thinger2, please never hold back from telling your stories or sharing your advice!
The last part of that reminded me of a local radio station asking people to call in and say things that were normal in the 70s but would get you in jail today... "Here honey, hold the baby for a sec so I can crack a beer and light a cig because the light just turned red."
When I was about ten Dad bought a division one 7 litre hydroplane.
Hilborn injected methanol 427 chev.
Back in those days we had to take the fuel with us in drums in the bed of the truck. So a one ton ford with 2 drums of alchohol sloshing around on the freeway in the summer.
My job was to sit in between those fuel drums with a bung wrench and vent the fumes every 30 minutes.
This is extra screwy because a hydroplane is just a wing. Our previous boats were 225 class which are narrow enough that they can sit on a flat trailer.
A 7 litre is too wide. It has to go on a tilt trailer.
So now you have a 23 foot wing tilted at 45 degrees, with a big block chevy in the middle of it,
and it is trying to make the ass end of the truck go airborne while some kid is crawling around on drums of methanol on the freeway.
And I had to remember to bang on the back window everytime so they would stop throwing cigarettes out for a minute while I was doing it.
And it was awesome.
Sometimes, my father would get us up really early to drive us to school. Early enough to hitch the truck up to the boat.
Just so we could be the kids being dropped off at school from a truck towing a hydroplane.
Pretty damn cool when you are a kid.
I wouldnt trade those memories for anything.