Friends Made While Traveling
In the spring of 1971 as a freshman at Arizona State University, I put an
ad in the school paper looking for two people to help me drive cars back to
Maine. My Dad was a Dodge dealer and Chrysler had just introduced the
Dodge Colt on the west coast. My Dad wanted to be the first dealer to have
them on the East Coast.
I got a couple of responses and chose two people, Dick and Ann, neither of
whom I knew before the
trip. Everything was fine until we hit Tucumcari, New Mexico. One of the
cars broke down on late
Saturday afternoon of the three day, Memorial Day Weekend.
The car was towed over 100 miles to Amarillo, Texas. The Amarillo Dodge
Dealer was closed but we managed to roust out the Service Manager who took
one look at the Dodge Colt and said, "This is not a Dodge." After we
persuaded him that it was, he took another look and said, "I can't fix a
rotor rooter transmission."
We spent Saturday night in Amarillo, three thirsty college kids in a dry
town. Pure agony. The next day we decided we would load the Dodge Colt
station wagon inside a U-Haul moving truck and the three of us continued to
New England. The rest of the truck went relatively without incident,
except for a lot of laughs about or stay in Amarillo.
Ann and I still keep up with one another. She's in health care in Texas,
and I practice
law in Vermont. Dick we haven't heard from since we graduated from ASU.
Maybe he'll hear this
story and give us a call.
Whenever Ann and I get together, we always reminisce about, "The Trip.":
Jeff
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