There are a couple of Hubskiites that know my dad, and anybody that knows my dad knows that he is ALL stories. Dude has lived an incredible life. This is one we all know by heart... --- My dad grew up in a sleepy little suburb far east of Los Angeles, called Sierra Madre. He was dead-center in the middle of the 1950's Southern California car culture. He personally knew Von Dutch, Edelbrock, Carroll Shelby, Bondurant, Gurney, Disney, and the Los Angeles Rams. And he was a hoodlum of the 1950's variety... doing burnouts on main street in front of the soda shop... illegal drag racing... he was basically living the movie American Graffiti: The cops in town were the washouts from other departments elsewhere. Complete muppets. Incompetent and harmless. So my dad and his friends used to mess with them... In the middle of town there is a cannon, which is a war memorial: One night, my dad and his friends see the cops "hiding" in one of their usual spots, surveilling the main street area, and decide to mess with them. So, they each pretend to be hiding things in their coats, and one-by-one, sneak up to the nose of the cannon and put something into the open barrel. The cops see this, throw on their lights, and come screeching up to the cannon, lights and sirens blazing, to "catch the kids in the act, before they blow something up!" One cop lines the boys up alongside the cannon, and is reading them the riot act, while the other cop has his flashlight out, and is slowly inching around the muzzle of the cannon to look inside. My dad's best friend Mike O'Donnell is standing closest to the back of the cannon, and as the cop with the flashlight gets his head around the front of the muzzle, Mike leans down and shouts "BOOM!" into the open breech. The cop FREAKS OUT... flashlight goes flying... he panics and runs back to the idling police car... slams it in reverse... tears the open passenger door off the police car as he burns out in reverse... and screams off down the street, leaving his partner and the boys laughing their asses off. Ladies and gentlemen... my father.
