This is just a story of my younger days. There’s no deep political meaning, no “moral”. It’s just a story of a nineteen-year-old kid from the suburbs, learning about – Riding the Dog. Enjoy!!!
Driving Old Cars
My sister lives in the New York City area. She has no need for a car; public transportation is great and stores in the neighborhood are close. So when she wanted to come back to Ohio and didn’t want to pay for a flight – she took the Greyhound from Newark, New Jersey. She called it “Riding the Dog”. She once led a passenger revolt in a blizzard at a truck stop near Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania. But that’s her story to tell.
I have lived in Ohio for most of my life. Unless you live directly in a downtown, having a car is a necessity. When I went to college at Denison University in Granville, I was two hours from home in Cincinnati. Dad could come and get me, but I was an independent young man, and didn’t want to depend on my Father for mobility. So I always had a car at Denison, even in my Freshman year when we weren’t allowed to park one on campus. I paid a small fee to keep it at the Certified Gas Station down by the IGA (grocery store). It was a fifteen-minute walk from my dorm, but accessible when I wanted to go camping, hiking, or get back home for a Friday night with friends.
Plymouth Fury III
Today’s kids would call my first few cars “beaters”. They weren’t all that old, my first car a 1969 Plymouth Fury III (it was 1974). But my cousin put the first 100,000 miles on her in a year, and she was worn. I paid him $250, and had to replace the head gaskets before I could even start the engine. So I learned about mechanics from my neighbors, as we took the engine apart to remove the heads, had them machined, then put everything back together. Tom Morgan and Carlos Phillips taught me everything about engines, and even more about the process of getting things fixed. Tom, a Proctor and Gamble engineer, always had a way of using a “gentle tap” with a hammer to loosen some recalcitrant part.
Carlos, on the other hand, learned his mechanics on his two vintage 1950’s Porsches. He was amazed that you’d even get a hammer near the engine, or that the engine would ever run without the “strict German tolerances” he was used to. But we had a great time in Tom’s garage, getting “the Furious” together, and watching my Dad fall asleep against a tire.
The “Furious” did fine for the last year of high school and the first year at Denison. But a buddy borrowed it over the summer after my freshman year, and the engine blew again. Ultimately the Fury was “repurposed” – we donated it to the Goodwill. I can’t imagine that they fixed it up, but I like to think that some other sixteen-year-old got a “low-cost beater” to learn on.
The Squareback
My second car was a little older, a 1967 Volkswagen Squareback. It was the station wagon version of the Beetle, with a shoe boxy build instead of the more traditional bulbous shape. And while it was by then eight years old, it only had 75,000 miles on it. Carlos was ecstatic – old Volkswagen engines and old Porsche engines were almost the same – except for engine tolerances and top speeds, of course. So when the Squareback broke down, actually caught fire on I-71 just north of the Fort Ancient bridge on a frozen sixteen-degree day, Carlos was more than willing to help replace the crankshaft bearings. Tom joined in too, this time in my Dad’s garage. The Squareback didn’t take up as much room.
But I was still in school at Denison, so I had to do the repairs on the weekend. And one way to get back to Cincinnati, was “riding the dog”.
There was a “metro” bus you could pick up in downtown Granville, across from Fuller’s Market (now I’m pretty sure that’s “the Pub on Broadway” – that’s my fault too, but it’s another story). It took you all the way down State Route 16 into downtown Columbus and the Greyhound Station, where you could catch the bus to Cincinnati. On the other end there was a stop in Springdale, not too far from Mom and Dad’s house, so I could catch a ride and get back to work on the car.
On the Dog
It took a couple of weekends to get the Squareback on the road: one to tear things down and get the parts to the NAPA store to “get grinded” and reset, then another weekend to pick things up and put them all back together. So there were two weekends of finding a way home, and the first weekend, of “Riding the Dog”.
So I caught the bus in Granville, and impatiently waited for the dozen stops to get downtown. We even stopped in a little town called Pataskala, not far west of Granville. I didn’t think much that at the time – little did I know that I’d spend most of my life there. But that too is another story.
We finally arrived at the Bus Station in Columbus, on the seamier side of downtown. I rushed in, got my ticket, grabbed my backpack and boarded the Cincinnati bus. I wanted the window seat, even though I had the trip down I-71 already memorized by mile marker. A middle-aged guy took the seat next to me, and struck up a conversation.
He asked me what I was doing, and I explained to him the fate of the Squareback. He laughed, then told me that he was a chiropractor. Now I was a smart kid, nineteen years old and a Denisonian, but at the time I’m not sure I knew what a Doctor of Chiropractic actually did. So this guy began to explain chiropracty to me, telling me about positions and spinal movements. It all sounded interesting, if a little exotic. He waxed eloquently about the health benefits of alignment and extension, and we were halfway to Cincinnati before…things got a little strange.
