The Hut Rod

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.