If you have an interesting "Fred" story, please submit it to this e-mail address:     ray [dot] ransom [at] gmail [dot] com

He was definitely an independent spirit and not afraid of anything.  Mother told me of his early days when she and Bill lived in PA at Bill's parents' home and he was a toddler curious about the large fireplace.  They didn't want him to go into it and get dirty so they told him there was a boogyman there and stay away.  He said he wanted to see the boogyman and entered the fireplace getting dirty!  Another time as a 2 year old toddler, mother said that he ran down the path and jumped into the Susquehanna River and almost drowned. Carol Pendleton (half sister)

We moved to Big Bear in 1947 and left in 1949, but came back to visit many times in the ensuing years.  We built the house up the road from Fred that is now a Bed and Breakfast. He was very close to my family and had lived with us a while when he was in high school.  Later he had come with us to Texas to work for my dad, J.B. Batchler.  He stayed about a year, but one day he came in and said; "I've looked everywhere around here, and I don't see anything I want to look at, so I'm going back to Big Bear".  He did, but we kept in touch with him always. There are lots of wonderful, crazy, wild and brilliant stories about Fred that I know of, and we often reminisce about him. He flew out to our ranch in north Texas in 1978 for my parents 50th anniversary party, and landed on a gravel road near the house.  We didn't know he was coming, so you can imagine what a delight that was.  He was still wearing an old beaver hat that he had had forever. Anna Batchler Smith

One time in the winter while he was living with us, he put a string of firecrackers in the fireplace, and when the fire was lit they started going off.  He thought it was funny, but mother was furious, and he had to clean up the mess. Anna Batchler Smith

Fred was really fond of my mother and once when he was about 16 he found an old skillet at the dump and decided to copper plate it and make in into a kitchen clock.  He had buckets of water and wires running here and there all over the garage.  I had no idea what he was doing, but lo and behold it became a copper skillet.  He added clock works that he had found, and presented it to mother for her birthday.  We were all pretty amazed. Anna Batchler Smith

Back when Fred was cleaning up a lot of junk cars because the county was on him about it, I made a deal with his son Mike to slip a few of my junk cars into the queue to be crushed and hauled off for scrap.  Fred happened to be home when I showed up, and he came roaring out, "Whaddya think this is, a junkyard?"  Avoiding the obvious answer, I told him of the deal, which calmed him down quickly enough.  "Okay, put it over there with Mike's crap."  Then something caught his eye, "Hey, what is that?  Put that one over there with my stuff." Larry Wormsbecker

While I was growing up, my mother, trying to raise me right, warned me to stay away from three people in the valley.  One of them was Fred. You would think a mother would be smarter than that -- and I became friends with all three.  All much older and a bit rowdy. My first real experience with Fred was when living in the big house, now called the Knickerbocker mansion.  For some reason he came up the driveway in the Tater Bug and saw me working on a car.  After talking a bit he offered me a ride and I jumped in.  He started back down the driveway, which had a turn as it hit the base of the hill.  There was a very large rock that Fred drove over slowly to see if it would clear.  He backed up a few feet and drove straight into the mountain.  It was a steep grade to the dirt road above and we went up with little problem until we hit the berm which was almost 90 degrees.  The front end got light and Fred dragged the emergency brake a bit to bring it down and we hopped onto the upper road. Turning left, he headed up the road at a pretty good clip.  At the first switchback, there was a dirt covered log to prevent cars from getting to another road.  He hit it at a little angle and we went over that.  Then he turned left again dropping off the road into a canyon that was filled with buckthorn and manzanita, going through it with ease.  Coming out on a dirt road, he headed up the first place I had been able to get up with 4WD to the SE corner of our 11 acres.  All the while he kept talking and explaining his car.  There were two large trees that the front end of the car fit through but the back tires, being much larger, would not.  Fred, instead of backing up, like a sane person would, climbed the tree with the rear tires until they squeezed through. After a few more minutes we arrived back below the house and, instead of driving up the shallow slope I had taken in the 4WD up, he went up a much steeper area around the corner.  A tree root extended out at ground level with the lower side being about 6 inches above the ground.  Hitting this killed the engine and Fred locked the brakes and restarted the car.  With the tires against the root he jumped over it and went on up the hill.  At the top he brought the front wheels up in a wheelie and grabbed a steering brake.  And the Tater Bug spun around on a rear wheel and headed back down to do it again right. All the time my mother was watching from the house. After a few minutes more listening to Fred I went inside to my very quiet mom. Some things I didn't realize for quite awhile was, like others have mentioned, Fred didn't back up, and if he set his mind to something, he did it.  He had taken an old beat up VW bus and turned it into a vehicle that can out do all 4WD's, except possibly the most dedicated rockcrawler, and I think if Fred were driving he could give them a run for their money. That was my favorite time around Fred and probably when he was the most himself.  I am sure there are better stories of Fred, but that one is all mine.  A great guy, and a better man. Denis Knickerbocker

My Experience with Fred Ransom I first met Fred at the beginning of the school year in 1943.  He was 12, I was 11.  His name was Fred Shaw at that time.  After a fight with his stepfather, he took back his Father's name, Ransom. This was the beginning of a 66 year friendship. Fred and I shared an interest in cars, trucks, and all things mechanical.  Our first project was building a 1927 Model T truck using parts donated by friends of my Father. In 1947 we both added motors to our bikes called Whizzers.  Later we rode them down (38) to San Berdo, up Cajon Pass to the Bear Valley cut-off, thru Lucerne Valley and up the back way to Bear City. Fred designed and built a rotary snow plow.  We hooked it to the front of my 1920 Maxwell truck and plowed lots of snow. One Halloween night we pulled an outhouse behind Fred's Model A to the center of town, cut it loose in front of Chad's and split. One other trip in Fred's infamous Model A, John Eminger, Ed Oerly, Bobbie Whiteside and Me, with Fred driving a little fast, ran off the road and landed upside down in a big ditch.  No one was hurt.  We four crawled out a window, climbed out of the ditch, while telling Fred how smart we thought he was.  John Eminger vowed he would never ride with him again.  And he never did. One day a grocery truck ran off the road just below the dam.  It lit upside down wedged between two trees. The top blew out and groceries went down the canyon.  Fred and I spent hours retrieving canned goods, etc.  Most cans were missing labels so we never knew what we had until we opened them. One of my last exciting experiences with Fred was back in 1973 or 74, flying in his J-9 Supercub.  It got dark before we got back to Bear City Airport (which had no runway lights), and the plane had no landing lights.!!  When I expressed my concern about landing in the dark, Fred said, "Oh we'll be OK, There's a full moon!" Fred and I remained good friends for most of the 66 years, except for a period of time when He hid the motor from my 1947 Crosley pickup.  He did it as a joke, I didn't think it was funny.!  But eventually my mad wore off. After I left Big Bear we stayed in touch and met at the Teddy Bear for lunch periodically. He always had a story to tell.      Just trivial things such as: 1. He crashed his airplane in Redlands in the fog,! 2. Getting severely burned by a oxygen bottle, and 3. Getting stabbed at Chad's over a game of pool, to name a few.      His life was never dull and he lived on the cutting edge.      He definitely marched to the tune of his own drum.           I will miss him. Bill Baldwin     9/11/2009