Adjustment?
The good doctor explained the need for special tables in order perform adjustments. But then he began to get into the mechanics of his tables, and the “new” chair he had designed. This, he said, was good for chiropractic, but its real value was for sex.
I wasn’t quite ready for that transition, and soon the Doctor was waxing eloquently about how good sex was in his new chair. He then got more descriptive, reaching over the carefully placed armrest to try to alter my Greyhound seat to more aptly describe his invention. I wasn’t a frequent “rider of the dog”, but I knew when it was time to defend my window seat. We had a bit of low-key parrying, as he tried to place himself in a more descriptive position. I kept replacing his hands back on his side of the armrest, and he was getting frustrated with my unwillingness to gain “a full understanding” of “the chair”. My still honed high school wrestling skills were coming in “handy”.
I thought things might become more violent, but realized that we were turning off of I-75 by Princeton High School. The Springdale stop was right at the corner, and I had no concerns about jumping over my “seat mate” to get down the aisle to the open door. No goodbyes were necessary for the Doctor of Chiropractic.
What Bus?
I spent the weekend up to my elbows in grease and gasoline. But we got the engine apart, the small (4 cylinder) crankshaft to the NAPA store, and ordered all the assorted parts and pieces to pick up the next weekend for the rebuild. By Saturday night, I was with my buddies listening to music (and probably having a Stroh’s beer or two).
Sunday morning I had breakfast, and then caught the early afternoon bus back to Columbus. No “doctoring” was available on this trip, so I read an Isaac Asimov novel and jumped out unscathed at the Greyhound Station. I went out to the street, and waited for the local bus to take me back to Granville.
After about half an hour or so, I wandered back into the Greyhound Station to the information desk. There I was informed that the bus to Granville (and onto Newark) didn’t run on Sunday, oops!
It was 1975, and hitchhiking was still “a thing”. My buddy down the hall hitchhiked all the time from his home in Maine to Denison and back, so I figured that getting from downtown Columbus to Granville wouldn’t be a big deal. But you can’t hitchhike on the Interstate, and it didn’t seem like you could in downtown Columbus. So I started walking east on Broad Street, figuring it couldn’t be too far until I could get to a more “highway” like area.
Hitchin’
Looking back on that journey, I walked from downtown, through Bexley and Whitehall, and out past the airport towards a little hospital (then), Mt. Carmel East. That’s about nine miles, but hiking and backpacking was my thing in those days. I was even wearing hiking boots and a backpack. Unfortunately it was getting dark, and cold, and there was still a long way to, about eighteen more miles to Granville. I finally got up my nerve and stuck out my thumb. A nice lady picked me up and took me as far as the County line.
State Route 16 was a two-lane highway back then, not the five-lane road it is today. And back then there was only one stop light from Mt. Carmel East all the way to Granville. Today, there’s one every couple of blocks. So hitchhiking was easier back then, and a pickup truck pulled over almost right away.
Now I was a novice hitchhiker, so I didn’t think too much when the guy with the fluorescent orange work gloves jumped out of the driver’s seat. The passenger door was broken he said, but he was headed east if I wanted a ride. So I clambered up into the driver’s side of the truck, slid over to the passenger seat, and we headed east towards Granville.
The window didn’t work either, so I did start to get a little nervous after my chiropractic adventure. But he was a local guy, just talking about local stuff, and we got to Granville quick enough. He wanted to drive me up to my dorm, but I had him drop me off by Fuller’s Market. Seemed like a safer bet.
No More Dogs
The next weekend I caught a ride with another Denison student headed home for the weekend. It was a busy Saturday and Sunday, trying to reassemble the Squareback with all the new parts and pieces. And I managed to get in a little bit of trouble at home: Mom came into the kitchen and found pistons in the oven and wrist pins in the freezer. Their tolerances were close: it was hard to get them together. So you made the wrist pins smaller from cold, and the pistons bigger with heat. Somehow Mom didn’t seem to get the point, and the oven did have the odor of just a hint of motor oil.
But we managed to get the pins in the pistons, the crankshaft in the engine, and the engine back in the vehicle. By Sunday it was time to test it out, and, I drove the Squareback back to school. By now I could park in the Dorm lot. I hitchhiked a few more times in my student days, including one crazy ride at 120 miles an hour through the mountains of Tennessee. I thought that was going to be the end, but learned to never underestimate the skills of the son of a moonshiner.
But that trip to Cincinnati was the last time I was “riding the dog”.
