My friend Bob and three free Mustangs

Back in the day, circa mid-seventies, my old pal Kipling had a little stone cottage on Highway 24, right on the curve where it meets County Road 32. Mark Wilson, who started his career at a gas station on Gordon Street, now has one of Canada’s largest used car dealerships on that corner. For a few glorious months in… I’m guessing ‘75 or thereabouts, Kipling was running the smallest car lot in Canada. It only had three cars, but were they ever cool. 1966 Dodge Charger 426 hemi automatic. One of eight sold in Canada. 1969 Nova SS 396/375 automatic. 1969 Nova SS 396/375 four speed with 4.56 gears and, what was considered really cool at the time, a straight-line shifter from either Mr. Gasket or Hurst, I don’t recall, that eliminated the half second it might take your right hand to negotiate an “H” shift pattern. If you happened to be racing for ownerships out on the 86 Dragway, that half second could save your life. So Kipling’s got this dream car lot happening, and it so happens the school bus stop is right in front of his house. There’s this 15 yr old kid from up the sideroad who collects the bus there every morning, and those cars hooked him for life. That was Bob. In the fullness of time, Bob married into the Kipling clan. (Can’t say I blame him; Viv was quite the hottie.) That’s how I got to know him. Once he had his drivers license he was keen on joining the quarter-mile cult. I was in the very early days of my teaching career when Bob gave me the first opportunity to dispense wise teacherly advice. He’d been at Hammonds for maybe ten years, and had an opportunity to earn a Millwright ticket through the company. But he’d rather drive one of their trucks. What should he do? The advice I gave him then still stands; you can always get a class A driving permit (which he already had, thanks to driving farm trucks on the family farm), but a Millwright ticket you can take to the bank. He took the Millwright course. Within a few short years he was head of maintenance in a factory with a couple of hundred employees on the floor. He enjoyed free run of the joint for obvious reasons. A machine could go down anytime anywhere. By then Bob had established himself as expert weed grower. He moved two pounds of home-grown in that factory every week for about twenty years. Sadly, somewhere in that run Bob and I had a terminal falling out. It was all about three free Mustangs. A guy I knew knew a guy who’d just bought an investment property up the road in Kitchener. There was a garage in the back that had three non-operational 1964 Mustangs inside. Dude was a real estate investor, not a car collector. Those three cars were mine. All I had to do was go get ‘em. So I call up my good buddy Bob the Millwright. Hey Bob, gimme a hand getting these ‘stangs outta there and it’ll be two for you and one for me. That’s generous on the face of it, but I wanted the one with the V8 and four speed. The other two (Bob’s) were six cylinder automatics, with bench seats! I’m guessing that in the collector market, an early ‘64 Mustang with bench seats is far more of a rarity than a V8 with four speed and buckets. I round up my Millwright buddy with his car-hauler and tool kit, and we go to collect our free Mustangs. For all the chains and pulleys and come-a-longs in Buddy’s toolkit, we couldn’t get ‘stang number one onto the trailer. This got my pal Bob so pissed off that he went into a wrench-throwing tantrum. I was lucky not to get boinked off the noggin. FUCK THIS Bob proclaimed. It’s kind of a longish walk back to Guelph, so I meekly succumbed to Bob’s termination of the mission, but I have to say that was the death of our friendship. Things were never the same after that. Which is too bad. Bob was a good guy. If I could do it over, here is what I would do differently. Instead of meekly bowing to Bob’s hissy fit, I’d say, hey man, let’s sit down and chill out. Maybe we should burn one. There’s no rush. Who the fuck ever got anywhere in life by giving up when the first try goes awry? Anyway, it wasn’t a long time after that that Bob got a lung cancer diagnosis. Like most cancer patients, he lost the fight, but he died owning a pristine 1969 Nova SS that he had built up himself, plus a new hemi-Challenger after Dodge brought them back. He and Viv were long divorced by then. Ironically, while she never shared his love of the weed, she’s still happily wheezing away while she smokes four packs a day.

The Reinhart boys

Way back when I was coming up, and we're backing up forty or fifty years here, when I was coming up out there on the 86 Dragway, the Reinhart boys were coming up one concession over.

