June jollies

All Cities had a street that everyone cruised, not just small towns.

We had one, till the whiners made the city block it off. God forbid the community should get together for fun.

Grand Avenue............through the Burger Chef........................

In Austin I & my buddies would cruise the Pig Stand and Holiday House burger joints on Friday nights 65 years ago.
Saturdays were date nights.

A little while ago I was fiddling with my new iPhone looking at WhatsApp and noticed it has a FaceTime feature.
Never have tried that much (only one time long ago), so I touched the button.
Lo and behold, it started dialing a number…..and our Brit friend Fiona in Wolverhampton, UK answered - appearing in her kitchen on my screen!
The Welsh girl was lookin’ good, busy whipping up some dinner.
Had a nice 6 minute chat to catch up.

Technology has come a long way since my family was stationed in Taiwan back in the late 1950s.
We were pretty much cut off from family & friends back in the USA, what with no telephone service to speak of - and writing a letter to get a question answered took at least two weeks, sometimes longer.

Then there was the time my brother (a UT student) back in Austin mailed a package full of Christmas presents to us in Taipei, but it never arrived. Seems the cargo plane went down somewhere in the Pacific without a trace. Disappointing to say the least - maybe some deep sea fish were wondering what my fancy Texas belt buckle was for.

We tried once to communicate with brother via shortwave radio - from the US military facility in Taipei, to our ham radio cousin who was a professor at St. Mary’s University in San Antonio. We were trying to “broadcast” in the middle of the night, hoping that cousin’s radio transmitter (a very professional set with worldwide range) could pick up our random calling signal.
We had not heard Jim’s voice for more than a year. But apparently the hit or miss conditions were not right, and cousin & brother never made the connection. Mom was extremely disappointed and wept all the way back to our house.

I had 2 spots. When I lived in Massachusetts it was the A@M Raceway in Marlboro where we all street raced. In Minnesota it was on Lake Street in Minneapolis at Porky's. Both places got to see the taillights of my Chrysler 300K.

To ENHANCE the 300, engine was balanced and blueprinted added 410 gears and high stall torque convertor. Many were SHOCKED at the Chryslers performance.

Did the high school cruisin’ in my dad’s ‘61 Impala 6 cylinder 4 door sedan with 3 on the tree.
Looked like this one.

Here was my first street cruiser. In this picture it was in process of being transformed to race car....I think this was taken in about 1969.

My first car looked like this one. Had it from 1964-67.