Alligators and Style

When I was fifteen years old, living in Southern California, I wanted to aconvertible. My parents bought me a beautiful green ’55 Studebaker commander coupe. But it wasn’t a convertible, so I gleefully donned mask and took up an acetylene blowtorch and torched the roof right off. My mother came out and saw me at it and said, “I think I’m going to be sick.” She just turned around and went inside and left me to my father’s wrath. You can see pictures of it on "The Vision."

It seemed like a good time to get out of town.  So  my good friend Chief and I decided that we would go take a trip to Florida. We had about thirty dollars between us, and we got there by siphoning gas from gas stations after hours.

We finally got to Florida and had a grand time for a week. We made friends with someone who let us crash at their place; in exchange he wanted to borrow the car for a couple hours the next day and said he would meet us at a certain corner.

Trouble is, we were partying so hard that when we woke up the next morning we couldn’t remember which corner it was. After we wandered around for a few hours we finally found the guy and got our car back.

In those days in Florida you could buy baby alligators in plastic bags and take them home. Because of the way I’d sawed off the roof the car, I had buckets in my wheel wells that filled with water when it rained.

A wheel well full of water was a perfect habitat for a baby alligator so we bought one and drove it home with us. At home I kept it in a bathtub. When it got too big I let it loose in the pond on our ranch; as far as I know it lived out its days there.

I rebuilt the Studebaker’s engine so I could turn it into a dragster, adding a McCullough supercharger and getting the car to 104 mph in less than a quarter of a mile, impressive at the time.

That was just the first in a series of race cars; I had an AC Ace after that, and kept racing cars until I was about eighteen, when I got interested in flying machines. It wasn’t until I met Marlon that I started thinking about dragsters again.