My Dad's Nickname Could've Been "Crash" Part 1

I think I know why my father was such a great mechanic.  It was out of necessity.  It would've cost my father way too much money to have someone else fix what he had broken.  He drove his cars hard, fast and loose.  If he would've been born in the South, his name might be mentioned in the same breath as Buddy Baker, Cale Yarborough, or Richard Petty.  He shared that same mentality of the Nascar legends.  The "I can make a car do anything I want it too" mentality.  However, just like those Nascar legends he also totaled his fair share of vehicles throughout his lifetime.


Dad always pushed a car beyond its limits.  Whenever he would test drive a car that he just fixed, he would hit the back roads and push the car to its top speed.  Usually over 100 mph.

          "Just making sure the engine is getting cleaned out!"  He would say to me.  Yup, I would be sitting there too, next to my father in the front seat watching the speedometer climb over the 100 mph mark.  That was really cool stuff for a 10 year old.  Mom would've killed dad if she knew I went along on some of his test drives, especially since we both were not wearing seat belts.  "If you're buckled in, then you wont be thrown clear from the wreck if the car rolls over!"  my father would confidently say.  To me, at 10 years old, that made perfect sense.

It was on one of these test drives that dad apparently pushed a car beyond its limit and ended up totaling a car that he just fixed.  Luckily, I wasn't riding shotgun on this one and dad didn't get hurt.  He must've had a team of Guardian Angels working in shifts to ensure he lived as long as he did.  Anyways, insurance covered the cost of the car and he continued to test drive cars at 100 mph.

At a younger age, my father crashed at least 2 cars that I know of, bringing the count of totaled vehicles to 3. According to my uncle Vic (dad's brother), my dad drove one into Lake Wisconsin, and then "borrowed" Vic's car, since my uncle was away at war, and drove it into a cow.  I think my father may have had a little too much to drink on the first one (drunk driving is not cool and thankfully my father had little to drink after he married my mother) and was expecting the Merrimac Ferry to be waiting for him at the end of the road.  It wasn't.  And since his car was waterlogged and his brother's car was just sitting in the barn, he decided that Vic wouldn't mind if he used his car.  Besides, Vic wasn't around to say no.  Unfortunately, for Vic's car and the unfortunate cow that wandered out into the middle of the road while my dad was probably going about 100 mph, neither survived.  My dad, though, was not hurt in either of the accidents.  Thank you Guardian Angels.

In Part 2, I will let you know why my father didn't stop at just totaling cars, but reserved one of his worst crashes for a large farm machine called a Combine.