1959 Caddy I ran across today...looks like a car from the future still!

[MONSOON]

You gotta love those fins from the 50s. What a great look!

[bobstad]

The memories...

Got my first open-mouth kiss standing at the right-front fender of a near identical one of those, in the headlight beam her car still idling; from Raynelle Smith who'd driven us* back to my red '67 Mustang fastback beater, after the six of us had spent most of the night rowing around on an ox-bow lake on her family's plantation met in a bar in Shrieveport with two of her girl-friends November of '70.(we'd been let off at a dinner theater made from an old tobacco barn her family owned, closed then and boarded up as if long since abandoned to time as had been the previous purpose of the place too...her white Caddy seeming along such lines also, landed gentry almost keeping up appearances vaguely focused on the reasons why)

The car was her parents, a dusty old white boat the exact same model as the one in the pics here; or at least a two-door hard-top, not knowing all the Caddy model designations all that well myself.(my second car after a '57 Metropolitan though, a '37 LaSalle bought with my $500 class of '69 high school graduation present from my parents; another glorious beater in what has now been somewhat of a parade of the type)

Funny story, when the Mustang was replaced by a '59 Volvo during college in Olympia, WA(T. E. S. C.) there'd been a particularly interesting drive into Seattle to get a set of new brake shoes from a parts store on Capitol Hill between Pike and Pine; during which when turning left found me the wrong way on a one-way, so bearing way over to the right into on-coming traffic to try to make the next corner on the block, there was a sickening scrapping sound going past a pristine two-door '59 hard-top, two-tone green Caddy...which for years had me believing had been side-swiped, with my brakes too shot to stop to leave my contact info for the owner so my insurance could cover the damages.

Until finally in Klamath Falls, OR the summer of '88 in a parts store, were a set of heavy twisted steel curb finders for sale on a counter top, when the notion hit me the sound heard passing the Caddy in Seattle was a set of these curb finders my Volvo had set a twanging.(a black Volvo, there was never any sign of green though with that car's crusty "through the trenches" appearance not as remarkable as that might seem)

Raynelle had been a passionate pipe organ student at S. M. U. in Dallas, whom had nailed me a second time with one of her very hot impromptu smackers, in the practice room she'd been given with a two-story tall pipe organ inside.(the whole performing arts facility there was endowed by the late entertainer and comic Bob Hope, which was named for the cheeky fellow)

Also during one of those visits to see her there, she'd played an organ only arrangement of a symphony in D minor by Cesar Frank; the two of us the only ones in the school's fancy recital hall which must've been quite expensive to build, with electrically adjustable acoustic panels covering the ceilings and all other sorts of plush.

Some years later during the fall '90 "Dead" tour in Manhattan walking to Central Park, when drawn to walk up a steep flight of narrow cement stairs to a small door in the back of a not too large looking building there amongst the sky-scraper urban canyons, and opening the surprisingly un-locked door; there was the sacristy of the biggest church imaginable, with far to the other end at the rear the pipes of what must've been an immense organ, in the darkened church looking as if the trunks of many trees in a forest their canopy lost in the ceiling of that place.(forever since regretting never looking for some wine, and the manual)

*Fellow N. T. S. U. saxophone students Ed Reynolds & Steve Dinwitty, both also from Washington state; over to Shrieveport from Denton for Thanksgiving break to visit Ed's relatives.

The photos are of me with my buddy Steve Purdy to my left, on the bench at 1510 W. Hilyard in Eugene, OR.

The logging bridge is one a grandfather built in a day, three college trained engineers said couldn't be done; he'd come out of retirement at his friend Sam Agnew's request to do...there in '60 just upon completion that stood until washed out by a flood in '93.(four 180' logs-see the tiny figure of the designer and constructor on the far left end in the photo standing on top his bridge or perhaps the fellow behind him below by the base on that end; over the Pistol River south of Gold Beach, OR) The way progeny of progeny even if not prodigy, can be helped to finance such life journeys as this person's.

[festivaWES]

I'd hate to replace a windshield in one of those. Squeeze out everywhere~!