NOBODY SHIMMIES LIKE MY OLD CAR KATE!

NOBODY SHIMMIES LIKE MY OLD CAR KATE!

...or
USED CARS ARE FOR THE BIRDS!

KENNETH E. HALL         April 1, 1998        Houston

Used cars are for the BIRDS!

I should know: I have had many first-hand experiences with klunkers, and stand ready to certify as to the truthfulness of the abovementioned statement.

The very first car I can recall us having when I was a kid was a 1951 Dodge, which Mom bought from a Rabbi for $50.00, in 1958 or 1959. We affectionately referred to the car by two names: Kate and Mehitabel. Why did we have two names for the car?

Simple: the car shimmied and shook like an old reducing machine! Somebody once remarked that there was "a whole lot of shakin' goin' on" after a ride in our car. This in reference to a Jerry-Lee Lewis song by the same name. Who knows: could a ride in the old jalopy have inspired somebody to write that song??

One can just imagine a cartoon in which I am lying in bed, very ill, and Mom is about to give me a spoonful of medicine which she has neglected to shake (as per the instructions).

"What if it DOES say: 'SHAKE WELL'"? Didn't I bring the medicine from the drugstore in old KATE?

There was a Fats Waller song popular in the 1920's: "I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate!" Several other artists kept this song on the Hit Parade for years. The song got sung, and the name stuck. Much later, well after the car's useful life span had been exhausted, the second name was born:

 The Adventures of Archy and Mehitabel, by Don Marquis was a book about a strange pair of friends: Archy, the cockroach, and Mehitabel, the somewhat loose female alleycat. It seems that Mehitabel was getting on in years, and was being viewed by her peers as "over the hill." Then one day, Mehitabel turns up pregnant. The "toujours gai" alleycat Mehitabel would then sing as she strolled down the back alley: "There's life in the old gal yet!" - much to the amazement of the denizens of that seedy abode.

Despite the inevitable aging process, Kate rolled on and on. A time or two someone would comment on the antiquity of our means of transportation, to which my mother would reply, in Mehitabellian fashion: "There's life in the old gal yet!"  and the nickname Mehitabel stuck.  It was now Kate Mehitabel.

Most people used to drive into a gas station and say: "Fill 'er up" at the pump. Money was scarce back then, and Mom seemed to have more MONTH left over at the end of the money. So a fill-up was a luxury she, sadly, could never afford back then. So she would always ask the attendant for : "A dollar's worth of regular, please." [The original miserable tightwad, Jack Benny would have been proud of my mother!]

Most people carry a spare TIRE in their trunk. We didn't. Oh, no - not US! We had to be different: we carried around a spare GAS TANK in the trunk. (Come on, now, doesn't EVERYBODY?)

I remember how this came to pass: one night we were going down the road, and we ran into the mother of all potholes. BOOM!! The car shuddered, and I just happened to be in the back seat, looking out the rear window as we drove. (Seat belts not only were optional back then, those old cars didn't even HAVE them!)

Right after I heard the BOOM I saw a trail of liquid in the street behind the car. I told Mom, and we pulled over into a convenient garage that happened to be open at night. It was a body shop only, so they didn't have spare gas tanks to install, but they did manage to plug the leak - - - with CHEWING GUM!!!

Laugh if you want to , but it held. It was supposed to be a temporary patch to get us home and to a garage the next day or so, but, as I said, money was sorely lacking. So we went to a shop and they were able to put a temporary plug - somewhat more substantial than the chewing gum - and later we were able to get a replacement gas tank from a junk yard at a very low price. It was the labor to install it that was the problem. And the plug held, so there was no point rushing the repair if the tank wasn't leaking!

The spare gas tank, of course, gave rise to a number of funny comments, and incidents as family members, friends, etc., would happen to notice the odd metallic object rattling around in the trunk, and wonder just what the heck it was. Funnier still was the look on their faces when Mom answered quite matter-of-factly: "Oh, it's just my spare GAS TANK"

My mother was always philosophical about her vehicle's age and condition: "It has four wheels, a motor, and it RUNS!" she would say. (Of all the junk cars she drove, I don't recall ANY having a radio that worked!)

When one considers the things that were wrong with it, it's a wonder it DID run! Sometimes it seemed as though the car itself had doubts, and wouldn't start, or the engine would "kill" as Mom used to say. And it wouldn't start until Mom called it everything in the book but a GOOD car. Then it would roar to life and then purr like a kitten, as if to let us know: "there's life in the old gal yet!"


THIS IS ANOTHER STORY ABOUT THAT OLD CAR:
http://kennyduke.blogspot.com/2014/07/a-fortunate-breakdown.html