Step right up sailor, do I have a car for you

We had two 96 hour weekends while attending Guidedmissileman A School in Virginia Beach. The first time I hitchhiked from VB to Cleveland a grand distance of  582 miles traveling by thumb. As I recall, that trip was over Thanksgiving weekend and standing beside a road at two in the morning got pretty damned cold. The leg between VB through the Smoky Mountains from Richmond to the Pennsylvania Turnpike was cold and dreary but there was no competition for a ride.

That all changed when I got to the turnpike the place was rife with other servicemen wanting rides. I turned the dial on my charm and cunning control up to a setting of ten and was on my merry way in short order. The last ten miles were probably the hardest because most people in Northern Ohio weren’t going six hundred miles in their cars. I remember walking the last five, or so, miles.

I was surely not going to rely on my thumb to return and risk becoming AOL. I took my first long distance bus ride back. As bad as thumbing up from Virginia was, riding a Greyhound bus for six hundred miles back was almost as bad.

Christmas time offered another 96 hour liberty and I had no desire to hitchhike six hundred miles back to Northern Ohio in the dead of winter. I located a sailor who was being transferred via MATS, Military  Air Transport Service, to Holy Loch Scotland and had to sell his 1953 Ford Convertible. I ended up buying this classic auto for $35. Of course in 1960 a 1953 Ford hadn’t made it to the classic car list quite yet.

There were two guys that I knew who offered me $50 each for a ride to Pittsburg and another from Akron who ponied up another $50. Me and the Ford limped into Northern Ohio one evening and I was able to nurse the car to the local junk yard and got $50 for the little beauty. Let’s see. I made $165 minus gas money and made it home for the holidays.

In February, we flew to LAX for Terrier BT3 C School at the General Dynamics factory in Pomona where I bought a 41 Ford Business Coupe for $50 and sold for $75 in May when I was posted to Southern Indiana.

Maybe I should have gotten out and sold used cars but I had bigger fish to fry.