Chapter 33
Jeffee's Further Adventures at College
Begin new adventures at the U of A here – mention Joe Woodard, going to dog track, our apartment on second Avenue near the front gate of Arizona, mentioned Tony the blonde guy I knew married to Izzy.
One of my great buddies in college was this guy named Joe Woodard. I talk about meeting Joe I believe in volume 2 so you have to buy that book to find out how I met Joe. Joe was my buddy from the Army in Pruem, Germany.
I met Joe again through the lucky circumstances of where my parents live. My parents lived in Centerville, Ohio and Joe was going to school up in Cleveland at Case Western University after we both got out of the Army.
Joe came down to visit me in Centerville driving his great 1965 Pontiac GTO. It is one of the classics. Jill and I both started school again in about 1971 his Pontiac GTO faster than hell because he got the engine blue printed which is a way of increasing the speed by getting the maximum tolerances and clearances and everything. It was a great, great car designed by DeLorean himself.
Again fate intervened in my favor of for one of the few times and Joe came down and stayed with us for like two days. As he was getting ready to drive back to Cleveland and Case Western University, his Pontiac GTO started acting up. It did really strange things and basically the engine stopped and we coasted to a stop alongside the road. Joe like I told you elsewhere in my biography, is a pretty good mechanic and pretty good parts man and he quickly figured out that the timing chain was gone on the car and it needed to be replaced.
That was something Joe couldn't do himself. Joe got a tow truck to bring it down to the shop and it was going to take two or three days to get his Pontiac GTO fixed. I put the time to good use and talked Joe into leaving Case Western University and coming with me to the University of Arizona in Tucson. I think Joe was kind of sick of the cold and bad weather because we actually drove up there to Case Western at some point and he showed me around the campus before we drove back to Centerville, Ohio and even then it was February and there was lots of snow on the ground. Joe was telling me Case Western was very expensive even with the discount he got because his mother worked at Case Western University.
So Joe didn't need that much convincing and so as soon as he got his Pontiac GTO fixed we made plans to drive from Centerville,, Ohio to Tucson Arizona. And that was quite an adventure. Joe would be bringing his Pontiac GTO and Jeffee would be bringing one of these funky Volkswagen old-style busses that my sister had been nice enough to give me when I get out of the Army in 1970. I think it was a 1963 Volkswagen bus really funny looking. It had a green exterior with lemons painted on it I think that was an omen. I never did repaint the lemons; I thought the lemons were kind of cute.
The bus was not exactly high-tech because it used the a six volt battery instead of the 12 volt battery like most cars do and in an amazing feat of safety ignorance, Volkswagen had placed the battery in the back where the engine was. The battery basically just sat on a piece of metal next to the engine and if you hit the brakes, the battery would slide back and forth, that's pretty incredible. And one time while I was driving on a city street in Tucson, Arizona the canvas type sunroof that you could slide open and see the world actually ripped off the screws and blew away along with the drivers sliding side window.
So quite a funky bus. We decided on this arrangement. We would always have the Volkswagen bus in front of the Pontiac GTO because let's face it; the Pontiac GTO was a little faster than my Volkswagen bus and its 1500 mL engine. We took turns driving and Joe liked driving my Volkswagen bus and I liked driving his Pontiac GTO.
My bus was kind of fun and funky vehicle and Joe really enjoyed driving it I think we actually slept in the back of the bus a few times when parked alongside the road and didn't feel like paying for a motel. I remember at one point we went through some kind of the toll exit or something or other and Joe and I got on different roads and I was in the Volkswagen bus so I proceeded to drive down the highway which I think was the right road until I found a roadside rest stop and then I parked right next to the highway and prayed to God Joe would come by and lucky for me Joe came by in about half an hour.
I will talk about my adventures at the dog track in another volume of my biography. They were equally bad as many of my other adventurers.
But I will talk about Tony and Izzy. I met them because they moved into my old apartment at second and second then I went back over there for some reason. Tony was 18 and his wife Izzy was 17. There were actually from the New England area and I think their parents were fairly rich but for whatever reason they had come out to the University of Arizona in Tucson. Tony was not exactly what you would call a settled married man and Izzy was constantly getting on him to do something. They had to get married because Tony and Izzy had a baby so they had a little baby to further, their young married life.
Tony was a very good athlete at several sports at least at baseball, tennis and was a golf prodigy. Tony wanted to go golfing so I took him out to Randolph South so Tony could play the first round of golf in his life. Like I said Tony used to play baseball in college before he dropped out and came to Tucson and he watched me swaying and he hit his first drive with a very baseball uppercut type of golf swing. Tony's natural athletic ability was overcoming all of his lack of practice playing golf. We played the fifth hole which was a short par five maybe 470 yards long. Tony pared the fifth hole which was the fifth hole of golf he had ever played in his life. That's what I call natural athletic ability.