During the next two years, a lot happened in our lives. Bill quit his job with the City of Lubbock and enrolled at Texas Technological College to continue working on the degree he had started years before. Since we were going to be tied down (as much as the two of us could be tied down), I decided to enroll to work on my Masters Degree.
We also bought a house. It had three bedrooms and one bath. A single car garage had at one point in time been unattached, but a previous owner had connected the garage to the house with one big room. The house was too big for us, but we often had sports car friends there.
The garage was good to have, but sometimes limited on space to work on our cars. We often took parts into the house and worked on them in the living room. My specialty was the carburetor. I worked them over to get more gas to flow through, but not so drastic we would get caught cheating. The main engine work was done by Bill, but if there was a job requiring small hands, I stepped up to the plate.
The neighborhood kids thought the Porsche was a good slide, but Bill trained them very quickly that it was not a piece of playground equipment. The Sprite was a different matter. If you are familiar with the body style of a Bug-eyed Sprite, you know there was a space behind the two seats. It was the trunk, but there was no “lid” to it. Several times, we found little kids playing back in that area.
If we had to carry something big, we would put it on that back deck, Bill would hold on to it, whether it be a lawnmower or something else like that, and I would drive. We were a sight to behold going down the city streets.
No matter what the weather was like, the cloth top was always off the Sprite. In fact, I’m not sure we even knew where it was. And we kept the windshield wipers in the side pocket. When changing from the regular windshield to the racing windshield, it was easier to not have the wipers to fool with. One time we were driving with our friend, Ann Smith. I was riding on the transmission hump. Rain started to fall. I reached across Ann, grabbed a wiper, and stuck my hand over the windshield to wipe a place for Bill to see out of. Ann just shook her head and said, “You two! I never know what to expect!”
We decided a radio in the Porsche might be nice. We were parked in back of the installation store and witnessed a dog being hit by a car. The dog was severely injured, with no control of his front legs. While waiting for Animal Control to get there, the dog was in mortal pain. He was foaming at the mouth. Someone yelled “Mad dog,” as suddenly, propelled by his back legs, he came ripping toward us. I was frozen to my spot when Bill grabbed my arm and pulled me toward the building. Just before getting to us the dog hit a curb and couldn’t get over it. He was at the spot where I had been standing. He stopped about three feet from us. Bill truly kept me out of harms way that day.
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