Memories

 

On TV I just heard a local traffic report of a wreck on Bolton Road  in Atlanta.  It brought back memories.  I knew Bolton Road well.  I worked for Sinclair Refining Company and their building was one block off Bolton.  

Do you know there is an elaborate ghostly  pet cemetery  on Hollywood Road, near Bolton Road?  Also do you know there was a Dairy Queen on Bolton Road.  My memory also reminds me Mr. Coffee, an elderly Sinclair co-employee lived on Bolton Road.  Mr. Coffee was old then so well…

There was also a Sinclair Service Station on Bolton Road and that is what I am building up to which occurred in 1967, just a couple of months before I married Anna.

There was a Burger King on nearby Marietta Blvd.  One day I was sitting in my little red Triumph eating my Whopper and a dump truck backed up, did not see me and the bottom of his load landed on my hood and when he started forwarded his truck bed bottom caught something on my car and drug me and my little red toy sideways across the parking lor.  I tooted my little shrill horn until the driver realized he was about to kill me and stopped.  Afterwards the company the guy worked for agreed to pay all damages to my little sports car.

Which they did (we thought).  After I thought all were fixed and I signed papers saying so, my transmission started acting up.  It was 4 in the floor.  Sometimes it would  clamp up on a gear when shifting.  Sometimes, when parked, it was hard to wiggle it out of reverse. 

Then one day on Bolton Road at a red light, when the light change I could not get the thing in first to take off.  I forgot how I did it but somehow I got it to the Sinclair Station.  The owner said he could fix it, for me to make myself comfortable and he would have it fixed in no time.  He was drunk as a coot.  What choice did I have.

I had a seat in his show room and I heard him in the bay singing, banging, cursing, banging, and hollering  “Mother Fucker”! a few times.  Then told his helper, “I see the problem, go in there, get one of the coat hangers and bring to me.  The helper did as he was told and drunk did something with the coat hanger and the car was fixed.  He didn’t charge me much as I remember.

I’ll have to ride down Bolton Road and see how it has changed, its about 53 years since the Triumph incident.