It was spring break, probably 1966, and four of us were driving from Pittsburgh to Fort Lauderdale. We were college students, and I believe this was before seat belts were common. We were traveling in a new car belonging to one of the guys, and naturally we took turns driving.
Somewhere in Georgia, another member of our group was at the wheel. His last name sounded enough like the word crash that after this trip, “Crash” became his nickname.
We were going downhill and around a curve when he apparently let the car slip briefly off the edge of the road. He reacted by swinging it quickly back onto the pavement.
That was a mistake.
The car began swerving back and forth, weaving in and out of oncoming traffic as we went down the hill. Somehow we missed everything coming toward us. At the bottom of the hill, the car spun 180 degrees and went sideways off the road.
There was a car parked there.
We hit it broadside.
And, of all the cars we could possibly have hit, it was a police car.
The policeman saw us coming and managed to jump across into the passenger side of his cruiser before we hit him.
We were four college kids from Pittsburgh, in rural Georgia, on our way to spring break in Florida, and we had just wrecked a police car.
We figured we were screwed.
Our car wasn’t drivable, so another police car took us to the home of the local justice of the peace.
And then the story took a turn none of us expected.
They were incredibly nice to us.
The justice’s wife gave us milk and cookies. They arranged to have our car towed to a local garage, where they pulled the damaged fender out far enough that we could drive it again.
“Crash” received a ticket for driving too fast for conditions.
The fine was fifteen dollars.
And they sent us on our way.
It was only afterward, looking at the wrecked car, that I noticed something that changed the whole event for me.
There was a huge gash in the roof.
It was right where my head would have been.
We continued on to Fort Lauderdale in our friend’s formerly new car. It was still drivable, although the gas tank had been damaged near the top, so we couldn’t fill it completely.
You might think the owner of the car had already contributed enough to the trip.
Apparently not.
When we got to Fort Lauderdale, we went to the beach. In those days people used round pieces of plywood as skimboards. You ran through the shallows, threw the board down, jumped onto it, and skimmed across the water.
Our friend was a big guy and probably wasn’t ideally suited to skimboarding.
He tried it anyway.
On his first attempt, he fell and broke his upper leg.
After a trip to the emergency room, we were back at the beach the next day. Our friend sat in a beach chair with his leg in a cast.
He was very fair-skinned.
And he got a terrible sunburn.
So his spring break consisted of having his new car wrecked, breaking his leg on his first attempt at skimboarding, and getting badly sunburned while sitting on the beach in a cast.
Mine went considerably better.
I came home with one particularly vivid memory:
that gash in the roof where my head should have been.
This happened to me.