Did not roll his car. He was driving a brand-new 1959 four-door Ford Country Squire Station Wagon.
OK, here goes. I never tried to write it before, I usually tell it. I wasn't going to do it tonight, but maybe I can do it justice. I just finished one Long Island Iced Tea, and Chris is making me another - "Make it strong!"
My dad and my mom, they had to get married, back during the Korean War. My dad was eighteen and my mom was 16, and they were from Biloxi, Mississippi. My dad's dad died when he was 12, my mother's parents divorced when she was 12, and her mother was a cashier at the Electric Maid Bakery. My dad went away to college at Ole Miss, where he majored in music, and minored in bridge, and flunked out and got drafted. So he enlisted in the Navy, and then got my mother pregnant, and was stationed in Norfolk, Virginia. He played English horn in the Navy band, and was not sent to Korea, and when the war was over my mother was pregnant again.
They moved back to Hattiesburg, and my father graduated from Ole Miss, and went to dental school at Loyola in New Orleans, where my other sister and my brother were born. And then he graduated, and got a job working in a dental clinic in the black part of town, where he put gold crowns on perfectly good teeth for people who wanted them, with cutouts in the shape of hearts, diamonds, spades and clubs, it was a status symbol. He bought a brand-new four door Ford Country Squire, the first new car he had ever had in his life, and accepted a job with an older dentist in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
They took the four kids to stay with the relatives in Biloxi while they looked for a house in Baton Rouge, and then drove west along the Airline Highway, planning on staying in a hotel, as the next day was my father's first day at his new job. Somewhere between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, it began to rain as it does in Louisiana, something akin to having a swimming pool lifted up over your head, and dumped.
As I understand it, the time was close to midnight, and so they were not expecting to see a hog standing in the middle of the Airline Highway. The 1959 four-door Ford Country Squire Station Wagon was a heavy beast, and not one for making a panic stop, and it plowed right into the hog, and did it in. My parents got out of the car, and stood in the rain, looking at the dying hog spurting blood all over the highway. My father turned to my mother, and said, "Do you see a brand?"
"What?"
"A brand! Do you see a brand on the hog?"
They looked the hog over. No brand.
My father said, "I can't believe that someone would just let this hog run loose on the highway. I want to find who this hog belongs to, and I want them to pay me to have my car fixed."
At that, he began to re-arrange the luggage in the back of the station wagon, and made a place to lay the hog. He then took a knife, and cut the hog's throat, and bled it so that it would not get blood all over his new station wagon. After he bled the hog, he and my mother dragged the hog into the back of the station wagon (she was wearing a summer dress). They then drove to Baton Rouge, where they checked in to a hotel. The next morning, my mother drove my father to work, and, pursuant to his marching orders, drove back to the place where they hit the hog, and began going door to door, trying to find the owner. That evening, having been unsuccessful, she picked my father up from work and took him back to the hotel.
Needless to say, he was loudly unimpressed with my mother's success in finding the hog's owners, and demanded that she try again. Which she did. I guess I should mention that the front of the station wagon looked like she ran into a hog.
After a while driving around with the hog in the back of the station wagon, it began to smell. My father suggested that she try to sell it to someone, but there were no takers. Finally, she had to go to a rendering yard, and pay them to take the hog out of the station wagon and dispose of it.
They took the station wagon to a car wash, and washed it out, but they never did get the smell out, until it needed a brake job, and come to find out that the blood had got into the hubcaps.
And that's a true story. |