Jamie was a couple years older than me. I remember him sitting a couple barstools down from me at The Chooch one night. I was playing my harmonica. Jamie takes up a collection and comes and dumps a handful of change in front of me.

"That's yours if you stop playing that fucking thing," he says.

That was good enough for me. Jamie was reputed to have biker connections. There was enough there for two beers.

That was my first paying gig.

Jamie had the most awesome 68 Mustang that he'd rip down the 86 Dragway once in awhile.

With open headers. You'd hear him fire it up one concession over, and then you could track his progress coming down the Marden-Maryhill road. Word was that Mustang had been raced in NHRA Super Stock by Barry Poole the year before, but that may have just been hearsay.

But it was one fabulous car.

Jamie's younger brother Carl was making quite a name for himself in Junior Hockey circles at the time. We all figured he was heading for the bigs. I was actually on the ice with him once. I think it was a pick-up game among the Ariss locals and somebody invited me along.

There used to be a after-hours joint near Ariss called the Boar House. It was what they might have called a speakeasy in a previous generation. I was only there a couple of times but a lot of the local aristocracy attended there regularly.

Like the Reinhart boys.

At the end of the day, Carl never quite made the bigs. But there was a younger brother, Paul. I don't even recall having a beer with him at the Boar House.

But Paul actually made the big leagues! Played for the Flames and, if I'm not mistaken, scored a Stanley Cup ring along the way! Then he went into management. For all I know he might still be in a front office job somewhere.


A farm kid from one concession over.


Local boy makes good!

Highway 86 revisited

I was at a get-together on the weekend, the 95th birthday celebration for the matriarch of the extended family, my dear Tante Hilde.

One of my cousins in attendance, a chap my age who got a shout-out in a post I wrote six years ago, reminded me of what's happened to that cohort of folks who used to care about fast cars.

We can't afford that hobby anymore.

Johnny was the guy with the Super Bee. Getting a 4,000 pound car up to 120 mph in the quarter mile takes a fair bit of disposable income. Factory guys like us used to have disposable income back in the day, before our jobs went to Mexico and China.

You can still buy a Super Bee today. Under $15,000 or so you're just getting junk. From 15 to 30 you might get a driver. From forty upwards you can probably find something that's been restored at some point and might last you a few years if you baby it. A clean '69 six-pack Super Bee or anything with a hemi is going to run into six numbers.

Or you can go to your local Subaru dealer and drive away with a car that will blow the doors off that hemi in a drag race. It'll also turn better, stop sooner, go three or four times as far on a gallon of gas, and it has a warranty.


The era of the big thumping V8 is gone, and it ain't coming back.

The real reason Toyota named its budget bomb the "Toyota 86"

When you read up on this question you run into a lot of hokum about how Toyota high-performance projects going back fifty years had the number "86" somewhere in their nomenclature.

Ya, maybe...

But here's a much more compelling explanation.

I think Toyota's branding department went into the history books and dug up the story of an authentic street-racing culture that was thriving fifty years ago on Highway 86.

Right in front of my house.

Makes perfect sense, doesn't it?

The six mile piss

Can't really remember the first time I met Kipling.

I think it was the night he ran his Chevy ll SS into a tree outside my parent's place out on the 86 dragway... or just about a half mile south of the 86 dragway to be precise.

I was the second person to come upon the accident scene, whereupon the first person informed me that the guy driving the Chevy ll was bleeding all over the interior of his new Deville.

So young Kipling plows his car into a tree at 100 mph, and a life-long friendship started.

A year later we both turned up at Budd Automotive, which was at that time the primary employer of niggers of all skin tones, including white, in the entire region.

That's where we really bonded.

I'd pull hilarious pranks like "borrowing" his 340 Duster from Budd's parking lot while he was on the night shift. The cops would be looking for that lime green Duster for months, and he got pulled over relentlessly.

But I always made up for it by returning that car to the Budd parking lot before the end of his shift with a case of beer under the hood. I'd unplug the distributor to make sure he had to open the hood to find that case of beer!

Oh, those were fun times!

There were a lot of real characters at the Budd plant back in the day. The Jamaicans, and there were tons of them, always had a line to really good weed.

That pretty much made them our best buddies.

