I was the second oldest of
eight kids, my youngest brother was the only one of us kids that graduated from
high school. I never liked school. I
never had a favorite teacher there.
We lived in the country 15
miles outside of Detroit
When I was 11 years old I
got my first newspaper route. I had to walk 5 miles on dirt roads to deliver 60
papers.
The last stop on the route
was a gas station and I started hanging out there
I started helping out a
little and they started letting me drink all of the 5 cent cokes I wanted to.
When I was 12 years old every
night around 7 o’clock I would be sent across the street to a small store to
get sandwiches after a while they
started ordering one for me I stopped
going home for dinner and would stay there till 9 every night when we closed
up.
One of the men that worked
there I called BIG Mike. He was in his fifties and a little over weight. He was
one of the best auto mechanics I have ever known.
When he was working, I would
watch everything he did. He made sure I knew why the car brokeand how to fix
it.
He always made sure I knew
why something broke or wore out and how to make it last longer than the old
part.
The first tune up I ever did
was when I was 12 years old; it a 52 Chevy. While Mike sat in the office, he
would let me do the work then he would look it over to make sure I did
everything right. When he found something I did wrong he never got mad he would
just help me fix it.
He taught me how to drive
when I was 12 by just giving me the keys and told me to change the oil and
filter on the car he pointed to. Which meant told me to drive a car inside and
put it up in the air on the hoist, change the oil, then park the car back outside all by myself. After
that I started driving all the time.
Not long after that He gave
me the keys to the pickup and sent me to pull a car in that would not start. I knew the people and how to get there. I hooked up the chain to the car. I slowly started pulling him back to the
station, when I got to the corner that I always turned at when I delivered
papers riding a bike I turned and he went straight. The chain pulled the back
of the pickup around in a circle. We both got out and he said he always turned
on the next block. I was going slow and car bumpers were stronger back then so
there was no damage.
When we got back to the
station I was mad at the guy and told Mike what happened, he listened as I told
him the story, with that look on his face that said you are lucky there was no
damage. All he said was "Did you
signal that you were going to turn?" and walked away.
Big Mike was always up to
something.
He loved women. He would
have me do the work while he sat at the desk and talked to the men and women
that came in for gas. Sometimes he would take one of women into the back room
and shut the door for a while and leave me in charge.
He would bet money on
anything at any time. There was a horse track a few miles from the station. A
lot of the people that worked at the track would come into the station. One day
a jockey from the track came in and told Mike to bet everything he could on a
horse. It was a sure bet. I was about 15 then and was getting paid to work there. We cleaned out the till and
closed the station early and went to the track. I gave him every penny of my next week's pay to
bet o this sure thing. The olds were something like 10 to 1 to win.
The gates opened, my horse
came out like a rocket. By the first turn he was way out in front. I was
already spending the 10 weeks’ pay I was going to get when the unbelievable
happened. The horse was so drugged up it never turned. He went straight though
the fence.
I have never bet on a sure
thing since.
Big Mike was the teacher
that taught me the most about the things I loved and about life, at a point in my life when I had the most to learn.
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