Tommie | Jumper Cables And A Funny Noise

A lifelong friend died a few weeks ago.  Sergeant Tom Ennis, United States National Guard, passed from this life March 4, 2017.  He was 87 years old.  Just over a month earlier, I had written a blog recalling some of the memories of a lifetime friendship with him, his wife Nan, and their children Dennis, Stacey, Susan, Sharon and Samantha.  Tom was a member of The Greatest Generation, the Generation that literally went out and saved the world.  In the end, his eyesight had failed,  his body frail and wracked with pain.  Thankfully, he is now free of the pain and suffering he endured the last years of his life.

Tom, or Tommie, as I called him, was tough as nails.  A career soldier who worked in the motor pool at The National Guard Armory, he supplemented his income by working on VWs out of his garage.  I say his garage, but when I first met the family, Tommie worked outside in the driveway and beside the house in Gresham Park.  When they moved to a larger split level on the outskirts of Cedar Grove, he worked out of the carport.  I can still see him pulling into the driveway in whatever VW he was driving at the time, walking into the house in his green fatigues and boots, and saying in that deliberate, baritone drawl of his, “Nan, fix me a drink.”  It is ironic that his eyesight failed him, because his eyes were a deep piercing blue.  He had a non-fade tan and was lean and fit.  I’m sure in his youth he was quite strapping and handsome.  After retiring from the Guard, he rented a garage on Fairview Road about two miles from the house and worked out of there for ten or fifteen years.  I painted the sign for the shop when he opened it.  The slogan on the sign was “We Get The Bugs Out.”

Tommie, or Tom, or T.L., whichever you preferred (he went by all three), had a very… acerbic sense of humor.  Everyone had a nickname.  I was always just “Etheridge.”  My buddy Chip, all six foot two and two hundred twenty pounds of him, was “Tiny.”  One of our long haired Gresham Park friends, of whom Tommie was not particularly fond, was “Alice.”  There were names for others as well, but I won’t mention them.  Some were pretty embarrassing.  My father, whose name was Julian, became “Julie.”  That’s all he ever called him, and the two of them became very close friends in the last five years or so of my father’s life.  Daddy would go over and hang around the garage at least three or four times a week.  A lot of people did.  I stopped by one winter afternoon and Tommie told me my wife, Marie, “came a-wheelin’ in here the other day with the top down, wearin’ an overcoat, gloves and a big ol’ floppy hat, tellin’ me her car was a-makin’ a funny noise.  I said, ‘Hell, Marie, it’s a Volkswagen.  It’s supposed to make funny noises!'”  She left in a huff.  I went home and drove the car around the block and, I had to admit, didn’t hear anything other than the usual Volkswagen funny noises.  I drove down to the shop to tell Tommie.  “Etheridge, what are you doing driving The Nice Car?” he asked.  He always referred to the convertible as “The Nice Car.”  He did not refer to it as such due to its mechanical soundness or cosmetic beauty, either.

When I was drifting in and out of jobs in my late teens and early twenties, Tommie was always good enough to pay me a few bucks to help him out with the Bugs whenever he could.  “Oh, hell, Etheridge, you’ve got the damn thing in upside down…”  He taught me a lot about Bugs, but the most important lesson he taught me was that I was in no way cut out to be a professional mechanic.  He tried to get me to join The Guard.  He was always trying to get all of us to join the Guard.  What a motley crew that would have been.  Ultimately, he convinced me that it was in my best interest to go back to school and pursue a career in which my talents lay.

But, he did teach me some VW tricks that stuck.  He taught me about wedging a stick between the throttle and the carburetor, opening it up about halfway so you could get home after the accelerator cable broke.  He taught me a trick about how to get into a Bug in case (or with me, whenever) you locked your keys inside.  I’ll refrain from sharing that one, because I don’t want to encourage breaking and entering.  And, after I had to stop by and borrow his perpetually full five gallon military gas can because I had run out of gas, he advised me, “they’ll run a who-o-o-ole lot better if you put gas in ’em to start with.”

