1977
Being newly married with a pregnant wife and a house payment, living in the poorest county in South Jersey where a lot of locals would work the tourist trade in the summer and then take unemployment through the winter, year round jobs were hard to find.
I had a bit of experience doing fiberglass having worked for a couple of friends that built animated creatures and such for boardwalk rides and scary houses, along with water slides. The boys got into a bad deal with a couple of unscrupulous shysters and about lost their shirts. Wondering if pay was going to be there at the end of the week took a toll on me and the nesting wife so new employment was in the cards.
There was a new outfit that moved into the converted WW11 outbuildings in the same rural airport complex that I had been working in and they were building fiberglass pools. I applied and was hired on.
Don was the ramrod in charge and he referred to the owner as Captain Goofy.
Don was a transplant from South Philly, his formative youth in the '50's, and would tell me how you could blow up cars with gasoline and a broken brake lightbulb, how to disable cars with a potato in the exhaust pipe and how to create a backfire for laughs, among a myriad of delinquent trivia.
Captain Goofy probably had connections to Uncle Louie and da boyz, if you catch my drift. He liked maximum profit with minimum expense, so rigging was an aspect of the job.
I'll mention that working in glass and resin is a hot job, temperature wise, aggravated by working in a metal hangar. Being summertime we would start early in the dark and finish for the day in the early afternoon.
We had finished a pool and it needed to be towed out of the hangar so it could be lifted off the mold. To haul the behmouth out, there was a tow motor of sorts, kinda like a gasoline powered forklift without the forks. The fly in this ointment was that the fuel pump didn't work. Captain Goofy knew it needed repair but maximum profit, minimum expense ruled.
Don came up with the idea that I could pour gasoline from a repurposed Methel-ethel keytone peroxide plastic jug into the carburetor while he drove.
So here we go, Don driving, me hanging on the side trying carefully to piss in the toilet, so to speak.
It worked, but the jostling led to spilling on the sides and the engine spitting and sputtering until it backfired and stalled sending a flame into the Molotov cocktail that I'm holding which caught flame. Tossing the jug AWAY from me was the priority and there she goes, rolling and spilling flame, heading towards a plane that was anchored out on the tarmac. Did I mention it was an active airport for Cessna's and such?
Don bailed and retrieved a fire extinguisher before any damage occurred to the plane ahead.
Once the sun came up bright you could see the zig zag chemical trail from the extinguisher and thus where the flames had been, and that was a little to close for comfort. Airport personnel were a bit curious as to what happened. Myself being the grunt of the operation had left Don to do the 'splainin.
I decided to seek other employ and became a cable guy soon after that (No experience? Pregnant wife? House mortgage? This guy will show up to work every day. Hire him)
Being newly married with a pregnant wife and a house payment, living in the poorest county in South Jersey where a lot of locals would work the tourist trade in the summer and then take unemployment through the winter, year round jobs were hard to find.
I had a bit of experience doing fiberglass having worked for a couple of friends that built animated creatures and such for boardwalk rides and scary houses, along with water slides. The boys got into a bad deal with a couple of unscrupulous shysters and about lost their shirts. Wondering if pay was going to be there at the end of the week took a toll on me and the nesting wife so new employment was in the cards.
There was a new outfit that moved into the converted WW11 outbuildings in the same rural airport complex that I had been working in and they were building fiberglass pools. I applied and was hired on.
Don was the ramrod in charge and he referred to the owner as Captain Goofy.
Don was a transplant from South Philly, his formative youth in the '50's, and would tell me how you could blow up cars with gasoline and a broken brake lightbulb, how to disable cars with a potato in the exhaust pipe and how to create a backfire for laughs, among a myriad of delinquent trivia.
Captain Goofy probably had connections to Uncle Louie and da boyz, if you catch my drift. He liked maximum profit with minimum expense, so rigging was an aspect of the job.
I'll mention that working in glass and resin is a hot job, temperature wise, aggravated by working in a metal hangar. Being summertime we would start early in the dark and finish for the day in the early afternoon.
We had finished a pool and it needed to be towed out of the hangar so it could be lifted off the mold. To haul the behmouth out, there was a tow motor of sorts, kinda like a gasoline powered forklift without the forks. The fly in this ointment was that the fuel pump didn't work. Captain Goofy knew it needed repair but maximum profit, minimum expense ruled.
Don came up with the idea that I could pour gasoline from a repurposed Methel-ethel keytone peroxide plastic jug into the carburetor while he drove.
So here we go, Don driving, me hanging on the side trying carefully to piss in the toilet, so to speak.
It worked, but the jostling led to spilling on the sides and the engine spitting and sputtering until it backfired and stalled sending a flame into the Molotov cocktail that I'm holding which caught flame. Tossing the jug AWAY from me was the priority and there she goes, rolling and spilling flame, heading towards a plane that was anchored out on the tarmac. Did I mention it was an active airport for Cessna's and such?
Don bailed and retrieved a fire extinguisher before any damage occurred to the plane ahead.
Once the sun came up bright you could see the zig zag chemical trail from the extinguisher and thus where the flames had been, and that was a little to close for comfort. Airport personnel were a bit curious as to what happened. Myself being the grunt of the operation had left Don to do the 'splainin.
I decided to seek other employ and became a cable guy soon after that (No experience? Pregnant wife? House mortgage? This guy will show up to work every day. Hire him)
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