"I Said; Rev'er Up, Son"

My eldest brother’s first car was a 1960 T-bird.

 

Beautiful, royal blue exterior, cream colored interior.

 

Front end lowered.

 

Rear end stacked up.

 

360 Cubic Inch Interceptor V-8 powered.

 

Glass-packed dual exhaust turned down 60 degrees right under the rear seat.

 

8-Track powering 12 speakers; long before throbbing music was in vogue.

 

 

 

That car didn’t idle, it roared.  Throaty, deep, powerful.  You could hear it coming, feel it passing, and remember its going away.

 

And it was fast.  Speedometer was wide, with markings up to 160 miles per hour.  Pegging the needle on the far side of that was no problem when you put your foot in it.

 

Crager slots front and back, wide rear tires, lots of chrome.

 

Every cop who saw it just knew it needed to be ticketed for something or other.

 

 

And Barry loved to drive.  Heck, most days after school he would run Robin out Mines Road to her house, then up over Mount Hamilton, on down into San Jose, and back up to Livermore just to be going somewhere.  All that driving and all that speed meant that there was a lot of love that went in to that car.  Every week, sometimes several times a week Barry was tinkering on that thing.  Adjusting brakes, timing, fine tuning the carb, whatever.

 

That thing idled at a disjointed 450 rpm.  So slow you could hear the individual cylinders fire; the car rocked side to side by the torque.

 

 

One afternoon rolling out east on Highway 84, just almost to the city limits sign, one of the local cops fell in behind Barry and trailed a couple blocks before hitting the lights and pulling him over.   Highway 84 headed east out near the city limits was a two-lane blacktop back then with bare dirt and gravel shoulders.

 

Now, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the locals were Barney Fife caliber.  In fact, thinking on it, I am sure that most of them weren’t even allowed to carry one round in their pocket.  And come to think of that, my brothers and I should be thankful for that. 

 

But, what they may have lacked in skill, reasoning, and intelligence, they made up for in enthusiasm.

 

In any case, this old boy had been bored and looking for something to do when Barry drove by.  So he just naturally saw that car, and knew that he could write himself a few fix it tickets to please Chief Michaels.

 

Barry, worrying about just that thing, and knowing that his pipes were too short, and too loud, shut the engine down even before getting off onto the shoulder.  In retrospect, that might not have been the smartest move.  That cop was intent on giving Barry a ticket, and if he had left it idling, not only would the ticket have been faster, but the cop might have had some warning about what was racing towards him at roughly the speed of sound. 

 

 

But as they say; “If I knew then what I know now, I’d a been born rich and retired”.

 

 

Officer Jameson came strolling up and bent down to look in the car window, leaning heavily on his ham sized fists on the driver’s side sill.  He looked each of us over, slow and serious, kinda like he knew exactly what we had been up to the previous Friday.  

 

He turned his mirrored glasses on Barry and said: “Let’s see if’n this thing is fit for driving on the streets shall we?”   

 

Then he set in on a road-side inspection.  He checked the head lights, tail lights, and turn signals.  He got out his tape measure and made sure the front bumper and exhaust pipes were above the minimum height limit.  He checked the tread depth on the tires, and the function of the wipers.  Yep, that man was on an enthusiasm fueled mission to make the world safe from a 1960 Ford Thunderbird.

 

Unfortunately, none of those checks turned up anything that he could write up.  Barry was just starting to relax a bit, thinking that he may have gotten lucky.  But Jameson had been saving his ace-in-the-hole for last.  He came back up to the driver’s window, kneeled down, looked Barry in the eye, and said; “Let’s hear her run, boy”.

 

Barry’s color faded some.  He moved his right foot as far away from the accelerator pedal as he could get it, and just barely bumped the starter.  The engine caught, without an rpm surge, and just started to roll over in that cylinder-at-a-time firing, as quiet as it could possibly be.

 

Barry’s color started to improve some.

 

Then Jameson did the oddest thing I’d ever seen a cop do.  Now at that point in life, I had seen cops sleep on duty, race each other to the donut shop, spin tires away from the police station for no reason, and do any manner of odd things.  But never something like this.

 

Jameson got down on his hands and knees, lowered his head down below the car door level, getting his ear right down by the ground and told Barry to “Rev her up”.

 

Barry’s color ebbed again.  He gently placed his foot on the accelerator pedal and just barely tickled it.

 

The RPM’s surged, and so did the sound.  Loud it was, but maybe not loud enough to ticket.  And so, we heard Jameson say again, “Rev her up”.   Barry tried to walk the tightrope again, just tapping the gas.  RPMs up higher, noise up louder, and while the engine sure hadn’t done much more than hit a 1,000 RPM, that time we knew it was gonna be a ticket for sure.

 

 

Yep, old Jameson had us, he could of written a noise fix it right then and there, and if he’d been smart, he’d of done it then and been off. But he wasn’t done making his point.  Unfortunately.

 

He raised up, looked at Barry long and hard and said, “I said; Rev’er up, Son, and when I say Rev’er up, I mean REV’ER UP; You hear me?” and put his head down again.

 

I saw it coming from the back seat.  Jeff saw it coming from the passenger side.  Barry saw it coming, cause I saw his muscles tense.  Old Jameson however, he didn’t.  He just stuffed his face down to the gap between the car and the dirt and yelled; “Now Rev’er Up”.

 

Barry planted his foot on the pedal.  While I don’t know for sure, I expect that he might of dented the floor with the accelerator right then.

 

The 360 Interceptor V-8 jumped from 450 RPM up to 3,000.  The decibels blew right past the acceptable range and peaked right up in the 175 db range.  60 cubic feet of hot exhaust, dust, sand and rocks blew out from underneath the car.

 

Jameson came up coughing, tearing up, and coated in dust.  His normally blue uniform looked as though he had just sold out and joined the Confederacy.   

 

He was talking a bit louder too.

 

 

Barry got his ticket.  Jameson went back to the station and got a shower.

 

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