There was a Polish guy who always showed up in a three piece suit. He didn't want his neighbours to know he worked in a factory. He'd change into work clothes when he got to work. Drove a 'Cuda.

Then there was Frenchie, who rolled his Javelin into the ditch with five brothers inside while trying to make it to the beer store before closing time.

Lotsa characters and lotsa fun! Who has jobs like that anymore?

Anyway, Kipling's dear daddy had a scrapyard in nearby Guelph, and holy shit, was he ever a character!

He was Fred to Kipling's Lamont... through that scrapyard Kipling got to know all sorts of interesting characters.

Like bikers.

This one guy in particular was to leave a lasting impression on me. Married to a native woman, and living on a reservation, he had a finger in pretty much any pie in the local economy, whether that pie was legal or illegal or in that grey zone between.

Used to be a big cheese in the Satan's Choice before they morphed into a Hells Angels franchise in the great patch-over.

So one day me and Kipling are sitting in the diner at the Woodstock Truckstop, and this guy happens along, and before you can say "no thanks, maybe some other time..." we're in Buddy's Peterbilt heading west at 70 mph, jug of Jack Daniels and a hash pipe going round on a too regular basis for my tastes.

An hour later we're on the 403 heading Sarnia way. I'm fucked, and I really really really have to have a piss.

Dude, can ya pull over so I can have a piss?

Buddy looks at me like I'm the most retarded retard he's ever seen in his life.

Ten minutes later; Dude, can you pull over so I can have a piss?

By now I'm practically exploding and having major bladder leakage...

Dude and Kipling are busting out laughing... nobody's going to pull an 18 wheeler over so some dumbfuck passenger can take a piss...

So I did what I had to do. Opened the passenger door, stood on the side-tank, pulled out my wang, and had a six mile long piss along the 403 at seventy miles an hour.

Best piss I ever had.

About those vast gaps in the landscape of memory

My buddy Kipling, he of the 426 Hemi Charger, claims that if I can recall match races on the 86 Dragway from forty years ago I don't have anything to worry about.

He's right and he's wrong.

I can remember an orange GTO Judge facing off against Earl Vollet's 64 hemi-powered Plymouth Fury like I saw it last night.

That might have happened in 1969 or 1970.

But I can't remember last night.

There are vast gaps in the landscape of my memory.

I remember the GTO won.

Those ram-air IV Pontiac motors would propel a two ton car to a flat twelve ET with nothing more than a set of slicks.

The three or four people still alive who know what that sentence means are nodding their heads in agreement right now.

But that was 40 years ago.

So Kipling is right.

But a lot of water has run under the proverbial bridge since then.

And most of it is simply water run away. 

I have no idea where it went or how it got there.

So Kipling is wrong too.

Wheelies then and now

My old pal Barney had a 1969 Nova SS with a 375 horse 396 four speed and 456 gears out back. While I have to admit I never personally witnessed this, rumor around the Guelph street racing circuit back in the day was that this car would lift the front wheels on a 7000 rpm launch.

That Reinhart fellow with the '68 Mustang side-oiler used to lift the front wheels at launch. That's something I saw. Right there on the 86 Dragway.

But for the most part, wheelie land belonged to the gravel pit crowd. I know I used to be able to keep the front wheel of my Honda ATC in the air for miles. Used to be a master of the "side-wheelie" too. I could go from here to kingdom come with one back wheel in the air.

Mind you, with 90 cubic centimeters of pep, that wasn't nearly as exciting as Wild Willie Borsch keeping the left front off the pavement throughout a 160 mph run.

But back to the gravel pit. While I was tooling around back there with that ATC, there were some heavy-duty moto-cross guys sharing the dirt. The Honda three-wheeler was a bit of a novelty so quite often I'd have the opportunity to take the latest two-stroke moto-cross technology for a rip while the moto-cross guys tested out my ATC.

I remember when those bikes hit the power band you were doing a wheelie whether you wanted to or not. On one occasion I traded off for a ride on a 250 Honda Elsinore. We were racing around in the pits behind John's Supertest when one of the local land-owners came out to complain about the noise.

She was an elderly woman and I certainly wasn't interested in picking a fight with her, but as I pulled away I unexpectedly hit the power-band. Suddenly the front wheel is reaching for the sky and the back wheel is showering the old bat with gravel. That was enough to cause her son, who had been watching from a distance, to call the police with a bizarre complaint about drug-crazed bikers spraying his dear momma with dirt.