Reading the exploits about Fred on that old Triumph reminded me about an incident where I figured I was going to die.  We had been out screwing around riding double and for some reason we went up to the old Lynn Lift.  There was a bunch of local guys gathered there on their bikes and a few cars.  I guess it was the county that had dumped a truckload of dirt right at the bottom of Burma Road.  You probably remember that was the dirt road that started at the the curve just past the ski hut that went up the hill to service the chairlift. To make a long story short, over the next couple of hours, everybody was taking turns coming up the paved road and jumping off the dirt pile to see who could jump the farthest up Burma Road before they hit.  That old trail was pretty steep, so no long distance jumps were made, although their were several spectacular landings.  Fred did one of the best.  He let the front of his bike drop and he was heading straight into the hillside.  We knew he was going to eat it big-time.  At the last minute, he stuck his legs out forward and, hitting the ground first, yanked back hard on the handlebars, cranked on the power and went on up the hill.  He turned around, rode back down and asked how did we like that jump, just like he planned it.  He should have broken both legs. Shortly after that, he got the bright idea that we ought to try jumping double.  I didn't think it was such a great idea and told him so.  After some name calling and such, I begrudgingly crawled on the bike and hung on.  We went back to the intersection and turned around.  Fred hollered, "Hang on," and he cranked it on.  It only felt like a second or two before we hit the dirt pile.  It launched me straight up and I couldn't hang on.  The next thing I remember, I was up in the air above Fred looking down at the gas tank with Fred screaming at me to let go of him.  What he or I didn't realize at that moment was that we had already parted company and that I had caught him under the arm pits with both my feet and lifted him fairly high off the seat and all he could do was hang on to the handlebars.  Somehow we both landed back on the bike without crashing and he regained control.  I was dragging one foot on the ground and riding side saddle.  He was still hollering and cussin' when we got back to the bottom till he figured out what had happened.  Everybody had a good laugh about the jump except me.  It scared the bejesus out of me and I was in no way going to try it again. Eddie Phillips

I knew Fred for over 60 years and he never once yelled at me.  I think I'm the only person in the world who can make that claim. Mike Anderson

I met Fred about 2 years ago.  I had met an old man at the Y bar in Lucerne, Chuck Puffer.  Chuck said he would like to take me up to Big Bear to meet an old friend of his.  I owned a few Cessnas and bought a classic 46 Beech 18 twin about 20 years ago.  I used to haul sky divers out at Soggy Lake.  Well what a treat to meet "fair-deal" Fred! Chuck had told me a few stories, claiming he and Fred were the first to water ski on the lake east of Big Bear.  Chuck said he felt like giving Fred a real ride and did the hi-speed whip.  A large audience witnessed Fred crashing up onto the beach.  It resembled an Evel Knievel landing. Chuck also told me about the automotive load leveler shock absorbers that Fred had installed on his motorcycle. Fred gave me a tour of the yard and the office.  Hanging on the wall was the traffic citation that the cop wrote for landing on a street in moonridge?  The old ski boat was still in a hanger, a modified storm culvert. Chuck's brother Ken also told me a few stories.  A restaurant had a new owner, who was well dressed in a suit.  Fred ordered a hamburger and thought it was awful.  He took the hamburger up to the owner, shoved it inside his suit and smushed it around, saying he could serve that to his other customers, but he wasn't going to serve it to him! David Wilson

Fred told me a story quite a few years back when there was some theft of avionics going on at the airport.  One night an Aero Commander arrived.  The pilot had displayed poor pilotage, spraying gravel and dust over the taxiway and other aircraft.  Fred noticed the four men snooping and one of them breaking into a 172.  He snuck up on one of them and pulled a large-caliber pistol, asking him his business on the airport.  It was an agent, also armed, showing his identification, and explaining that there was a 5-dollar-an-hour ski lift operator flying a 150K airplane and they were there to plant a tracking device in his plane! David Wilson

My dad and uncle went to school with Fred.  Talk about the stories I'd hear.  I got a million.  I was told in my early life "..never fly with Fred."  Well, I just had to see why, so Greg Smith and I flew down to Redlands with him.  Going was pretty easy, but coming back was a trip.  I think it took us about 2 hours.  We were way overweight.  That little plane barely would clear the treetops.  Fred would say (yell), "Never fly any higher than you have to -- save gas."  At the time, I believed him.  Hell, I'D BELIEVE ANYTHING HE SAID.  I looked up to him like he could do no wrong. Mike Simpson

Well, you people are letting me down.  The basic premise of a legend is that its main substance comes from the stories about it.  Without them, the legend begins to fade. Since the expected (and requisite) deluge of "Fred" stories has failed to arrive, I have created some of my own.  These are mostly first person -- events as I remember them.  Some are further removed than that, which is only fitting in the case of trying to support a legend.  Some could be total fiction, but, after all, isn't that the point?

The Baseball One fine summer day, my father discovered that a baseball fit snugly in the bore of an old hydraulic cylinder that had been disassembled for some reason.  This would have been meaningless trivia to most people, but to the inventive, but bored mind, there was only one possibility.  This was a ready-made cannon. One blasting cap with a foot of lit fuse went into the cylinder and a baseball was rammed in after it.  A few seconds later, the baseball was blasted across the field, landing somewhere on the far side of the airport.  My father and his friends reacted the only way real men can.  If one is good, two must be better. The charge was increased, one cap at a time.  Finally, after six, somebody noticed that the side of the barrel was bulged out and the breech partially blown off.  I kept expecting to hear about a baseball coming through somebody's roof in upper Moonridge, but that never happened.  Even today, there are likely a few baseballs scattered through the woods and mountains.  If you find one, you'll know how it got there.

