My TR4

This picture of a TR4 red Triumph looked much like the one I bought.

Yesterday, We were talking about Triumphs the dog park  and I re-lived the below:

In  July 1965, the same month I returned home from the Navy I bought a new little red Triumph, TR 4, and I think I remember the word Mark II on it too, whatever that means.

I enjoyed driving in the north Georgia mountains with the top down, wheeling around curves that seemed they would never end. 

My lifelong friend Sam Carsley, his co-worker, and I would meet up at Fisherman's Grill many week nights and guzzle beer and solve the world's problems.  

Once Sam and I went to his co-worker's apartment near 10th and 14 Streets.

To get the most benefit of the weather and the coolness of being in a convertible, we drove to his house in Atlanta with the top down.

We drank plenty of beer and when we left his apartment about 11pm it was pouring down raining.  We were not sober enough to correctly snap the buttons to put the top on. 

We drove back to Marietta, me driving with the top town and Sam in a heap under the canvas top shivering and fussing.

Another time in the Triumph I was sitting in the parking lot of a Burger King, probably eating a whopper, when I saw a huge dump truck backing up towards me.  I got closer and closer.  I blew my horn but it just kept coming.  It scraped over the hood, stopped and started driving forward.  The underneath of the dump truck bed was on top of my bashed in hood.  It drug me and the  along.  I kept blowing my horn and by then other people were running up to the driver pointing in my direction.

Oopps!

The dump truck company paid for a body shop and paint job repair with no fuss... shit happens.

After I picked up my Triumph at the body shop I signed off that all was OK, I was satisfied.

A few days later I noticed the straight stick transmission was not working right.  It locked itself in a gear several times.  It was bad of locking itself in reverse and either 3rd or 4th, I forgot which now.

In Atlanta at a red light on Bolton Road near Hollywood  Road the transmission locked up on me... jerking the gear stick back and forth, I finally got it out of the position it was stuck in but got stuck again in reverse and would not change.

I backed my car into a Sinclair Service Station.

I told the mechanic about the trouble I was having and he said he would look at it.  I noticed he was reeking in the smell of alcohol. 

I sat in their showroom/office while the owner ran back and forth waiting on cars wanting gas and hearing the clanks and clangs from the bay of my car being worked on.  The mechanic was also singing loudly.

Once the drunk mechanic stuck his head in the office door and asked his boss if he had a coat hanger.

A coat hanger?

He fixed it.

It lasted about a year more until, I suppose, the coat hanger lost its grip.