My friend Bob and three free Mustangs

Back in the day, circa mid-seventies, my old pal Kipling had a little stone cottage on Highway 24, right on the curve where it meets County Road 32. Mark Wilson, who started his career at a gas station on Gordon Street, now has one of Canada’s largest used car dealerships on that corner. For a few glorious months in… I’m guessing ‘75 or thereabouts, Kipling was running the smallest car lot in Canada. It only had three cars, but were they ever cool. 1966 Dodge Charger 426 hemi automatic. One of eight sold in Canada. 1969 Nova SS 396/375 automatic. 1969 Nova SS 396/375 four speed with 4.56 gears and, what was considered really cool at the time, a straight-line shifter from either Mr. Gasket or Hurst, I don’t recall, that eliminated the half second it might take your right hand to negotiate an “H” shift pattern. If you happened to be racing for ownerships out on the 86 Dragway, that half second could save your life. So Kipling’s got this dream car lot happening, and it so happens the school bus stop is right in front of his house. There’s this 15 yr old kid from up the sideroad who collects the bus there every morning, and those cars hooked him for life. That was Bob. In the fullness of time, Bob married into the Kipling clan. (Can’t say I blame him; Viv was quite the hottie.) That’s how I got to know him. Once he had his drivers license he was keen on joining the quarter-mile cult. I was in the very early days of my teaching career when Bob gave me the first opportunity to dispense wise teacherly advice. He’d been at Hammonds for maybe ten years, and had an opportunity to earn a Millwright ticket through the company. But he’d rather drive one of their trucks. What should he do? The advice I gave him then still stands; you can always get a class A driving permit (which he already had, thanks to driving farm trucks on the family farm), but a Millwright ticket you can take to the bank. He took the Millwright course. Within a few short years he was head of maintenance in a factory with a couple of hundred employees on the floor. He enjoyed free run of the joint for obvious reasons. A machine could go down anytime anywhere. By then Bob had established himself as expert weed grower. He moved two pounds of home-grown in that factory every week for about twenty years. Sadly, somewhere in that run Bob and I had a terminal falling out. It was all about three free Mustangs. A guy I knew knew a guy who’d just bought an investment property up the road in Kitchener. There was a garage in the back that had three non-operational 1964 Mustangs inside. Dude was a real estate investor, not a car collector. Those three cars were mine. All I had to do was go get ‘em. So I call up my good buddy Bob the Millwright. Hey Bob, gimme a hand getting these ‘stangs outta there and it’ll be two for you and one for me. That’s generous on the face of it, but I wanted the one with the V8 and four speed. The other two (Bob’s) were six cylinder automatics, with bench seats! I’m guessing that in the collector market, an early ‘64 Mustang with bench seats is far more of a rarity than a V8 with four speed and buckets. I round up my Millwright buddy with his car-hauler and tool kit, and we go to collect our free Mustangs. For all the chains and pulleys and come-a-longs in Buddy’s toolkit, we couldn’t get ‘stang number one onto the trailer. This got my pal Bob so pissed off that he went into a wrench-throwing tantrum. I was lucky not to get boinked off the noggin. FUCK THIS Bob proclaimed. It’s kind of a longish walk back to Guelph, so I meekly succumbed to Bob’s termination of the mission, but I have to say that was the death of our friendship. Things were never the same after that. Which is too bad. Bob was a good guy. If I could do it over, here is what I would do differently. Instead of meekly bowing to Bob’s hissy fit, I’d say, hey man, let’s sit down and chill out. Maybe we should burn one. There’s no rush. Who the fuck ever got anywhere in life by giving up when the first try goes awry? Anyway, it wasn’t a long time after that that Bob got a lung cancer diagnosis. Like most cancer patients, he lost the fight, but he died owning a pristine 1969 Nova SS that he had built up himself, plus a new hemi-Challenger after Dodge brought them back. He and Viv were long divorced by then. Ironically, while she never shared his love of the weed, she’s still happily wheezing away while she smokes four packs a day.