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A FEW CLOSE CALLS
1. At about four to six years old, playing cowboys and bad men. I apparently was not one of the most liked kids in the neighborhood, and was one of the “bad guys”. I was captured and found guilty, stood on a chair in Larry Steed’s back yard under a huge willow tree. With the rope around my neck tied to a tree limb, the chair was pulled out from under me. We played realistically back then. My twelve year old brother, Howard, got me down before any permanent damage was done.
2. As a teen being on probation, I was supposed to be home by 10 P.M. Well, we were having a party at Walter Guinn’s house to celebrate his mother being out. I guess the neighbors objected to 30 or so drinking teenagers and called the police complaining of strange noises coming from the house. Some of the guys coming back from a beer run came in and told us the police were at on both ends of the block and to kool it. All of the lights were turned off and we went completely silent inside. Not wanting to get in trouble for being out after curfew, I snuck out the back door and laid flat under a hedge that ran the length of the driveway. The police meanwhile under the impression the house was being burgled, were investigating. An officer walking down the driveway with his flashlight beam swinging as his arm swung the beam lit on me. I jumped up and over the fence at the driveway and was halfway across the neighbor’s backyard when I heard “Stop, stop or I’ll shoot” (remember they thought it was a house robbery). Well, he let one off into either the air or the yard. I don’t know which, cuz I turned around so fast and ran back to surrender. My probation officer took me back to his car, chewed my ass out for being out too late and gave me a ride home.
3. After seeing the real motorcycle drag racers and their “low bars” being used at Santa Ana Dragstrip, I got a bright idea. I went home took a pair of high riser bars and cut them off at the highest spot just before they started the radius to come back down. I then mounted them upside down so the section that used to point up was now pointing down (trick huh). Next week while making a pass, I got a front wheel wobble at speed. Those damn bars beat my thumbs against the tank sides as the forks went violently from side to side. It hurt so much to hang on but I was too frightened to let go. While doing everything I was told was wrong, the wobble straightened out and the only damage was sore thumbs.
4. I shoot shotgun sports and have for over thirty-five years. Once, while shooting a round of skeet, after having taken my four shots, I moved to just left of the house that throws the targets, there I was protected from broken clay targets by both a horizontal and a vertical shield. As I started to leave the shooting station, one of the other shooters said ”Look down there at the baby king snake”. Now, I wear go-heads and after standing 6 to 12 inches from the snake, shooting four times and not knowing the snake was there and he didn’t strike. So nobody else would shoot him. I decided to pick him up and toss him out into the surrounding weeded area. I no sooner touched him then he whipped around and struck me. The only thing faster than that snake was me getting my hand away. He was only able to get me on the top of one finger between the first and second joint where there was too little meat over the bone to sink in his fangs and inject poison. Guess what, it wasn’t a king snake at all. It took ten minutes to capture him by snatching his tail as it tried to wiggle under a 55 gallon drum while I’m shouldering the drum to lever one side up keeping my legs out of striking distance and at the same time “pin him” with the butt end of my shotgun. After catching and confirming a baby rattler, I tossed him out into the weeds to hunt rodents.
This is nowhere near all the excitement in my life like in 1950, when I was on my way home to Inglewood as a tractor trailer rig turned right in front of me on my 1940 Indian Chief, another hospital trip.
Heading home from scrambles at Ballona Creek and an old man did not see me and made a left turn right in front of me. As I was flying over his car, I clearly saw a carhop fling a tray of food in the air when she saw me airborne coming in her direction.
While trying to fishtail back and forth through water running down the center of the alley behind Don Henderson’s house. I went a little too far and “rode” my out of control bike backwards through Don’s neighbor’s fence, requiring another ambulance trip.
Hill climbing on my ’57 Triumph and becoming airborne at the hilltop and landing so hard on the rear wheel that the force snapped my body down toward the ground opening the bike to full throttle and wheelying all the way across the parking lot until I could pull myself back up to close the throttle. All this while receiving crowd applause, they didn’t realize the truth and I never told them.
Then there was the time while riding my Maico I hit the far side of a shallow ditch, that I didn’t see coming. The impact caused me do did a quick handstand on the handlebars and landed amazingly back on the pegs like nothing was unusual. Ahh, what a life!
This being 2008, and after standing at machines for 51 years, being in business for 29 of those years, suffering from the maladies collected from the aforementioned recreational abuses. I am ready to call it quits and live my remaining time having a ball. Damn, I just wish I could do it all over again if the end results would be the same. My absolute “funnest “ times have been on motorcycles, and I have fond memories of accumulating the broken bones, burns, scrapes, curled up rear fenders, bent forks, and dents. My biggest disappointment in life is that I did not have the talent to become a successful motorcycle dirt track racer. To hell with the main event prize money! I would have paid them to let me race. Dick Holt
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