The Corvette The wrecked '58 Corvette showed up without warning.  I came home from school one day, and there it was in the garage in all its dilapidated primer gray glory. My father and his friend spent a couple of months rebuilding the front end, sculpting fiberglass in thin air with molds made from paint cans, window screen and cardboard.  They did a good job.  It was starting to look pretty decent -- still primer gray and ugly, but ready for the road -- when it was turned over to my mom who, as I learned later, was getting sick of her 1960 Ford Country Squire station wagon.  It only took a few days.  In a moment of confusion between the throttle and the brake, mom drove the 'Vette through the front of a store and smashed up the front end again. My father was uncharacteristically calm.  He barely said a word.  But the 'Vette vanished within a week, sold off to the first buyer with money in his pocket.  That said more to me than any words he could have spoken.

Midnight drag racing Most men sit around and talk about fast cars.  My father did something about it.  He and his fast-car-talking buddies staged many a late night drag race on North Shore back in the days when there were no neighbors to complain and no traffic to endanger. He had a 1955 Chevy pickup with a '58 front end and a 389 Pontiac with tri-power under the hood.       During the drag racing days, it had big drag slicks on the back and traction bars welded onto the back axle.  According to him, it was the fastest thing this side of Pomona, but I don't recall it that way.  What I remember were a lot of excuses, blown transmissions and fruitless tuning between rounds.  The guys willing to dump real money into their cars were much faster than the caliginous collection from the back yard. One night, one of the traction bars tore off, ripping a big hole in the axle and causing the truck to spin out of control.  When the dust had cleared, the world's fastest drag truck was facing the wrong way in the ditch.  This spelled the end of drag racing for the WFDT.  The slicks came off.  The traction bars came off.  The axle was patched up.       My father started to work on a Ford Anglia panel truck funny car.  It could have been fast, but he lost interest and sold it.

E for Empty My father used to fly his plane a lot.  He didn't need much of an excuse.  He would be off at a moment's notice, maybe just to buzz around the valley or perhaps to conduct some business down the hill somewhere.  One time, he was returning from a lunch trip with his friend Dick DeVoe, when the plane ran out of gas right over Snow Summit.  He rocked it back and forth a couple of times to see if it would pick up any fuel.  Nope.  A quick glance at the gauges told the story:  Empty. Knowing that the prevailing westerly wind would produce a horrendous downdraft in the valley, he cranked it around and glided down to Redlands airport, where he dead-sticked it in (probably without a radio).  Most people would be happy to touch down any way they could, but not my father.  He nonchalantly landed at mid-field and let his momentum carry him off the runway and down the taxiway, right up to the fuel truck.

More Midfield Stuff Ever since the county took over the airport, the tie-down for my father's plane has been adjacent to his property, roughly in the middle of the runway.       Rather than taxi to the end of the runway to do his run-up and mag checks, he would check the mags while taxiing directly to the runway on the midfield taxiway.  Then he would slow down just enough to execute a right-angle turn onto the runway, shove the throttle ahead and be airborne in a hundred feet. I was with him once when he did this.  There was a guy on final approach when we pulled out onto the runway for takeoff.  The guy touched down about the time we took off.  There was probably a complaint floating around the FAA for a while, but I never heard anything further about it.

Airplane Drag Racing I was riding my dirt bike with my friends at a place called Soggy Dry Lake.  Suddenly, this Piper Cub came swooping over us at an altitude of about 20 feet.  It circled around and landed on the dry lake.  Of course, we all knew who it was. We talked for a few minutes.  Damn, it's hot here.  No, I don't want a warm beer.  Well, gotta go. It was simultaneously obvious to all of us.  We had to race the plane.  We smoked him out of the hole big time, but airplanes are a whole lot faster than you might think.  We were sucking on prop dust long before we topped out.

FAA Dispensation One day, when I stopped by to visit with my father, he proudly produced a letter from the FAA.  He had been granted a special dispensation to use regular car fuel in his plane.  This came about because he had a habit of landing on a lonely road in the middle nowhere and trying to fuel up at Joe's Last Chance for Gas.  One day, Joe wouldn't sell car gas to the crazy airplane driver, so the crazy airplane driver sent off a request to the bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., asking for official permission to run his plane on car gas.  I hate to imagine the tall tales involved in justifying that.

FAA Dispensation # 2 Another time, my father showed me a second special dispensation letter from the FAA.  He had been given permission to perform his own annual inspections on his plane.  There must be some really big loopholes in airplane regulation.

The Boat Tire The whole family was packed into the station wagon, on the way to Lake Mead.  All of a sudden, there was a big clunk, followed by an awful grinding sound and the car started slowing down.  As my father wrestled the car over to the shoulder, a tire came bouncing past us.  It took a few seconds to put it together.  The tire had come off our boat trailer. This occurred at the top of a hill.  With a 60 MPH head start, the tire was well on its way to the bottom of the next valley, some two miles away.  "Watch that tire!,"  my father yelled.  He sounded serious. My brother and I complied, noting the location where the tire launched itself off the embankment and disappeared into a gully.  It was easy to find, once the car had been unhitched from the boat.  Then came the hard part.  The U-bolts holding the axle to the leaf spring had been ground away.  Even if we could magically produce bearings, washer, nut and cotter pin, the boat was going nowhere.  And it was some 20 miles to the nearest town. My brother and I were dispatched on a search mission, back where the drag marks started.  Amazingly, we found all the parts except the dust cap and the cotter pin.  But the bearing didn't look good.  It was blue from having been overheated and there were flat spots on the rollers.  The inside race was wallowed out from spinning on the axle.  And it was now full of sand. Meanwhile, back at the boat, my father had used a bumper jack to spread the leaf spring away from the frame and wedged a big rock between the frame and the axle.  The boat could move if the bearing could be saved -- and could it ever.  Some gas siphoned from the boat, some grease from the car's front suspension and U-joints, some shim stock made from beer cans and a piece of wire clipped from a nearby barbed wire fence and the boat was able to limp into the next town.  The bearing was replaced, but no replacement U-bolts could be found.  The rock made it all the way back to Big Bear.

The Evangelist Back in his supremely handsome days, my father was sitting a bar, enjoying a beer after work, when he was approached by two men with a proposal.  They had been looking for him.  He had been recommended, and now that they were face to face, the recommendation had been a good one.  They were looking for TV evangelists. "We want you get up on TV and flash that smile.  Tell those lonely old ladies how much they need to send their money to Jesus," one of them said.  "You're perfect.  Voice, stature, rugged charm," chimed the other. Nah, I don't really believe any of that," my father told them. You don't have to believe it.  We'll tell you what to say.  We'll show you the moves, work on your delivery.  You could make a pile of money." My father declined them flat.  He probably could have been the most successful TV evangelist in history, but it was not his nature to deceive.