Another trick I saw Tommie use involved jumper cables and a lot of ingenuity.  During the ice storm of ’73, the power got knocked out.  Never mind the heat, stove, washer or dryer, the TV was out.  This was a disaster.  Undaunted, Tommie and his buddy G.C. climbed the pole out in front of the house and, using jumper cables, managed to jump the power from the main line to the line going to the house.  Problem solved.  The jumper cables stayed up there for months, until Georgia Power discovered them while doing routine maintenance.   

Tommie put up with a lot from us as kids, more than I ever could have endured.  Pulling in from work and there being four or five jacked up hot rods parked in and leaking oil on his driveway.  Walking into his house from work and Foghat blasting from the stereo.  Four or five teenage boys hanging around his swimming pool or running around his house in swim trunks.  No wonder he wanted Nan to fix him a drink.  I would have eventually gone postal.

Tommie never did.  As a matter of fact, beneath his somewhat gruff facade, you always knew he was kind, compassionate, and would do anything he could to help.  He helped me patch up my Bug countless times when I would come limping into the driveway in it.  He helped our friends David and Butch rebuild the transmission in David’s Porsche 912.  He kept Stacey and Samantha’s MG Midgets on the road.  When I was restoring our convertible, I sought him out for advice constantly and he gently walked me through many of the processes.  When it came time to paint it, he got me the paint at his cost from NAPA and let me paint it in the shop using his spray gun.  He showed me the basics and I painted it myself.  The end result was something less than even Earl Scheib would have been proud of, but it didn’t matter.  With Tommie’s help, I had painted the car myself.  I was thrilled.

As much as Tommie endured, he endured what is, to me, unfathomable.  He endured the loss of his only son, Dennis, in 1989.  Dennis was thirty three years old and killed in an automobile accident.  I have lost family and friends, but cannot begin to imagine the loss of a child.  Dennis, Stacey and I had been friends since high school, and that is how I became close with the Ennis family.  Tommie, Nan and the girls persevered and life, as it should, went on.  All these years later, it still seems surreal sometimes to me that Dennis is gone.  I can only imagine the hole that was left in the their lives.

Dennis was absolutely and without a doubt the best mechanic I have ever seen in my life.  He could do anything he wanted.  He could change out a VW engine the way most people change underwear.  He once took a ’67 bus and cut the middle out of it.  Then he pushed it all back together, welded it up, finished it and it looked like a Balooney Toons Cartoon Car.  He built numerous dune buggies, both rail and fiberglass bodied.  He and Stacey and I went to Daytona one year for Spring Break in his 454 Monte Carlo.  On the way back the ignition coil (remember those?) went out somewhere on I-10 in the middle of nowhere.  Dennis and I left Stacey in the car with a blackjack, and walked about a mile and a half to the closest gas station.  They happened to have an old 350 engine out back and sold us the coil off of it for two dollars.  We walked back to the car and Dennis took the old coil off and put the new one on using nothing but a screwdriver.  Rather than try to put it in the mounting bracket without the proper tools, he laid it on top of the intake manifold, and off we drove.  We made it home without a blip.  A couple of weeks later, Dennis told me he had forgotten that the coil wasn’t in the mounting bracket until he opened the hood to replace his air filter.  He had driven it around for two weeks with it resting on top of the intake.  At the time he died, he was working on a Volkswagen limousine.  He was in the process of cutting a Bug in half.  He was then going to pull it apart, cut the middle out of another bug, and put it in the middle of the one he had cut in half.  There’s not a doubt in my mind he would have pulled it off perfectly, and it would have looked and driven like it had rolled off of the line in Wolfsburg.

The last time I saw Tommie was in the summer of 2016.  Jackie and I, along with Barry and Debbie Pratt, visited with him, Nan and Stacey at their house in Jackson.  It was a beautiful afternoon, and we spent several hours laughing and reminiscing about the old times.  As we were leaving, I told Tommie I loved him.  It was the first and only time I had ever done so.  I’m thankful now I had that opportunity.

So, they are all back in the garage now.  They’re sitting around the pot bellied stove drinking coffee in the morning and beer in the afternoon.  Talking about VW’s, NASCAR, model airplanes and bass boats.  Other than Tommie and Dennis, ol’ Charlie is there.  G.C. is there.  Marie just wheeled in wearing her overcoat, gloves and a big ol’ floppy hat.  My father is there.  And, I like to think, someday I’ll be there.  We’ll all be there… Still Cruisin’!  –J.