Teek’s Hot Rod
It’s 1958, and fast cars are what we wanted. Teek, my classmate with a funny nickname, found a Ford Model A roadster body and frame, but needed everything else and had little money. He heard about a wrecked 1954 Oldsmobile with a good engine at the bottom of a canyon.
We’re in Fruita, Colorado, a town of 1800 people a long way from most anywhere. South of town is the Colorado National Monument, an area of striking sandstone canyons traversed by roads bordering the canyon rims.
Someone had decided to get rid of his car by rolling it over the canyon rim just outside the Park boundary. Teek heard about it and decided to salvage the engine in the wreck at the bottom of a 200 foot high cliff. That called for creativity and a lot of help. He and some of his gearhead friends climbed into the canyon and disassembled the engine as much as they could.
They packed the smaller parts up out of the canyon with only Jerry smashing a finger falling while carrying a cylinder head. Next, how to get that big cast iron engine block out of the canyon. One Saturday, about ten of us assembled at the canyon rim. Teek had taken the rubber tire off a wheelbarrow wheel and bolted the wheel to a long 4″x4″ piece of lumber. We poked it over the sheer rim, weighted the back end with some big rocks, and ran a 1/4″ hemp rope through the pulley and into the canyon.
Thankfully, I was not involved in wrestling that big block from where the car had rolled to under the rim. With the rope tied to the engine block, all we had to do was pull. That block probably weighed 400 pounds. We pulled. And pulled. And complained. And pulled. The little rope slowly unwound as we pulled, and we worried it would break. It sure looked skinny.
It took most of an hour with hands and muscles complaining, but we got it to the rim and dragged it to level ground. Teek had a motor for his roadster!
A few months later we showed up at his house out in the farm country north of town. The car was running, sort of. The motor was in, transmission and running gear installed, and it was loud. No exhaust system, no gas pedal, just a wire coming back from the carburetor, and no starter. The cooling system was two hoses jammed together and filled with irrigation water. Oh, no seat, just a board laid on the frame rails for seating and to hold the battery. No fenders, of course.
Teek and another guy sat on the board, he had one hand on the wheel, the other on the throttle wire. Three of us laid on the trunk lid of the roadster body with our feet on the bumper of the pickup truck start vehicle behind us, and the pickup driver started us moving. The Olds engine fired up, and off we went.
I have had fast cars, motorcycles, and flown, but never had such a sensation of pure speed as roaring down those country roads lying on the back of a roadster trying to keep from being bounced off. We would go until the engine got hot (no radiator, remember?), stop, pull the hoses apart and fill it with ditch water, push start again, and fly!
Never again have terror, joy, excitement, and sheer speed come together like that day.
High school graduation came and I moved on. Teek finished his car and drove it for years, but I never got a ride in the finished model. We talked about those days at our 50th reunion, and the memory is still fresh as the day we broke lots of laws riding on Teek’s hot rod.
The pictures are not of Teek’s hot rod or of the canyon the motor came out of, but are good representations.