Tater Bug Tater Bug started out as a two-tone beige and green 1950-something VW van.       I first saw it on the back of a flatbed, having been scooped up off the road after a serious accident.  The side was smashed in and the left rear wheel had been torn off.  There were many cars in better shape in the junkyard. Since I was only nine when Tater first began to materialize, I didn't really understand the process until many years later.  Basically, you start with a van because it has the gear reduction rear axles and a frame.  The gear reduction axles give you lower gears for off-road and contribute to ground clearance.  The frame allows the floorpan of the van to serve as the functional structure. I remember my father cutting out the basic shape for Tater, lifting the smashed van body off and welding the front axle on to the front of the new, shorter vehicle.       It was in just that state -- no steering, brakes, clutch or shifter -- when my father decided to see if it would start.  He handed me a clump of wires and gave me instructions, "Connect the red and white and touch the blue to engage the starter."  I did as instructed and the thing fired right up.  It was in gear, so it took off across the yard.  He was yelling, Pull the wires apart!," but being a dumb nine-year-old kid in a state of panic, I couldn't perform that simple task. He ran after the runaway Tater and kicked the front tire to steer it away from his pickup truck.  By this time I had dropped the wire clump and bailed off.  Tater was on its own, continuing across the yard, until the gas in the float bowl ran out and the engine died.  Somehow, it was all my fault.

The Weasel This one is impossible to explain without pictures.  This is a Studebaker M29 Weasel:       It was designed to for snow operations during World War II.  Thousands of them were floating around for 25 years after the war.  Needless to say, my father owned several of them at various times.  The weirdest one was a junker.  The whole body was a mass of rust.  It was destined for the scrap heap until a body off a VW pickup came into my father's possession.  Here is a picture of one:       Now, just imagine the Weasel body cut off and replaced by the Volkswagen.  Then imagine a Chevy stove-bolt six and 4-speed truck transmission, mounted in the bed and direct coupled to the Weasel differential.  It was one of the weirdest vehicles in history.

Bulldozing the House One time, we were walking a D8 dozer from my father's property to a subdivision near Fox Farm, where he was cutting the roads.  Back then you could make that whole journey and only cross two paved roads.  The first one was Big Bear Blvd.  We crossed that, without incident, somewhere around Gildart. When you cross a road with a dozer, you have two crews of guys, who lay tires down in front of the tracks, shuffling them from rear to front as the tractor crosses the road.  The next crossing was at Sugarloaf.  We crossed easily, and were loading the tires into the truck, when my father pivoted, trying to squeeze between a house and a tree, and slammed the dozer blade right into the corner of the house. None of us knew what to do.  Leave a note?  "Dear homeowner,  We just knocked your house off its foundation by crashing into it while illegally driving a big yellow belching beast across your property."  Struck by the same sentiment -- and also wild with anger -- my father jammed the D8 into gear and took off as fast as it would go. A few weeks later, a letter arrived from an attorney.  Apparently, problems such as these don't go away when you run off and leave them.

Mud Wrestling We set out one crisp winter evening to extract a TD-14 from a mud bog, where it was buried up to the floorboards.  Somehow, I had been roped into accompanying the usual crew of misfits, illiterates and degenerates my father always hired because they would work for less than the prevailing wage. Our weapon and conveyance was a military surplus 6x6 2 1/2-ton truck, with 10-ton winches front and rear.       It had no lights, no license plates and minimal brakes, but we set off down the highway anyway.  Things were rather different back then. The first obstacle was the snow.  The degenerates couldn't figure out how to engage the front axle.  As I explained it to them, I realized why I had been brought along.  I don't think they would ever have made it to the tractor without my guidance. Once at the mud bog, the truck was tied off to a big tree and the cable from the front winch connected to the tractor with a two-part line.  The slack was taken up and power applied to the winch.  The truck shuddered under the load.  The cable creaked and vibrated as the winch tried in vain to reel it in.  The tractor cleats churned up fresh mud.  Nothing moved.  The degenerates stalled the motor.  My father yelled at them about it. It was time for more mechanical advantage.  More cable was reeled out and a sheave added for a three-part line.  This time, the tractor started to move, but it wasn't enough.  The degenerates stalled the motor again.  My father yelled some more.  Another length of cable, another sheave and another part gave us 80,000 pounds of pull.  That was enough.  Churning its way through the mud, the tractor was dragged backwards by an invisible force.  Slowly it found firmer footing and began rising higher.  Moments later, it was up on top. To the naive teen-age boy, it was nothing short of a miracle.

The Rattlesnake My father used to tell the story of a rattlesnake encounter when he was a boy. He and his two friends -- let's call them Billy and Jimmy -- were wandering around getting into all the trouble they could.  Since it was acceptable back then, and because they were on the lookout for snakes, Jimmy was carrying a shotgun. They were negotiating a steep embankment on their way down to explore a ravine when one of them saw the snake.  Billy, in the lead, tried to slow his descent and was plowed into by the other two.  All three of them slid/rolled/tumbled down the hill.  The shotgun went flying.  At the bottom, Billy found himself within striking distance of an aroused and cocked snake, rattling away.  As he scrambled wildly backwards up the hill, my father grabbed the shotgun and fired at the snake. There was a stunned silence for a few seconds.  Ears were ringing.  The dust was settling.  The snake was dead.  All was well -- or was it?  Billy looked down and saw two holes in his shoe and a trickle of blood.  "He got me!" Jimmy and my father came over to see.  It was a snakebite for sure. Billy pulled his shoe off and tossed his sock aside.  The three of them inspected the the two red marks on the top of Billy's foot.  Then my father smiled.  He picked up the sock, felt around inside for a bit and pulled out a small metal pellet. "That ain't no snake.  You been shot."

The Turbo Harley A turbocharger off a junker Corvair was the hot new possession one month.  Two hippie biker brothers, Carl and Jim, were hanging around my father's place about that time.  One of them, I don't remember which, had a clapped-out knucklehead chopper.  If ever there was a vehicle less deserving of the turbo, it was that bike.  I guess that's why it was selected. Intake and exhaust manifolds were constructed.  Fuel was plumbed up.  The turbo was installed on the Harley.  Rube Goldberg would have been so proud. The first test flight was at night.  Jim or Carl kicked the knucklehead to life and took off up the street, his left leg hanging out to the side to keep from being burned by the exhaust pipe.  He disappeared into the darkness.  I heard a shift, then another.  Then silence.  A few minutes later, he was back, pushing the bike.  Both exhaust pipes were glowing red. The next day, they found a wire that had come loose and got ready for a new test flight.  Both of the brothers rode it and came back smiling.  My father rode it and came back smiling.  That could only mean one thing:  It was time for a drag race.  Out came the World's Fastest Drag Truck.  It was no contest.  The turbo Harley ate WFDT for lunch. It was a kick for about a week.  That's how long the knucklehead lasted before a piston disintegrated.  Turbo Harley came in for the last time with a rod sticking through the front of the engine case. The turbo came off and melded in with the rest of the junk.  For all I know, it's still out there somewhere.

