A recent meme on social media asked if I'd ever had a policeman pull a gun on me. Actually, I have...
I don't remember the date, crap, it was over 50 years ago. I was, probably, 16 at the time, had my coveted California Driver's License, and had helped my dad rebuild the engine of a Triumph TR3, for the previous year, and so earned the use of it. Being a British sports car, it had "quirks" when we finally got it out of the garage. While we worked on it, we'd had it painted, and reupholstered, even to the point of having a new top and taneau (?) cover (the one that covered the seats, but not a top), as well as having the door panels re-covered. All in all, it was a work of love, Dad bought the car in 1966 for $2,000 (which was a sh@t load of money back then for a seven-year old sports car). He bought it from an "iron lot" in Sacramento, "No warranty expressed or implied," and damn if it didn't break down at the old Milk Farm on the way home.
It was ugly. It was a kind of lavender color, with black interior. Dad, through his contacts in the Vacaville PD, managed to get a title trace, and found out that it had belonged to a young woman, who used it while she went to college, and her medical studies. This all came after something rather disturbing came up while we waited for a tow.
You see, a TR3's hood has "button locks," that require a T-handle to open. We didn't know this, until we had the car in the Milk Farm parking lot at about 10 pm. We didn't know, prior to that, how to open the hood, but when we got out and looked, we knew it took a tool. Dad started grumbling about, "Just my [flipping] luck, the [master fixer] isn't even in the car..." It took a rather long, profanity laced search, but we located the T-handle, and popped the hood. I'm no car guy, although I've helped my dad rebuild both the Triumph, and a '47 Plymouth Coupe, but even I knew that it didn't look good. After we got it back to the house, we put it up on blocks, and crawled under it.
Dad always said that you can go farther with no gasoline than you can with no oil, apparently he was correct. The first thing was to drain the oil, and it was more than black, it was jet black. I dipped my finger in it, it was supposed to be 30-weight, but it felt more like rubber cement. I started to wipe my finger off, and noticed there were little flecks of metal in the mix, and showed it to my dad. Dad was always pretty hot tempered, and he let out a string of invective that cast doubt upon the parentage of the car dealer, the president of Triumph, and just about everyone in between.
Personally, I didn't get the harangue. He bought the car as a "project". He just wasn't going to be able to drive around in his sports car before he started on it. As it turned out, we got it running in April of 1967, thirteen months later, three months before I turned 16. When I got my permit, I was only allowed to drive their 1967 Cougar twice, and initially learned how to drive in a 1963 Galaxy 500 LTD. Once the Triumph came out of the garage, I started begging my dad to teach me how to drive a "stick shift". Because of all of my help, he taught me, and I took my license test in the Triumph.
The quirks were mostly electrical, and while Dad was good at reading schematics, we had a hard time locating the trouble. I even tried enlisting the help of the Chief of Police, Jim Lehman, who was somewhat of an autoelectric savant, or something, and even he had trouble with this particular problem. It was totally random, but it always shut down my dashboard. Lights, gages, heater... That's why I didn't know I was close to being out of gas... ("I put in 59 cents two days ago...")
Anyway, it was late, and I had been to the Teen Club, and was on my way home when my car stopped at the corner of East Main St. and McClellan Ave. I knew immediately, and got out of the car, looked for traffic, and pushed the Triumph into the corporate lot of A-1 Roofing. No sooner had I got the car stopped (safely off the road, and on the gravel lot) that a Vacaville PD patrol car comes screeching up, lights flashing, spotlights on, spewing gravel as it skidded to a stop. I watched the driver's door start to open, and reached for my wallet, actually getting it out of my pocket, and almost in front of me when the policeman, Jerry Self, was crouched behind his door, gun pointed at me, and yelling, "FREEZE!!"
When you see guys get arrested at gunpoint in movies and TV, they casually raise their hands, and say, "OK copper, you got me." It ain't like that in real life. Back then, cops used a snub-nosed, .38 caliber, police special, now it's 9 mm Glocks, or Berreta's. Either way, when you're, essentially, minding your own business, and a cop points his weapon at you, in real life, the hole in the barrel looks like an open sewer pipe. There was none of this, "Ya got me copper," crap, my hands flew into the air, so fast, so hard, I ended up throwing my wallet about 30 feet away, and screaming, "DON'T SHOOT! I GIVE UP!"
Looking back, I screwed up. I anticipated that whoever it was, they would want to see my license, so I was getting it out. After a couple of days, it finally dawned on me that from the cop's viewpoint, I was reaching for something, possibly a weapon. This was 1968, though, and not the kind of environment cops face in the 2020 era. Kids didn't carry guns back then, and although cops didn't have to wear kevlar, cop killing was not unheard of. I actually arranged to meet with Jerry, to apologize for my actions, which he took pretty well, although three weeks later, he violated my Triumph in front of the stairs at Andrews Park, on a bogus "drug search". The only thing he didn't tear out of the car and basically throw on the sidewalk was the steering wheel and seats. He went through my glove box, trunk, spare tire well... he said he thought my glove box had a false bottom to it, and ripped it out of the car. His little fit cost him a week, because the first person I called was Jim Lehman. The Chief made him restore my car, and what he couldn't put back, he'd pay for, then suspended him for a week.
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