Tuesday, March 16

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March 16, Tuesday - What a day! Real busy in store. No help, of course. Lights went out, had a flat tire, rained and hailed something fierce. Bud went to bowling alley and got home about 12:30. Didn't sleep well.

March 17, Wednesday - Not too much doing today. Mike and Ron came down. I went to bed about 9. Cold 15 tonight Bud wanted me to take him to a used car lot to look at a car, but I declined.

March 18, Thursday - Marie and I in the front end, as usual. Not too busy, though. Still cold.

I remember the hail storm so well. It came through about 4 in the afternoon. I was riding with Ron in his 1957 Chevy convertible. We were headed west on Anderson Avenue near Kensington or Cypress when the first hailstones started to fall, small stones at first, then progressively larger and larger until we were being pummeled with icy rocks the size of baseballs falling from the sky - onto a convertible. We noticed one of my classmates, Mike Rittermeyer, walking west on Anderson and we honked at him and told him to get in. By now the convertible top was in shreds, and we were trying everything we could think of to protect ourselves from the onslaught. I wound up with two big goose eggs on my head, and Mike always joked that he would have stood a better chance out in the open. Houses all over Northeast were damaged - windows, roofs, siding, and of course, the cars. Ron's Chevy was a dimpled mess. The hail broke the steering wheel and bent both sun visors like tacos. The windshield was completely gone, and broken glass was everywhere. It was a scene from a war zone.

That was the first day I met the Rittermeyer family - Al and Carolyn, and their four boys Mike Mark, Matt and Marshall. They would become my surrogate family for the next fifty years and more, and to this day, I still consider Mark to be my brother. Mike died suddenly from a heart attack a few years ago. We did the things brothers do. We got in trouble, we got out of trouble, we had as much fun together as any nuclear family has ever had. I can go on for hours about the good times we had together, the motorcycles, the trips to Keokuk, Iowa and Lenexa; the Saturday night house parties and all the music we made, but suffice it to say I am so much better as a human being for being a part of  this remarkable American family.

The Rittermeyer Brothers - Mike, Mark, Matt, and Marshall

Me with my brother Mark.

Moving on: As usual, Bud is trying to put the strong-arm on mom. In my defense, I wasn't aware of what mom was going through with her upcoming surgery, how terrified she was, or how sure she was that she wouldn't survive this ordeal.

The car in question was a 1948 Packard Henney Hearse. I saw it a used car lot on Independence Avenue, right across the street from Katz Drug Store. I'm guessing it weighed 6,000 pounds, and had a torque-monster flathead straight eight under the mile-long hood. It wore a velvety patina of age appropriate for its years. I saw a hearse as my ticket to fame and teenage alpha notoriety, and after all, I was only eighteen months from being able to drive it legally. I think I was just weird enough to pull it off.

This isn't the actual hearse, but the year and model are correct.

The guy at the used car lot actually let me drive it around the block a couple of times, and to this day, I have seen few vehicles that ran as smoothly and quietly as that Packard. When it was parked with the motor running, you couldn't feel any vibration, and if you didn't know for sure, you couldn't tell if it was actually running or not.

Still, mom prevailed, and the hearse sold a few days later to a guy from East, a rival school over on Van Brunt Boulevard, south of Truman. He swapped out the straight eight for a big-block 396 from a totaled Impala Super Sport, and was headed to North Kansas City to have it painted when a gas line popped off the carburetor, and the Packard burned to the ground on the ASB bridge. Hi ho.