The Drowned Rat Inevitably, some little rodent or other fell into the well and drowned, poisoning the water.  My father dragged out a big air compressor and connected it to the end of a pipe shoved about 50 feet down the well.  The compressor was allowed to build up 150 pounds of pressure and the valve opened.  Hundreds of gallons of water shot up out of the well casing like a geyser, knocking everything out of the rafters of the well house and putting out the light.  As an added benefit, the well house was flooded.  Some modifications to the procedure were in order. A board was nailed up over the well casing on an angle to deflect most of the water out the door and two sump pumps were started.  Somewhere in the midst of all this, a dorky young fat guy showed up.  I didn't really know him.  He was the son of a friend of a friend or something and almost always the butt of every practical joke.  From this, I surmise now that he was not the most aware person to come around my father's place. So, now, with dorky fat guy in position, we were getting ready for well blast number two.  "Hey, whatcha guys doin'?" Oh, we're trying to see if there's any water in that hole.  Why don't you go down there and take a look." My father opened the valve.  The result was downright hysterical.  Fat dorky guy came sputtering out of the well house, every bit the wrong drowned rat.  Yeah, there's water down there."

The Monorail My father came and got my brother and me.  He needed some help.  "Take this rope and climb that tree."  It was a very weird request, but so much better than what we expected. The tree was easy to climb because there was a tree house in it, with a ladder up the side.  We were instructed to continue up above the tree house, to a height of about 40 feet, to a sort of natural saddle where the main trunk ended and a big limb took off going straight up.  My father tied a big rope to the little one and had us haul it up.  We were told to tie the big rope around the big limb and climb down. The big rope was big and expensive.  It appeared to have been the remains of an old rope tow.  We took the free end to another tree about 150 feet away, pulled it tight with a truck and tied it around the other tree about 4 feet off the ground.  Great.  We had a big rope stretched between two trees.  What was it?  My father wasn't about to tell us. From the tree we went to the welding shop, where we were instructed to cut a piece of 3/4 galvanized pipe about 20 inches long and weld it crossways to an old metal pulley.  Once that was completed, it was back to the rope, where my father pulled the pin from the pulley and put the big rope through it so it could run back and forth.  It was about this time I began to get a notion of what this contraption was supposed to do.  My father tied the first small rope to the pulley handle.  "Take this thing up to the other end."  Yeah, baby, this was going to be great! Except, it wasn't so easy to get the pulley handle to the top of the rope.  Without continuous downward pressure, it would flip upside-down.  And there was no way to supply that pressure for the last 10 feet because the tree limbs were in the way.  It actually took weeks to learn the proper way to give it the proper whip to make it travel to the end of the rope. I was elected guinea pig number 1.  I climbed the tree and waited for my father and brother to get the pulley handle to me.  Then, hanging from the pipe, I dived off the tree and rode down the rope.  The first time, my father stationed himself at the end to keep me from bashing into the tree in case I came in too fast.  It turned out that was a needless precaution.  It was easy to stop by dragging the feet. Someone christened it "The Monorail" and it became the toy of the decade.  Kids from miles around came to ride down the rope.  Nobody ever fell off.  There were no injuries of any sort.  Not one parent complained.  It makes me sad to compare those days to modern playgrounds, with no monkey bars and padded plastic toys for the kiddies' tender little hands and tender little indoctrinated minds. A few years went by and a guy named Don snagged his semi tractor on the rope and pulled it down.  When we complained to our father, he said, "Go ask Don.  He broke it."  We did, but Don didn't care.  So The Monorail died.  I last saw the pulley handle in a pile of junk about 30 years later.

The Helicopter It was a Piasecki H-21 Flying Banana.       A new power line was being strung across Holcomb Valley and the banana was setting the poles.  Between poles, they left it running while it was fueled up, which turned out to be quite a mistake.  The hose ruptured, spraying gasoline on the exhaust.  The banana caught fire.  The midsection melted and the back half drooped to the ground.  Since it was an impossible job, the helicopter people hired my father to drag out the carcass so it could salvaged. In reality, it wasn't so impossible.  My father built a tow-bar thing that attached to the front wheel and pulled the banana down to his yard like a big trailer.  Once it was there, some guys from the helicopter company came and removed everything that could be used as spare parts for their other machines.  All that was left when they were done was a big tin can.  It was junk with a capital J, but to my father it was a valuable acquisition.  As everyone knows, there is no better storage shed than an old helicopter fuselage.

Not Another D8 Most people go to yard sales and flea markets.  My father used to fly around in his plane, looking for interesting stuff abandoned in the forest.  One day, he saw something yellow showing through the green canopy, way down where nothing yellow should be -- deep in a gorge cut through the rocks by a tributary of the Santa Ana River.  A couple of low-and-slow passes confirmed the find.  It was tractor. An expedition was organized.  My father tossed a topo map into the Tater Bug and set out for Santa Ana canyon.  He drove as far up as he could and hiked the last quarter mile.  It was a D8.       It had slid down into the canyon and there was no way to get it out.  And, just to make sure, someone had stolen the starter. The starter was no problem to someone with a yard filled with every kind of thing ever produced.  But how to get the tractor up out of the canyon?  See, that's what makes a job impossible.  If it came down from the road, it has to go back up to the road, right?  Wrong.  All you have to do is start it up and drive it down to the bottom of the canyon.  Follow the canyon to the river.  Follow the river to the road.  Load it on a Lowboy and haul it away.  That's what my father did.  It was easier than installing the starter. I heard a rumor afterwards that the former owner was making some noise about getting his tractor back.  "Sure, I'll give it back," my father said, invoking the first unwritten law of backwoods salvage, "All you have to do is reimburse me for the cost of salvage -- about twice what it's worth."

The Water Tank When you deal in junk, sometimes you get lucky.  One guy comes to you, looking to buy something, a few days after some other guy offers to give you that exact thing.  It's a nice profit, unless the object in question is too big to move, as was the case with the water tank. The tank was on North Shore.  The buyer was Snow Forest Ski Area.  The problem was you had to have a state permit, a county permit and a City of Big Bear Lake permit.  You had to hire a certified wide-load hauler.  You had to have a bond.  You had to pay law enforcement to block the road.  You had to deal with low power lines.  You had to go through the Village.  Yes, this was one impossible job. The solution was incredibly simple.  My father picked up the water tank with the crane and drove to the lakeshore with the tank suspended.       The tank was lowered into the water and towed across the lake with a 10-foot fishing boat.       On the other side, the tank was floated onto a trailer and hauled the few blocks to the ski area real early in the morning before permits were required.

