories of the Ice Storm of ’73 remain to this day.

Driving in a winter storm is no fun now. I hear all the time how we Southerners don’t know how to drive in snow and ice. The storm of 2014 that crippled the city and made a national laughingstock out of Atlanta comes to mind. I was out there and it took seven hours, but I made it home. So, I must know a little something about driving in adverse conditions. Along the way that evening, the thought struck me that a great percentage of the Atlanta population is now made up of northern transplants. I figured that since they all knew how to negotiate the ice and the hills that they were all safely home. I never realized that many of us dumb old Southerners were left in the city. There sure were a lot of us. The weirdest part was the fact that a great number of the cars that were swerving, careening and abandoned on the side of the expressway had Ohio and Indiana tags on them.