“It seemed like a perfectly good idea at the time.”
— T-shirt the guy in the next cell was wearing.
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I got a ticket. A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.
The aged and torn City of Los Angeles traffic citation dated August 17, 1967, was exhumed last week from its cardboard crypt of misfiled memories. A vivid reminder that havoc happens during those temporary losses of good judgement.
We all have them. Tell me you don’t!
Flashback to that year, a couple of weeks before the end of the spring semester at Kilgore College. I arrived home on a Friday afternoon. Mom was in the kitchen on the phone with her little brother in California. Everyone talked on the phone in the kitchen. Because that’s where the phone was, and the cord wasn’t long enough to go anywhere else.
“Tell Uncle Bill ‘Hello’,” I hollered.
Before I could drop my laundry bag by the washing machine, Mom called, “Come talk to Bill.”
“Do I want to come work for you in California this summer,” I responded to my uncle? “This a trick question, right?”
And just like that, I was Southern California dreamin’. Hot rod cruising nightly at Bob’s Big Boy drive-in. Beach Boys on the radio and the juke box. Dune buggies running the sand hills at Pismo. Surfboards and bikini watching Saturday afternoons at Malibu.
Reality, however, was centered on summer jobs to afford school. Not on a 19-year-old’s daydream coming true. This was a job offer. Uncle Bill was the body shop manager at a Volkswagen dealership in the Los Angeles suburb of Canoga Park.
Now, fast forward a few weeks. I’m balancing college money budget with that California dreamin’ thing when I spot a newspaper ad at my uncle’s house. “FOR SALE: 1929 Model A hot rod, 1946 Ford chassis, 1954 DeSoto “Firedome” Hemi V-8 motor. Needs finishing and paint.”
Visions of one cool car for cruising kept me working on it at nights.
Finally mechanically sound and finally prepped for paint, Ralph Kyger, the incredibly talented auto painter at the shop where I worked was called on to apply the bright red enamel.
Ralph painted VWs by day, and high-end, classics, and custom cars by night. He was my mentor for skills that I would use to finance the rest of my college career back home at Sandlin Chevrolet and Olds, and Surratt and Heimer body shops.
Granted, these are great memories. But here is where this one lapse of good judgement reared its ugly head. When I failed to transfer the old car’s registration at the courthouse.
Mount Pleasant friend and classmate, Ronnie Lilly, made the trip from Texas with me calling on his ’57 Chevy to make the journey. In a brief delusional lack of good sense, we decided that transferring the front plate off Ronnie’s car to the old Ford was a good idea to drive the 15 miles for painting. Done, I headed for the shop on back streets while Ronnie stopped to gas up his car.
That was well and good until the one turn required onto a busy street to reach my destination … just as a black and white Plymouth passed with LAPD on the door. I knew I was busted when the cruiser lit up doing a U-turn.
Standing streetside, the officer silently inspected the car and my driver’s license. “I can’t believe you drove this thing all the way from Texas,” he said suspiciously. Choosing my words carefully, I simply said, “I’ve done a lot of work on it. Taking it over to Thousand Oaks for a paint job tonight.”
Then just as I began to breathe again, Ronnie caught up. The Chevy’s brake lights came on, he pulled over and backed up to meet us. The officer’s eyes went to the Texas plate on the back of Ronnie’s car, then to the matching plate on the hot rod.
“Registration, please,” he said.
It was a different day and time back then, even in California. Issuing me citations for “no proper registration” and “no valid plates displayed,” all the officer said was, “Cool car. Go get it painted tonight, then get it registered tomorrow.”
In today’s California, or even in today’s small town anywhere, what seemed like a pretty good idea back then would likely mean jail time today.
Wearing that T-shirt.
—Leon Aldridge
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Aldridge columns are featured in these publications: The Center Light and Champion, The Mount Pleasant Tribune, the Rosenberg Fort Bend Herald, the Taylor Press, the Alpine Avalanche, the Fort Stockton Pioneer, the Elgin Courier, The Monitor in Naples, and Motor Sports Magazine.
© Leon Aldridge and A Story Worth Telling 2025. Excerpts and links may be used, provided full and clear credit is given to Leon Aldridge and ‘A Story Worth Telling’ with appropriate and specific directions to the original content.
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