The Desert Race Back in my father's time, the hot dirt bike for desert racing was the Triumph TR6 Trophy.  The top 4 finishers of the Big Bear Run in 1956 and the top 5 in 1957 and 1958 were riding these machines.  If you wanted to win in those days, that's what you rode, and that's what my father rode. A dozen years later, the reign of the TR6 was over.  Lightweight two-strokes with something resembling suspension were taking over.  But my father was still stuck in 1960.  According to him, the "desert sled" was unsurpassed.  The sheer-mass theory of blasting through any obstacle was the only way.  "All them damn ring-dings do is spin the back wheel and give you a headache." Some local teen-age riders got sick of hearing the theories and demanded proof.  They challenged the mighty TR6 to a race.  Pigheaded to the end, my father accepted.  So, off they all went to a place out past Lucerne Valley we used to call The Cove.  A course was laid out, five laps at about four miles a lap.  It was mostly long sections of whoop-de-do motorcycle trails, with a bit road and twisty little motocross-like section tossed in. The course didn't favor any particular bike, but the race progressed pretty much as expected.  The experienced desert racers on their 250s took off and disappeared.  This left my father on his thumping sled       to duke it out with the smaller bikes and more inexperienced riders.  Down the long straights, the sled built up a big lead, only to be passed in the tight section.  My friend Chris, on his 100cc Hodaka, battled back a forth with the sled, passing it in the tight turns and eating dust down the back straight. It would have ended with the sled in fourth or fifth place, but in the middle of lap 4, the backing plate stay came loose and the rear brake rod wound around the axle.  My brother, acting as pit crew, was ready to disconnect the rear brake and get the bike back on the track, but the sled driver had had enough.  He accepted defeat graciously, commenting to Chris, "You sure can make that little pissant go."

The Motocross Not convinced by the desert race that the days of the British twin as an off-road competitor were over, my father kept right on bragging. Two of his young employees had taken up the new sport of motocross.  Back then, motocross had just come over here from Europe.  It wasn't the antiseptic stadium event we have now, with clean-cut smiley poster boys soaring 50 feet in the air over the triple jumps on their million-dollar factory Japanese bikes.  It was raw and rugged and run on natural terrain by superbly conditioned, but not-so-good-looking real men with funny names, hailing from places like Ornskoldsvik, riding funny-looking European motorcycles with equally funny names.  The two young employees each had one of those funny-looking European bikes.  They were 175cc DKWs from Germany, with leading-link front forks and weird radial cooling fins on the cylinder heads. You see where this is heading, right?  The two employees got sick of hearing how fast the TR6 was.  They challenged my father to a race.  Still pigheaded as ever, he accepted, and he kept right on bragging, predicting a huge victory. There was a big crowd on race day, at least half it rooting for the sled.  Then it got weird.  The silly rules of whatever motocross contingent these two guys belonged to called for the left hand to be touching the helmet visor when the race started.  It was their race, so it was their rulebook. The two motocross riders never bothered with the clutch.  When the flag came down, they cranked the throttle, tromped down on the shifter, grabbed the handlebars and off they went.  After a normal clutch take-off, it took two laps for the sled to catch up.  My father came flying into view, passed the other two riders and crashed in the mud corner right in front of the spectators.  A bunch of them ran out and helped him up.  They picked up the bike and started it, but their help did no good.  The two young motocross riders were half a lap ahead by the time he got going again. This was a timed event -- fifteen minutes or something like that.  My father was in no condition to be doing anything that strenuous, especially against young guys who did this every day after work.  Fighting against that 370-pound hunk of outmoded machine, he fell further and further behind.  Just as he was about to be lapped, he crashed again.  This time he waved off the spectators.  He was done. He was also done bragging about how fast the TR6 was.  The mighty TR6 never raced anybody again.  I'm not sure it was ever ridden after that.  It got stuck in a shed with a burned up Ariel square-4 and a bunch of other motorcycle relics.  Most of that junk is gone now, but the TR6 is still there, leaning against the wall, waiting for the next challenge.

The Dust Bank It was 1981 and I had just bought myself a new Honda XR-500R.  It had about a hundred miles on it when my friend and I encountered my father out in his back yard, while taking a shortcut from my house to somewhere.  He checked out the bike.  "Le'me see that thing."  Apparently, he was going to ride it. He jumped on the kickstarter and it stopped dead on compression.  "How'd'ya start this dumb thing?" "Take it through compression," I said, pointing to the compression release. And be careful.  It's not--"  He kicked it to life and roared off.  "--broken in..." He took it through the gears, tearing out across the airport property about 80 miles per hour without a helmet.  In a flash, he was back.  He did some donuts, jumped over some pieces of an old foundation and did a few wheelies, all the while holding it wide open.  A 50-year-old lunatic had hijacked my brand-new bike and was doing his best to destroy it.  Nothing had changed in 25 years.  It was exactly the way I remembered it when I was a little kid. Only this time, I was becoming a bit angry.  You weren't supposed to abuse a new engine this way.  I started waving, trying to attract his attention, but was too busy riding in and out of the storm drain, shooting up the sides and flying through the air.  He did that a few times.  Then he went down into the ditch and accelerated away.  Suddenly, the sound of the engine cut off in mid thump. We ran over, expecting the worst.  There was my father, covered in gray powder, standing there staring at the back half of the bike.  The front half had disappeared, embedded into a pile of fine gray silt.  It took all three of us to pull it out.  It took weeks to clean the fine dust out of everything.  I don't recall verbalizing my feelings, but I think he could tell I was not real pleased.

