Joe's cars

I really don't know where to begin. Me Grandpa Joe had a plethora of cars which ran the gamut from neat to bad, and on downhill to particularly, excruciatingly bad. Yet he was proud of every one of them, and I was somehow proud that he was proud. He often had so many that it qualified him for the fleet rate with his insurance company.
There's the 12 cylinder Packard I wish I had seen. Pops always seemed impressed, even wistful, talking about it. Perhaps Joe's biggest claim to celebrity was a big white Chrysler Imperial (which I did see, and even rode in) which supposedly had a governor of Florida as a former owner. Man, that thing was huge. And who could forget the 1961 Ford Fairlane which he bought for thirty five bucks? It went from zero to sixty in, in, well, I don't think it ever actually made it to sixty. Oh, and a 65 Chevy Bel Air which always smelled burnt because he had flicked a lit cigarette out the driver's window only to have it sucked into an open back window and burn out the rear seat. That one became (more or less) my brother Phil's. It lasted until 1983, when it was t-boned by a guy who ran a stop sign. But the one I remember the fondest was a 1967 Cadillac. It was purple.
Well, more like lilac really. He had bought the car while we, me Pops and Mom and the family, had been in North Carolina visiting her folks. Joe felt it needed painting and found a paint shop running a special obviously intended to get rid of unpopular colors. Since Joe always said "I ain't Hell on pretty," he didn't care about the color. He cared about the great price for the paint job. I can still hear me Pops, as we pulled up behind that beauty on the return home, asking incredulously "I wonder whose purple Cadillac that is?" He should have known.
Joe being Joe, he had a hitch installed on that thing because any vehicle could pull a welder. That's exactly what he had me doing when I was an older teen: delivering welders with it. I heard every purple Cadillac joke imaginable taking machines into factories and onto job sites.
Still, it was a neat car in its own way. It was the last style of Caddy, I believe of any American car, with tail fins, modest though they were. It was the car I drove through a small lake, on orders from Joe, when I was 17. You can read about that here: https://thesublimetotheridiculous.blogspot.com/2017/10/high-tide-in-milan.html if you care to.
Yep, me Grandpa Joe had some cars. As I remember more I'll tell you about those too.

High tide in Milan

I drove past Milan, Michigan yesterday, and it reminded me of something I had long forgotten.

Back when I was a teen, I was there with Grandpa Joe picking up one of his welders. It was at a Ford plant when they were doing an expansion. It had apparently rained the night before, and rained hard. Although we were in a building, there was a large pool of water, about three feet deep and a hundred yards wide on all sides. The welder itself was land locked on the other side of that pool. And the only way to get to it was straight through that water. "You have to drive straight," a foreman was telling Joe. "If you drift to either side the water's about six feet deep." Joe got out of the car and told me to drive through the water to the welder just like the guy said.

Thanks Grandpa.

Of course I did it; you don't argue with your grandfather when you're 17.

I drove that old Cadillac he had right through that water, straight as a tack. In my memory the water came to right below the driver's side window; how the engine didn't stall is beyond me. I was nervous and scared. But I got that Caddy through the ocean and right up to that welder, slowly but surely. But then the powers that be decided that the machine was too heavy to be pulled through the water by a car. They would get a bulldozer with a long heavy chain and drag it through the water.

And I would have to back the car out through the pool, as there was no way to turn it around. I hadn't known that when I started. I have no idea how we were supposed to hook up the welder now that I think about it.

But I backed through it and lived to tell the tale. The tale I remembered after 40 years yesterday.