December 5, 2010

I grew up near Worcester, MA.  The sketch opposite is from Salisbury St. in Worcester, where we used to ride around and gawk at the rich peoples' houses from our Hudson Hornet.  We did a lot of gawking from a Hudson when I was young.  After the tornado ripped through Westboro around 1954, not too far from my house, we piled in so we could, hopefully, ride victoriously through the devastation of other people's lives.  We were disappointed when angry cops diverted us from the tragedy we'd missed by a few miles.
The Hudson Hornets that came and went from our ash-filled driveway (we burned coal, no doubt the last people north of Appalachia to do so in 1960, and Dad paved the driveway with the ashes) were numberless.  My dad was a convert to those cars because they were luxurious in his mind.  I did like the radios in the Hornet, which I blasted with the music of The Animals.  But luxury or not, Hudsons never started, or worse, our latest incarnation would start, and it would take me uptown to buy my dad's Winstons, and then it would die for the return trip.  I guess my love of walking long distances began then because I was often trudging the backroads home on a weekend afternoon.  It was so common for the car to die that I stopped considering it to be a problem.  To this day, though, I am left with a phobia about cars breaking down.  I obsess about it, obsess about my children's cars, and I'll obsess about your car if you are in need of my services.  Apparently the "bad boys" from the Lyman School in Westboro liked our Hudsons as much as my father did.  Dad worked over there; he was in charge of the dairy farm.  No doubt the farm was considered to be therapeutic in a Yankee way for restless adolescent thugs.  This was back when the state would house orphans as well as murderers all in the same place; they just needed to be under 18.  My father taught the boys how to run a dairy farm, and it was a dangerous job.  I remember sitting over codfish gravy and mashed potato and having Dad tell us how the night watchmen had been killed by a bunch of escapees who hit him violently over the head.  Anyway, Dad had earned a reputation at Lyman School with those murderers and orphans.  They knew where we lived and they knew he always left the keys in the Hudson Hornet that sat on an ashpile near the road.  They always headed straight for Davis St. and stole our car.  I remember one Easter, the only time we ever really went to church, that we discovered the car was gone.  Luckily those boys would go only as far as there was gas, then abandon the car.  As far as I know, the succession of Hornets never broke down for any of our thieves. They'd typically run out of fuel about an hour away--my mother was a skinflint about gas and she'd only put in $1 worth every four or five days. So we always got the cars back, although they drove funny afterward, the energy of those criminals imbeded in the steering wheel.