The Road to TV Imagine no TV.  It can't be done now, but back in the early '60s in Big Bear it was easy.  The only TV we had were the three fuzzy channels from San Diego and the one fuzzy channel from Mexico.  No matter what direction we spun the antenna, nothing else could generate more than a few squiggly lines in the background of snow. Then the cable company came to town.  They were going to put a big antenna on top of Bertha Peak to capture the real TV stations from L.A.  The trouble was, they needed a road to get up there.  Also, they were somewhat of a fly-by-night operation and had no real budget to fund what they needed to have done.  That was a perfect arrangement for my father.  Lifetime free cable TV seemed a good bartering token. My father's main piece of earthmoving equipment at the time was a battered old Allis-Chalmers HD-10.  Even as a little kid, I knew there was something wrong about that tractor.  The 4-71 two-stroke Detroit Diesel that powered it had a lonely sighing tone to the exhaust.  It never grunted and groaned and blew out a stream of black smoke under load like a real tractor should.  As the blade filled with dirt, the sighing would became deeper as the RPMs fell.  If you waited too long to disengage the clutch, it would sputter and die.  I remember my father cussing at it, calling it a gutless wonder.       Anemic as it was, the HD-10 was enlisted, spiffed up, hauled off and put to work, building a road to the top of the mountain.  The whole job took two days, mainly because it wasn't much of road.  It was rough and rocky, sometimes so steep it was too much for the cautiously-driven 4x4.  Everybody was happy, though.  The Fly-By-Night Cable Company had its road and we had lifetime free cable. It was a short lifetime.  Fly-By-Night ran out of money and a more substantial entity purchased the assets.  The new guys weren't about to honor a silly barter agreement.  We had no cable and a check for the road before we had enjoyed one second of lifetime free cable. There are double ironic endings to this story.  The first is that the new cable company hired one of my father's friends as manager and he looked the other way when my father hooked himself up to the cable.  It wasn't lifetime, but there were many years of free cable. The second irony is the road.  It was cheap and never finished.  It was difficult to navigate on foot and nearly impossible with a vehicle.  61 years later, it has barely changed.  Nobody ever came in and built a real road to the top of that mountain.

The Electric Seat Sometime in the early '50s, a friend of my father's friend was dating the friend's girl.  Naturally, the friend came to my father for a bit of technological vengeance. Okay, so maybe it wasn't all that technological, but they sneaked up to the Highlander parking lot and wired up a Model T coil to a seat spring in the girl stealer's pickup truck.  It would power up when the ignition was turned on, and the lucky driver would be the beneficiary of many thousands of volts, delivered right through the seat of the pants.  All that was left to do was hide out in the bushes and wait for some action. When the drinking and dancing let out, everything went according to plan -- except the girl got in on the driver's side.  She started the truck and high voltage found its way to places where it didn't belong.  "Donnie, I think there's something wrong with your truck."

The Barbecue Spit In at least two John Wayne movies there is the same giant barbecue spit in the background during town party or ranch party scenes.  I remember seeing it once and thinking I had seen it before.  A trip to my father's yard many years ago made me realize where I had seen it.  There it was, leaning against a tree. This thing is unique.  There is no chance there are two of them exactly the same.  First of all, it is Hollywood huge.  It takes a whole cow.  Nobody would really build and try to use such a monstrosity.  And, secondly, it is human powered.  There is a crank about three feet long on one end.  Once again, nobody would do that.  If you really wanted to roast a cow over a bonfire, you would put a motor on the spit.  I remember the actor in the movie having a difficult time trying to spin that crank.  You would need an army of slaves to keep it turning all day.  There is no doubt in my mind.  This is a movie prop.  My father would never have built anything so lacking in functionality. So, how did it get on the set?  And how did it get back to the yard?  I wish I knew.  I can only speculate that it was created for North to Alaska, which was made in 1960 had a few scenes filmed in Big Bear.  That would have been the right time frame.  My father had a shop on Pine Knot where he did welding up until the summer of 1960, when we moved to the North Shore property.  As for the spit coming home, I have no idea.  It's just another mystery behind the legend.

Captain Ahab and The Sugar Pine I was doing some logging with my father in the early '70s.  It was a typical of my father's many business arrangements.  He supplied the equipment.  You did the work.  Any profit was split.  This was acceptable until something broke (and it always did).  Then neither party felt his split should pay for repairs.  I learned that the hard way. My father had a Captain Ahab moment with a majestic old sugar pine near Cedar Lake.  It was six feet in diameter and had been there for a millenium, but it was dying, so it had to go. I wanted nothing to do with it.  A tree that big could only be trouble.  Captain Ahab felt otherwise.  He convinced me it was a great trophy, so I collected my stuff and went up on the mountain to harpoon a great white tree. It took way too long to fall it.  The bar on the saw was only 4 feet.  I could have felled five normal sized trees in the time it took to do that big one.  It took too long to limb it.  The limbs were big and heavy and most were too high to reach without climbing up on the log.  And it took two days to buck it up.  Three quarters through the first cut, the kerf pinched together and trapped the saw.  I had to fire up the D-8 and roll the log over to free the saw. The fun was only beginning.  I had to figure out how to load this giant log onto the truck.  The normal procedure with normal sized logs was to grab them with the 4-in-1 bucket of the loader and set them on the truck.  No chance was that going to work with a six-footer.  I had to ask the expert.  "Hook a big choker to the stakes and roll the log onto it." That made sense.  I wasted another half a day finding a choker (a big metal cable with eyes on both ends) and a pair of shackles.  Despite the 2:1 mechanical advantage of lifting only the free loop of the choker and rolling the log up the cable, it only took about one minute to realize the loader could not lift that log.  All it did was raise its back end up in the air. The next step was to drop the blade of the D-8 on the counterweight at the rear of the loader.  That enabled the loader to lift the log off the ground, but it crept forward, the blade slipped off and everything came crashing down, tearing the loader bucket apart. About this time, I gave up and went after some normal sized trees.  I had them piled up next to the road and Captain Ahab showed up and started barking orders, "Pile those logs up and make a ramp." That plan worked pretty well.  I parked the truck next to the ramp and my father pushed the giant log up the ramp and onto the truck with the D-8.  Except for dented fuel tank and my finger getting smashed in the door when the log came down, Ahab's capture of the great white tree was a success. But loading is only half the adventure.  The thing we called a log truck was a 1953 International Harvester 18-wheeler with a 220 Cummins, no heater, no power steering, a Jake Brake and very little in the way of real brakes, and I had to drive it and the log down the back grade to the sawmill in Hesperia.       The driveline was bent, imposing a top speed limit of about 40 miles per hour, which wasn't really a factor.  The faster you went, the greater the chance you could never stop.  It was easiest to let the traffic back up behind me and schedule an entire day to make the trip.  That's what I did, and it wasn't really all that adventurous. The adventure resumed at the sawmill.  The sawmill guy had a 988 Cat, which was more than a match for the log, but it had a regular bucket, not log loading tongs, so there no easy way to unload.  He had no choice but to get up against the log and roll it up and over the stakes.  When it came off, it bent both bunks down and folded one stake down into the tire.  For good measure, the big Cat grazed the side of the truck, destroying the clearance and tail lights on one side.  I had him hook the bucket under the rear bunk and lift the truck off the ground.  A few jounces pulled the stake out of the tire so I could get home. Back at the shop, I was informed the repairs were my responsibility, because I had caused the damage.  I countered that it was the Captain's obsession with the great white tree that had caused the damage.  I could have hauled ten lesser trees to the sawmill in that week without breaking everything.  It was a stalemate.  My father was never one to take his fair share of blame and my principles wouldn't allow me to accept it, so we reached the mutual disagreement that my career as a logger had come to an end.

