I was driving onto Travis Air Force Base the other day, going to get a CT scan for one of my follow-ups on my lung cancer surgery almost two years ago. There's a lot of construction, for those of you who haven't been in Cowtown for a while, the biggest is the building of a Amtrak station off Peabody Rd. and Vanden/Cement Hill roads. The plan calls for an overcrossing to be built on Peabody to take traffic over the train crossing. To that end, Peabody has been closed at the intersection of Vanden/Cement Hill roads, and the detour takes you all the way back, around the jail, and back onto Air Base Parkway. Most people in Vacaville/Dixon/Rio Vista areas use the back gate, so it's not uncommon to see traffic backed up in the mornings.
The person in front of me had a rental car, and the current readiness level (Bravo) requires the gate sentries to look in the trunk of rental cars. There was some junk in the trunk, not hers, the car's, but it was otherwise OK. It got me to remembering an old car my dad fixed up, and let my sister Sherry use...
It was a brown, 1947 Plymouth coupe, six-cylinder engine, and a 3-speed manual transmission with the shifter on the steering column. Pop brought it home, and the girls (sisters Sherry and Pat) responded with the 1950's version of, "Ewww!" It was a total P.O.S., and it broke down in our driveway a couple of weeks after Pops bought it. I don't remember how long it took him to do it, but he totally rebuilt the engine, and actually had the car running pretty well. It would be a great car to have today, except for one small thing...
Pops was kind of a lazy guy, and only wanted to travel out to the dump when he had to. Our garbage service in Vallejo didn't take yard clippings, so we had to store them up, and take them out to the dump ourselves. Being lazy, Pops just tossed them into the trunk of the Plymouth. Ever smell dead grass after it has baked for several days in the trunk of the car? I can tell you, without a shred of doubt, it stinks like Hell, but this was the car my sister Sherry got to drive. I think my parent's attempt at preventing teen-aged pregnancies was pretty effective, but there were still holes in that plan, as would later be discovered.
One afternoon, my sister had to go out to Mare Island (when it was still a Naval Base), and a robbery suspect had evaded Vallejo Police, getting onto the Base somehow. They had chased him around some of the Shipyard warehouses, and had asked for the Marines on the gate, now armed with M14's, to search every vehicle for a white male suspect. Cars would pull up, stop, the Marines would ask to open the trunk (they didn't have interior switches in '47). For the safety of the driver, they would take the keys, and open the trunk with cover from the other Marine. Imagine the look on my sister's face when they opened the trunk to find two weeks of grass clippings. The Marines smiled, closed the trunk, gave my sister the keys with a, "Have a nice day, ma'am."
I don't know why, but something about that incident flashed when I saw the Airman checking the trunk of a rental car.
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