Adventures with Captain America

One of the joys of youth is that you get get to to do totally crazy things. Captain America was one of those things in my life. I chose to take an auto shop class in high school. It meant that I had to take one less class from Orlin Ford. During one year, I took three different classes from the same teacher, Calculus, Physics and Statistical Analysis. Taking auto shop from Ed Schilowsky was a welcome break from the theoretical world and inspired me to create "Captain America" with my friends. We had found an old 1947 Ford pickup truck on a farm. A friend at school said he could sell it to us cheap, and we soon had towed it down the hill to Bountiful High's auto shop. We worked on it there during class time and soon had the truck running well enough to take it home where we removed the body and truck bed. Then it was back to the shop where we cut the frame out and welded it back together with a much shorter wheelbase. In the process, we had to create a new place for the seat, shorten the driveline and add a beer keg for a gas tank. We welded two steel rims together for each rear wheel to create dual wheels.

We named it Captain America after something from the film "Easy Rider" - for the life of me, I cannot remember what. We painted different parts of the motor red, white and blue. The thing could pop wheelies if you dropped the clutch in granny gear. One time when I did that, the weld that held the mounting plate for the clutch and brake pedals broke off and dropped to the ground, leaving me no way to stop the vehicle as I headed down 1500 South in Bountiful. I finally stopped it by sideswiping someones wooden fence with the rear dually. I never was very good at welding.

I drove it up to Janene's house once. Maybe more than once. We didn't have an exhaust system, so that meant no muffler and flames would shoot out the sides where the exhaust manifold should have been. Janene was so embarrassed to have me there. She said she could hear it coming for five minutes and her dad was disgusted with me and not happy that all the neighbors saw this noisy thing park in front of his house.

We tried to make it street legal, but in order to do that, we had to have a title. Being young dumb kids, we didn't know about that part. When we pressed our friend for the title, we got the run around and finally we became aware that our friend probably didn't own the vehicle and had stolen it. By then, we had destroyed a perfectly good truck that belonged to some farmer and figured we would be charged with stealing the truck if we went to the police. There was no choice but to dismantle the vehicle piece by piece and send the parts out with the family trash over a period of time. We dug a hole on the side of our house with the help of my little brother and buried the cab and body. The engine was dropped off the side of a hill on the dirt road going up to Calder's property and the wild ride of Captain America was over, much to the relief of my parents, Janene's dad and all of the neighbors