California Dreamin’

by Ben Robicheau – brobicheau@cogeco.ca

I became a teen-ager at the beginning of the 1960’s. Most of these formative years were spent listening to the evolution of Rock and Roll music as broadcast across the Gulf of Maine by D.J. Arnie (Woo Woo) Ginsberg on Boston radio station WMEX. The airwaves of the time were dominated by West Coast groups like The Beach Boys and Jan and Dean singing songs about sun, surf, girls and cars. Songs like Surf City, Surfin’ Safari, Little Deuce Coupe, Drag City, Little G.T.O. and California Girls painted a picture of a lifestyle that we could only dream of. In our minds, every guy on the West Coast spent his days cruising around in a fast car with a hot chick by his side and a surfboard strapped to the roof. He was always either on the way to Waikiki or Kokomo to catch some wild surf or out looking for someone with an equally hot car and hot chick to drag race with.

Here on the East Coast my friends and I did our best to copy what we thought was the California lifestyle. After all, living here on the coast surrounded by the sea was not all that different from being in California if you overlooked the fact that on most days you couldn’t see the sun through the fog and tried to ignore the total absence of both surfing beaches and endless highways for driving and racing. We tried hard to convince ourselves, but to be truthful, the severe shortage of endless summers, cool cars and sun-tanned, bikini-wearing, blonde-haired beach babes really made it difficult to accurately emulate those laid-back surfer dudes.

Still, we did the best we could with what we had. We tried to copy the surfer look by making surfing shorts out of cut-off pants, these were called “baggies” and we wore them faithfully, even though our knees sometimes turned blue from the cold. We even made a surfboard out of some scrap plywood and almost froze our baggies off trying to surf at Pond Cove. Since the board couldn’t really support a person and the waves were nowhere close to being big enough to ride on anyway, our surfin’ safari wasn’t all that successful. The best we could do was to float the board in the water near the shore, then run down the beach, jump on it and skid out ten or fifteen feet before sinking in the ice-cold water. We eventually came to the realization that our island was not exactly equipped to allow us to follow the surfer’s life. The only time we got any real big surf was during hurricanes and winter storms; not the best time to hit the beach. So we turned our attention to another important aspect of teenage life, cars.

We might not have surf, but we did have cars. Although we didn’t have the bored and stroked, chopped and channelled, metal-flake painted, tire-smoking, screamin’ machines that we pored over in the pages of Hot Rod Magazine, the cars we did have had one advantage, they were cheap. Ricky and Wayne went in together and invested $12.50 each in an old Chev they bought from Dick Thompson. They soon decided their new ride would look better as a convertible and using high-tech tools like an axe, a hacksaw and a sledgehammer, went to work “customizing” it. They got the roof off OK, but didn’t stop there, by the time they were done, all that remained of the body was the front fenders, windshield, front doors and front seat. A rope across the back of the seat tied the doors together to keep them shut.

This Island version of a California Hot Rod lasted less than a week. One afternoon they stopped to ask if I wanted to go for a ride, the only seat was crammed full with four people so I would have to crouch down on the floor behind the seat and hang on to the rope. I decided to pass on their offer, a good decision as it turned out; about twenty minutes later I heard that they had flipped the car on Pea Jack Road. Two riders were thrown clear and the other two were able to duck down in the seat as the car rolled completely upside down on top of them. Except for a bit of road rash and a few bumps and scrapes, all escaped with only minor injuries.

The summer he was seventeen, my friend Leonard got a job in one of the fishplants. He decided that the wisest thing to do with his first paycheck was to buy a car. Luckily for him, The Digby Courier that week had a big ad for Weymouth Motors offering terrific deals on a variety of used cars in near-perfect condition. One of these excellent vehicles, a nearly twenty year old Pontiac, was on sale for the unbelievably low price of only $99.00.

Leonard didn’t have a driver’s licence so he asked if I would come with him to drive his new car home. We arrived at Weymouth Motors and found his car sitting dejectedly at the back of the lot with two flat tires. After pumping up the tires and a bit of tinkering by the mechanic to boost the dead battery and get the engine started, we were ready to hit the road. This turned out to be easier said than done. To get out of town you had to cross a one-lane bridge and then go up a steep hill. Half-way up the hill, the car gradually came to a stop; it didn’t have the power to go any farther. We turned around and went back to the garage where they told us the engine hadn’t been run for quite a while and probably just needed to warm up.

We spent the next hour trying to get out of town, we tried going as far up the hill in the opposite direction as we could get, then turned around and bombed through town as fast as we dared to go, weaving through traffic and dodging pedestrians. If we were lucky, we wouldn’t have to stop for someone on the bridge and we could get a running shot at the hill. We made several attempts, and on one of these it looked like we were finally going to make it to the top when at the last minute, a train crossed the road at the top of the hill. We had to stop with the rest of the traffic and when the other cars finally pulled away, we were left sitting there without the power to get going again. We headed back to the garage once again and this time convinced them that there was definitely something wrong with the car. They said leave it for a few days and they’d take a look at it. We hitch-hiked home and returned a week later to find that the problem had been a cracked distributer cap; this time we roared up the hill with no trouble at all.

My own first car was a 1956 Chev. On rainy days you had to watch out for water and mud flying up through the holes in the floor and everywhere I went I was followed by a thick cloud of oily smoke because it burned almost as much oil as it did gas, but it was still a bargain for $65.00. I eventually was able to eliminate the major problems by installing a plywood floor and rebuilding the engine myself. I didn’t really know what I was doing with the engine, so I’d work along until I got stuck, then go ask Ace McDormand or one of the other local self-taught mechanics what to do next. Surprisingly, when I eventually got it all back together, it actually ran!

In those days annual mechanical inspections were not required and even insurance was not mandatory. Once you paid for the car, your only other expense was gas and registration, and there were ways around both of those. If you stayed on the island, you could get away without license plates or even a driver’s license. I’m sure a lot of people weren’t too happy about us unlicensed drivers cruising around the island in our unregistered cars, but we saw all that paperwork as just a lot of unnecessary hassle and expense. Even the cost of putting gas in your car could by reduced by using boat gas, which was cheaper than regular gas, but also illegal.

I’m sure the Beach Boys didn’t have Pond Cove and chopped up old cars in mind when they sang their songs glorifying the California lifestyle, and I’m sure they would have got a good laugh out of our attempts to copy what we thought was the daily life of the West Coast teen-ager, but looking back on it, we had a lot of fun and freedom back then and in our own way developed our own coastal lifestyle.