My pal Frankie lived around the corner on Alcott Street in an old house with a grape arbor that served as the chute for when we played rodeo cowboy. Frankie was the best pal ever. He also had an atrium where we could keep our pet box turtle. His dog was a German short-haired pointer with a chopped-off tail that loved to chase squirrels but never got one. We read Edgar Allen Poe stories and played Monopoly games that lasted for weeks. When we read “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” we made our own corn cob pipes with stems of hollowed-out grape vines from his arbor. We had to swipe tobacco from my dad’s pouch, and I think he knew it, too, but he never said anything about it.

Frankie’s dad had a factory where they designed and made vibrators called the Dart Vibrator. Lots of people today have vibrators, but these were different. Contractors used these things to settle concrete when it was poured into foundation forms. They were pretty cool devices. They could shake the heavy concrete goo into the form and jiggle out the bubbles so the foundation wouldn’t have weak spots later on when they put a house on it. My Dad was a builder himself, and he thought the people at Frankie’s dad’s factory made a good product, although probably a little expensive.

One day Frankie asked his dad if the guys at the factory could make a chug with a motor. Frankie and I made a lot of chugs. For the chassis, we used a two-by-eight plank my Dad brought home from his work site. We got some wheels at the Army Surplus Store and fixed them on there somehow. For the body, we used a nail keg. When we were kids, contractors could buy eight-penny nails in a wooden keg, which my dad did. We painted it black and then put a big silver number eight on the front. I liked the number eight and Frankie didn’t care much what number we put on there. I liked eight because somebody said if you turn it on its side it looks like the symbol for infinity which I figured must mean without end.

None of our chugs could hold a candle to the one Dart Manufacturing made for Frankie. It had a motor and brakes, a three-speed transmission, and something called a differential that the wheels bolted onto. I don’t know what it did, but it was special to have one of those on your chug because it could go around corners better.

Dart Manufacturing was unlike any business I’d ever seen. In the front part, men and women sat at tall desks making pictures of gears and shafts and electric motors. When you went through a big door at the back of that room, you came into a big, dark room where men in coveralls, heavy boots and safety goggles bent metal or scraped it round on lathes or drilled perfect holes right through the metal so another piece of metal or a bolt could be poked through it. At Dart, they had big stacks of metal for making stuff, I mean actually making metal things from scratch. They seemed to enjoy making Frankie’s chug, too, and would sometimes watch us boys mess around with it.

It was pretty cool. The engine was a kind of lawnmower engine, only bigger. We had to wrap a rope around a spool at the front of the engine and give it a gigantic tug that was darn near bigger than both of us 11-year-olds. But when it would cough into action, it sounded plenty powerful to me. We could hop onto the board seat, push in the clutch, shift it left and down and into first gear, and go.

Frankie taught me how to do that tricky maneuver, and then how to let out the clutch ever so slowly until the thing began to move. Then when it was going, he told me to just let the clutch all the way out

and push the accelerator all the way down.

After I got the hang of that, he showed me how to push the clutch back in while we were moving, and move the gear stick up and to the right. This was called second gear! This time it was easier to let the clutch out and our motorized chug could really fly in second gear.

Then one day he showed me about third. In with the clutch, then straight down! It’s like an “H,” Frankie said, and he sketched it in the air until I got it. After that he showed me about reverse, but we didn’t use it very often.

We weren’t allowed to go anywhere except around the dirt lot by the factory. But that didn’t matter much because at 11 years old we didn’t have anywhere to go anyway. But a couple of years later I noticed that my Dad’s Willy’s Jeep had a gear shift thingie just about the same as Frankie’s chug, so I tried it out without asking Dad, and things went pretty well. I went around the block by myself because I didn’t want anyone to know what I was up to. I managed to get the Jeep back home without a hitch.

That’s when I figured I’d pay Frankie back for all the fun we’d had at Dart Manufacturing, so one day when Dad was gone, I started the Jeep and backed it out of our driveway, onto our street, and headed around the corner to Frankie’s house. Instead of pulling right up to his front door, I went up the alley and stopped at his back gate. I killed the engine, hopped out and went to find Frankie. He didn’t seem to be around, so I checked next door because he liked to hang out with Jimmy sometimes. Jimmy had a pet skunk that had been deodorized and was a darn good pet, once you got past the idea of it. Frankie wasn’t over there, either, so I hopped back over the fence. I figured I’d come back another time so we could have some fun.

The street in front of Frankie’s house was a hill that you didn’t notice much unless you were trying to ride your bike uphill real fast. It also was pretty good for going down in our chug that didn’t have a motor. The alley behind Frankie’s house, where I got out of the Jeep, was like the street, sloping. I didn’t know anything about parking a Jeep until that day. Later on, when my dad stopped yelling at me he showed me about putting the Jeep in gear, shutting off the engine, and setting the emergency brake.

There was a streetcar that ran near Frankie’s house on the downhill side. In those days, people could ride the streetcar downtown to where the Monkey Wards and the Penney’s stores were. I guess it was just bad fortune that the streetcar happened to be going by when the wayward Jeep smashed into it. Mrs. Klugschmidtt had a sore neck from the collision, but she said it really wasn’t too bad. In those days lawyers had other things to do rather than sue over such trifles, so I guess that was fortunate, too.

When Frankie heard about the whole thing, he thought it was pretty funny, and he told me I’d have to practice more with his chug and get my driver’s license before I dared to pick him up for a joy ride. That’s really a good example as to why Frankie was such a good pal.