Ted and Bob

We had borrowed the "Silver Bullet" van from Scott Gressitt. It had been used for too many Bionic Erectors jobs, and the tires were rather worn. We were going to pick up an engine & transmission in someplace like Paterson, to put into Bob's BMW 1600 . We got onto Rt. 287 outside Morristown and started zipping along in slushy snow. Traffic slowed down ahead of us and Bob put the breaks on. In an instant, the van did a 180 and came to rest in the breakdown lane facing oncoming traffic. It was as though we had simply pulled over to the side of the highway, except we were facing the wrong way. Both ashen-faced, Bob asked Ted whether we should just kill the road trip right there. Ted's response was that we had probably passed the milestone event for the day, and they should just press on with the mission. Bob's comment was that "It probably can't get any worse..."

They finally found the house and took the entire motor out of the car in the backyard with light snow falling. They ended up putting the whole engine assembly on some cardboard or carpet and sliding it down the seller's slushy lawn to the van. With brute force, the three of them loaded the greasy, dirty motor assembly into the back of the van where it looked like some kind of dead animal. After it was all loaded, Bob asked the seller why he was parting the car out instead of selling the whole thing. He responded in a furtive voice: "Uh, no title." Nuf said. Bob and Ted beat a hasty retreat.

After finding an on ramp, they crawled through the growing snow storm back toward Mendham. The 45 minute drive had become a 2 hour-plus marathon. When they finally made it into Mendham on Rt. 24, they rounded the turn by Tingley Road to discover their mother and sister off the road in a snowy ditch. When the turned around to go back and push the family's Dodge Aspen out, somebody else was already there. Dave Haslam, Chris Cole, and Keith Markinson were working to free the car. As the snow kept falling, we all pushed the car back onto the road. Jeanne insisted on thanking all of the boys by providing dinner. It wasn't until they arrived at the house that it was discovered that Brian Nelson chose never to get out of the car to help. Doubtless some karmic disaster later befell him.

After a welcome meal of homemade soup and bread, the parents went off to bed and Bob and Ted settled down to a celebratory glass of whiskey to mark surviving the long day. It was then that Bob looked up and said: "Aren't Steve, Maura, and Jeff Troast supposed to be driving back from Maine today? Yup. Not ten minutes later the phone rang. After listening to a clearly exhausted and frustrated Steve for a few minutes, Bob finally said: "so how does this involve me?" Cutting to the chase, Steve explained that they had been having ignition problems with his Saab 95 for most of the trip from Maine to New Jersey. Repeated efforts to re-time the engine along the way had finally culminated in a set of cracked points. Unbelievably, this did not stop them. Jeff Troast had managed to clip the points together with a hemostat, clamp the hemostat into the battery, and arc-weld them back together with a Maura's gold earring. McGyver's got nothing on Jeff...

Steve's request was for Bob and Ted to hop in the newly liberated Dodge Aspen and bring them a spare set of points from a cache in the garage. (Ted chose not to take this opportunity to chastise Steve with a reminder to always follow Sal Mineo's advice to stow your previous ignition parts in the car whenever you do a tune-up.) So, after escaping death in the Silver Bullet earlier in the day, Bob and Ted hopped in the Aspen and delivered a set of points to Steve, Jeff, and Maura at a rest stop near the Tappen Zee bridge. Jeff installed them and angrily threw the gold-soldered set off into the snow, thereby destroying all evidence of a remarkable repair.

Amazingly, both cars returned back to Mendham without incident.