That was an afternoon that didn't end well, at least not right away. Turned out that the son was a bit of a super-car afficianado in his own right, and used to race stock cars down at the Flanboro Speedway. I  talked this incident over with him years later and by God, had we known then what we knew now, my evening at the police station could have been avoided entirely.

But back to wheelies. My buddy Jim Lippert, may he rest in peace, was one of those old-school hot-rodders who could shoe-horn any motor into any vehicle and make it work. His last project before he passed on was putting a Cummins diesel from a Greyhound bus into a GMC pick-up truck.

Personally, I didn't see the point, but by God there were certain things that 600 foot/pounds of torque could do that your average GMC pick-up couldn't.

Like wheelies.

But Lippert had an even richer wheelie legacy. He used to run the auto shop at one of the local high schools. A few of the shop teachers around the area were getting into bragging about the race cars their students were building. They'd source an old muscle car, canvas the community for donations, and eventually sink twenty or thirty thousand dollars into some piece of crap that might turn a low 14.

They were like those would be street-racers who couldn't figure out why their 350 Nova was actually slower after they bolted on that 950 Holley three barrel. They'd mount a set of wheelie bars just in case that 14 second Nova, which for a couple of thousand dollars they'd just turned into a fifteen second car, was going to go over backwards at launch.

So Lippert gets this old Oldsmobile station wagon. Has his students spend a week mixing cement by hand and pouring it into the back. The old girl must have had two tons worth of concrete behind the back seat.

He takes it to the back parking lot at his school, puts the hydramatic 350 in neutral, sticks the pedal to the metal and dumps it into "drive".

The old girl lurches forward, front wheels about three feet off the ground, and she expires right there.

But he had the students record every second of this launch. What you saw in the pictures distributed around the School Board was this 1980 Oldsmobile station wagon doing a wheelie, and the caption that said "shop teacher builds nine-second racer from junkyard parts."

Sorry to let the cat out of the bag Jimmie!

The Rebel Machine

In 1969 AMC introduced a little quarter-mile rocket called the Hurst S/C Rambler. It was the best they could do in the horsepower wars of the time. They plopped their 390 cube 340 horse big-block into the Rambler American, and with drag slicks and open headers you suddenly had a high 11 Rambler.

They painted it up red white and blue, and forty years later you still have a bona fide collectors item.

The next year the Hurst Rambler went to the dustbin of history, and the Rebel Machine took it's place. I was never a AMC fan but I have to admit I owned one of those.

The Rebel Machine was the result of putting the same power train into their mid-size Rebel body. So you made the same power in a car that weighed in at about 800 pounds more. With slicks and headers you'd be lucky to get the Machine to a mid-thirteen.

I bought my Machine when it was four or five years old off a lot in Toronto. It wasn't running. Me and cousin John towed it home behind my 340 Dart.

John's Dad was one of those old-school mechanical genius types who could hardly speak English, but he had this puppy purring in about ten minutes.

Whereupon we set about a campaign of delivering the greatest smoke-shows the local muscle-car crowd had ever seen.

That 390 was pretty much out of breath by fifty-two hundred, but if you dumped the clutch in second gear and then held it wide open you'd put up a most impressive mushroom cloud. I used to do this out on the '86 Dragway, and passing cars would put on their headlights to navigate the smoke field.

Alas, these massive smoke shows eventually caused the demise of this motor, and that's where I made a critical mistake. I towed the Machine into a local dealership and had them rebuild the motor.

The rebuild cost twice as much as what I'd paid for the car. And the shitheads at the dealership were quite obnoxious about it. Even though I'd bought a brand new car there (a factory-order 340 Duster) they came up with all kinds of reasons why the rebuild cost two times the estimate and why I had to pay the bill in full before driving the car off the lot.

The dealership was Guelph Chrysler Plymouth, and they were on the cusp of bankruptcy.

Not long after, some drug-crazed hooligan went wild in their back lot and wrecked half a dozen new cars they'd aready paid Crysler Corporation for. Served them right. Guess I got that Machine out of their shop in the nick of time.

They went tits-up weeks later.