Poor Service Station Mormon kid

 Poor Service Station Mormon kid




                                                                        mormon boy


     This one traces the Sheehy-Creason friendship back when Greg and I were floating in our Dad's gene pools. Jobs were very hard to find in the depression and young Ben and John had time to sow some wild oats in the 1930's before they were made respectable by Grace and Charline. When they could raise a grubstake they might take a car and head east for adventure and the possibility of separating rubes from their money. These road trips might include Army-Navy games, Notre Dame football in South Bend, the Kentucky Derby or one certain drive to Indianapolis where Eddie Rickenbacker ran the Speedway and the biggest event in the midwest at that point was the 500. The top driver was a man named Louis Meyer who also started the milk guzzling  tradition because it gets hot in Indianapolis in mid-May, especially after 500 miles of exhaust, grit and hard turns on the brickyard. The cars were travelling over one hundred miles an hour and one can only imagine the ear-splitting din of the thirty race cars burning over that banked track. Yet BC and his pals had other ideas regarding the Indy since they did not give a damn about auto-racing despite it's great popularity in LA. So, as the story goes when a weary truck driver left his load of coca colas idling at the truck stop in the middle of Indiana to do his businesss a larcenous companion of our innocent fathers jumped into the cab and sped off to Indianapolis where a huge crowd sat sweltering in plus 80 degree heat with no shade. They quickly set up shop near the speedway and sold the precious, un-chilled cokes by the bottle for the unheard of price of one buck each. The supply vanished quickly and the truck was abandoned where it sat with the miscreant Californians counting their ill-gotten earnings as they headed back home. As the story goes, the fellas starting drinking a whiskey made by the Wilken Family of Kentucky and were completely wasted by the time they hit the outskirts of Salt Lake City Utah. One of the occupants had been forced to stop the car and heaved  his dinner and lots of Wilkens Family's own on the windshield where he had staggered. The puke dried to a crust during the journey but when a nice Mormon boy came out to do his duty at a service station he managed to re-animate a big load of barf as he attempted to clean the windshield. When John would tell the story and imagine the look on the kid's greenish face he would laugh until wheezing.



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