The Gas Station The house on my father's North Shore property, where he lived for the better part of 70 years, didn't start out as a house. The tale of the house begins with my grandmother and her siblings inheriting a block in downtown San Diego sometime in the late 1930s.  They panicked at the onset of World War II.  Knowing with the certainty of true paranoiacs that the Japanese were going to attack San Diego, they sold their property.  As near as I can determine, my grandmother bought the North Shore parcel in 1942 and my father's stepdad built the big garage in 1944.  The well went in a year later.  The house was built in 1948, only it wasn't a house.  It was a gas station.  The ill-conceived plan, apparently, was to sell gas on the most desolate road in California. My father lived there sporadically until 1949.  He moved to Texas for a while and kicked around the country for a few years after that, never straying too far from Big Bear.  He came back long enough to get married in 1953, and wandered around chasing work for three more years.  By 1956, he was back to stay.  All this time, the gas station languished. In 1959, my father had a hand in demolishing an old fox ranch.  Watching all that great building material go to waste gave him one of his all-time great cheap-skate ideas.  Rather than haul prime portions of a ripped-down house to the dump where it belonged, he piled it on his mother's property.  Nights and weekends he set to work.  The gas pumps were removed.  The roof out to the pump island was walled in.  The old fox ranch experienced a reincarnation, as the gas station was converted into a home. Somewhere along the way, Grandma found out what was going on with her gas station.  Accounts differ as to what happened next.  According to Grandma, nobody was ever going to live there.  According to my father, he packed us up and moved us in without bothering to inform his mother.  My aunt says both versions are partially true.  The order was given and ignored.  They both knew she could have gotten him out if she had really wanted.  She must not have been all that opposed to the idea in the first place. In the long run, everybody forgot the house had been a gas station.  I grew up there and my father lived there for 50 years.  He always meant to finish the construction he started all those years ago, but he never got around to it. I think about fixing the place up.  Somehow it doesn't seem right.  Grandma's gas station is gone, but "Fred's house" will live forever.

How to Pick Up Girls (circa 1950) You sign up for the rodeo.  Then you pin your number on your shirt and wear it around town.

The River Trip Y-AN-ER'S GO-ETTE showed up around 1964.       She was a nondescript white 16-foot flat-bottom ski boat, decked out in metalflake gold trim and that cryptic name emblazoned across the transom.  The initial configuration featured a dual-quad 327 Chevy, with finned aluminum Corvette valve covers, a water-cooled V-drive with no reverse, a non-adjustable cavitation plate and white naugahyde tuck-and-roll seats.  It had but one purpose: to pull a person clinging to the end of a rope across the water, and it did that very well.  Many an unwary skier, accustomed to some little outboard, was yanked clean out of his binding and flipped end over end by that boat. Y-AN-ER was a great ski boat.  It always started.  It ran reliably.  It had no major mechanical difficulties.  As the years went by, newer, better, faster boats came along.  Unfortunately, my father had to keep up.  By 1974, the 327 had a radical roller cam.  It no longer started with a touch of the ignition.  You had to grind it over and work the throttle, till the right combination of air and fuel dripped into a few of the cylinders.  When it caught, it was usually with that slow-responding hydraulic throttle open.  Before you could get your foot off the gas, the engine had spun up to 8,000 RPM. It was this configuration that formed the nucleus of my father's big summer vacation extravaganza.  This was the plan:  Eight people in three vehicles, plus a boat, would form a convoy and drive to Lake Mohave.  We would park in the marina at Cottonwood Cove, launch the boat and ferry ourselves and a ton of camping gear 5 miles upriver, where we would camp on the Arizona side far from everybody.  My father would fly over two days later and land on a section of dirt road up on the bluff.  It sounded great on paper -- especially if you were the one flying the plane.  The reality was a bit more real. The trouble started almost immediately.  I was driving a 1963 Ford Econoline van that wouldn't go more than ten miles without overheating as we made our way across the desert.  I tried driving fast.  I tried driving slow.  I tried letting it get so hot it blew all the coolant out.  The only thing that worked was fighting with it till 2 o'clock in the morning when the temperature in the desert fell.  I sent the others on ahead and rolled in alone at sunrise. It took all day to transport everything to the camp site.  Spooked by the prospect of being so far from civilization with the temperamental boat as our only transportation, my brother decided to drive around the lake.  Nobody thought that was a good idea because the map showed no roads to our camp.  He didn't care.  He did it anyway.  We all thanked him later. The next day, the king arrived in his airplane around lunchtime, ready to be towed around the lake.  With perfect timing, the boat did one of its 8,000 RPM start-ups and something broke inside the engine.  It ran alright, but there was a terrible clattering coming from inside. We took a vote.  We wanted to load half the stuff into the boat and the other half into my brother's truck and go home.  The king overruled us.  It was his vacation and he was going to ski, dammit.  We were going to pull the boat motor apart and fix it.  Imagine dumbfounded silence. Well, why not?  We were miles from anything.  We had only the tools in my brother's truck.  We had no rags, no soap, no shower and no work clothes.  The natural thing to do was overhaul the engine of a floating boat in the hot sun.  It was so absurd nobody could think up a good argument before the king was off to the airplane so he could fly to Searchlight, Nevada and pick up a top-end gasket set.  What could we do?  We started pulling the engine apart. The problem was obvious when the cylinder head came off.  About an inch of the top ring land had broken off the piston.  The bits were banging around in the cylinder.  Amazing.  All we had to do was remove the broken pieces and put it back together. Assembly went well, considering we were lacking a few essential tools.  Without a torque wrench, the head bolts had to tightened by guessing.  Without feeler gauges, valve adjustment had to be done by the audible tick method with the engine running, which sprayed oil all over everything within 20 feet.  Setting the ignition timing was mostly guesswork as well, but we got it back together and ran it for two days straight without the piston losing any more pieces. I have to admit the skiing was excellent, particularly for my father because he didn't do one other thing.  Between being pulled up and down the lake he sat under the awning, daydreaming or demanding to be fed.       When he had had his fill, my brother drove him to the plane and he flew away, while we packed and loaded.  It seemed like months later when the rest of us finally made it back home, tired, dirty and much in need of a vacation. There have been many vacations since, none of them so memorable, because none of them had the unmistakable stamp of my father on them.