I was walking down a dirt road one day in Elk Falls, Kansas, just exploring the town and the roads that headed out, searching for good potential walks, when I turned a corner and stopped short. In front of me was an old Ford Bronco sitting in the middle of the road with the hood up and a guy with his head underneath it messing with the engine. But that wasn't the interesting part. The interesting part was that the whole car was hand-painted, with a brush, in red, white and blue, stars and stripes in the pattern of the American flag and on the back were small hand-prints in blue.
I walked up to the front and recognized the guy who had his head under the hood. It was the soon-to-be mayor, so I asked him the obvious question, how did this car get painted like that? It seems that a friend of his, an art teacher from another Kansas town, had gotten in a fender bender some years before. On the morning of her appointment to take her car to be repainted, as she was getting ready she had the t.v. on. Suddenly it was reported that planes were hitting the World Trade Center. It was the morning of September 11, 2001. She sat down, shocked, and watched the news, missing her appointment. Then she changed her mind. Instead of making a new appointment, she took her car to the school where she worked and had her art students paint it in honor of the victims of September 11th. It was their handprints that were on the back of the car.
I begged the mayor-to-be for three months until he finally sold me the car. I loved that it was a tribute and a work of art and I figured also that if I broke down anywhere, especially in the Midwest, there were a lot of guys who would stop and help me. I very happily drove that car for the rest of the years I lived in Elk Falls and then back to California and around there for a year until the second year there it couldn't pass the California smog test. I couldn't afford to fix it so very sorry and sad I sold it to the State as part of a state project to get old smog-emitting cars off the road. I miserably took it to the crusher, which was part of the program but once there I asked to speak to the manager. I told him the car's story and said it shouldn't be put to the crusher and suggested that maybe he'd put it out front as an advertisement for his shop. A few weeks later a friend mentioned that she had seen me in Walnut Creek, a nearby town. I said no, I hadn't been to Walnut Creek in a long time. She said she had been sure it was me because she saw my car parked by a shop there and my car definitely could not be mistaken for any other car. A few days later someone else told me the same thing, again in Walnut Creek. So, I was very glad to discover someone at the crushing yard decided to take its salvage title and fix it so it could run again on California streets.
Whenever I would drive the Americar to somewhere else in Kansas, everybody on the road would wave and once in a while somebody would hoot and hollar. It was a gas driving that car. Actually, I thought there was something odd about the gas. One of the first days I had it I drove fifty miles over to the town with the supermarket and 3/4th's of the way back, I filled the tank at a small service station. The next day when I got back in the car, I noticed that the gas gauge said it was nearly empty. I looked under the car. No leaks. I couldn't figure out how I could have used that much gas just getting home the rest of the way. I phoned the soon-to-be mayor and complained that he had told me it got good gas mileage. "It does get good gas mileage!" he said and considering that he owned the mechanic's shop and was about to be mayor, I figured he was telling the truth. So, the next week I did the same thing. I had filled it up earlier so I again drove fifty miles to buy groceries and almost all the way back, I filled it up again. The next morning again it was down to one quarter tank. I saw my next-door neighbor out in her yard and walked over. I told her what was going on and added that it was like somebody was stealing the gas. She replied, "Somebody is stealing the gas!" and told me about a guy in town, Billy Rattail, who was stealing gas, cords of wood, tools, whatever he could get his hands on in the middle of the night. She said everybody in town was getting mad and folks were even putting up threatening fliers in the post office about him, cause everybody knew it was Billy, they just couldn't catch him. She said he had the nerve to stack a cord of stolen wood right in front of his house and the guy he stole it from could easily recognize it (one of those mysteries of the Midwest of which I have encountered many). She said to buy a locking gas cap and that would keep him out, that he only stole what was easy to get. So I wandered down to the post office and asked the people hanging out gossiping and yeah, they confirmed it all right and they pointed to an angry flyer telling Billy to get out of town or else. Once I knew this was going on, I understood what people were complaining about in the cafe every morning. So I'd sit in on these discussions, being mad myself, especially because he punctured the floater in my gas tank when he was trying to siphon my gas. Everybody who wanted in on the discussion would crowd into the really big booth in the cafe and start talking. The men would complain that the sheriff was doing absolutely nothing about it, on and on about how the sheriff ought to do something. One day, there was a sweet looking little old lady sitting quietly at the table. After the men had gone on about the sheriff doing nothing, in her little squeeky voice, she spoke up. "I think we ought to tar and feather him and send him out of town on a rail," she said. Right on, Girl! I thought. The only one there with cahones.
Then one day the cafe was all aflutter with news. Early that same morning at 4 a.m. when Shirley LaDoo had gone out to get in her car to make her usual long drive to work in Wichita, her husband had naturally walked her to the car to wish her a safe trip. But once she had driven off and it got quiet, he could hear something funny-sounding down the road. It was still really dark so he walked as quietly as possible down to see what was going on. And lo and behold he spotted Billy breaking into the Elderberry's weekend house. He hurried home and phoned the dispatcher and told her the sheriff needed to get out there quick to catch Billy red-handed. The dispatcher asked if he could call back later because the sheriff didn't like to be woken up before 8 a.m. A couple of weeks later, one of the deputies started handing out yard signs saying he was running for the office of sheriff. He won.
The Americar did have its moment of glory. I was married by then to my third husband, Pat, who had been in Vietnam. When September 11th was approaching, we found out that there was going to be a parade to commemorate the day so early that morning Pat put on his fatigues and we drove out to the parade and signed up to be in it. We were right behind the high school band. Pat was uncharacteristically nervous waving at the cheering crowd as we puttered along behind the band. At one point a guy in a Marine T-shirt yelled, "Hey, how come only the Army is represented!?" I yelled back, "Jump on the hood, Marine!" He didn't though. I didn't know Marines could be shy. As we passed the judges' seats, the voice over the loud speaker yelled, "And here comes the VFW car!" Pat and I looked at each other. We hadn't registered it as the VFW car. But the Americar just had that aura. So we both grinned and Pat waved happily.
