The Prankster

Dad was known, mainly when he was younger, for being willing to invest a great deal of time in order to pull off a great prank.  And he knew how to work with others.

Not that he wasn't afraid of impromptu fun, either. Once, when he and his younger sister, Aunt Barbara, were walking in the relatively new Lloyd Center Mall in Portland as teenagers, in the middle of the crowd, without any warning whatsoever, he stopped cold, and in his commanding voice announced:

NO! NO, I DON'T CARE IF YOU ARE PREGNANT, WE ARE NOT GETTING MARRIED!!

And then he stormed off, leaving her stunned and speechless, shocked bystanders left to draw their own conclusions and having no way to know they were actually siblings.

Aunt Barbara tells this tale with a chuckle now, but I'm sure it was highly mortifying then, being around 1960 when things weren't as loose as they are now.  I seem to recall that this was not unprovoked, that she had pulled something on him earlier and this was payback.

But this is not the tale to tell with this post.

Dad was a complete gearhead, owing to his propensity to take everything apart to understand it and put it back together again. Following his short stint in the Marines, in fact, he worked at a car dealership doing repair in their garage before getting his first big break with Boeing outside of Seattle in the late 60's. Cranking and wrenching on 1930s and 1940s roadsters was totally his thing back in and after high school.

So he and a group of his compadres set up one of their cars for the event. They rigged up a metal cup of some sort on a hinge or swivel, over the exhaust manifold, which is the hottest thing on a running car. Ran a pull cable or string into the passenger compartment to tip it on demand, and filled it with old motor oil.

Then they filled a few baskets with really critical car engine parts. Things a car absolutely cannot run without. Including things that you can't even get to without a few hours of labor digging into the engine. Things like pistons, pushrods, intake/exhaust valves, rocker arms and springs, radiator hoses, distributor caps, spark plugs and wires.  Major components. And they nested these in the engine compartment of the car.  Mind you, cars in those days had huge engine compartments with lots of extra space, they weren't hyper engineered and packed tight under the hood like cars today.

So then like eight guys would pile into the car and head out for downtown Portland. And when the timing was right and they were drawing up to a very busy intersection and were going to be at the front, someone in the car would pull the wire and tip the cup.

The oil would pour onto the exhaust manifold and instantly create billowing clouds of grey/white smoke that would pour out of the engine compartment. The driver would drop the clutch as they rolled to a stop, making the car lurch a bit before sputtering the engine dead. All the guys would jump out like it was a clown car, throw open the hood, and "go to work!".

So there they are appearing to discuss what's wrong, and guys would grab a part from one of the baskets, a couple guys would look at it, shrug like yeah we don't need that any more, and toss it over their shoulders into the intersection. There were so many guys crowded around the engine compartment that none of the bystanders around them could see what they were actually doing. Over the next 60-90 seconds, these guys are crowded around a heavily smoking car and chucking parts onto the street like nobody's business.

One of the guys was a spotter, and when he saw the light for the other direction go yellow, he gave the signal, everybody jumped back, someone slammed the hood down, they all piled in, started it up, and drove off, leaving a cloud of smoke and critical car part debris and dozens of flabbergasted onlookers to try to process what they'd just watched.

Dad loved telling this story. They did it more than once, sounds like always to great success.  And yeah, they littered, I guess.... but it was the late 1950's. Kids being kids, right?

Good times!