Go-kart Fever

Most of the time life runs along without anything out of the ordinary. Then there are coincidences, and you notice those.

Other people’s lives run parallel to our own, and, as I learned in Miss Adriana Barrera’s Geometry class 50 years ago, parallel lines don’t intersect. Lives lived in parallel are the usual way, and crossing lines are rare. Not impossible, as Euclid would have it, but unusual.

That must be why coincidences are memorable, and the rest of our experiences get puréed into a memory soup of indistinguishable repetitions of the same.

Last November I was looking for a photo of my dad in a box of family memorabilia retrieved from his house near Garner State Park, when I found a photo of the go-kart I’d built in 1962.

A couple of days later, at the memorial service in Laredo for my father, Chester Long asked me if I’d ever got the old go-kart running.

Double intersecting lines! two years earlier in Rio Frio, Chester and Becky had helped me box the stuff my parents had accumulated in 50 years of marriage, so he could sell the house. The photos were in those boxes, and then he remembered the go-kart.

Hence a story inspired by that coincidence.

To say that boys, say twelve to fourteen, in 1962 were into cars, motor scooters, motorcycles, and go-carts — anything on wheels powered by a gasoline engine — would be an understatement. The only competition for our interest were local sports, Top-40 songs on the radio, and, of course, the still unmapped terra incognita of girls. School? What school?

If you’ve marveled at the laser-sharp focus of boys’ attention to video games nowadays, you’d have recognized it in our obsession with engines and cars 55 years ago. What boys today can’t walk past without stopping to watch on video displays is a recent innovation. The equivalent back in the olden days was the irresistible appeal of an engine’s noise. How indelible is the image of a car in a Laredo driveway back then, engine idling and revved at intervals, hood up, and a ring of fascinated boys leaning over the fenders savoring the connoisseur’s pleasures of exhaust fumes, smoky oil, and hot rubber, offering self-appointed experts’ opinion on the horsepower of the engine?

Only this fascination can explain things like our listening to hours of the Indianapolis 500 race on the radio every Memorial Day. How else to account for us considering Mario Andretti and A. J. Foyt to be just as important as John Wayne, Mickey Mantle, The Rondels, and John Kennedy?

The whimsically spelled go-kart was still a novelty the summer I tried to build one in the backyard. Art Ingels, race car engineer working in Los Angeles, assembled the first one out of scrap metal and a lawn mower engine. His first test drive of the miniature race car had been only six years before in the parking lot of the Rose Bowl.

The go-kart was an idea whose time had come, and its popularity was immediate. At the same moment, one-horsepower Briggs & Stratton and Tecumseh lawn mower engines were in mass production to power the lawn mowers needed to cut the grass in front of every suburban tract house across America. They were relatively inexpensive and driving fast was the extreme sport of the day.

Since my father worked where lawn mowers were repaired, I asked him if he’d give me a repairable, unclaimed engine so I could build my own go-kart. He’d grown up building boats and working on cars with his brothers and the neighborhood gang in Port Arthur and was always happy to support my DIY projects.

Some mail-order plans from Popular Mechanics soon arrived, but no amount of studying and day-dreaming was ever going to make that professionally molded aluminum and welded steel chassis race car anything more than a boy’s fantasy.

The alternative was a contraption of two-inch angle iron bolted together, a jalopy not much more sophisticated than the Little Rascal’s runaway wheeled bobsleds I’d seen on Saturday morning TV. My dad had a welder make front axle assemblies and a steering wheel. The next afternoon sweat dripped off my forehead and on to the pieces, as I wore out 1/4” drill bits boring holes in the iron frame.

I talked my parents into letting me withdraw savings accumulated from my namesake grandfather’s Christmas checks to purchase a bag of bolts and nuts, 4 wheels, a couple of pillow block bearings, a centrifugal clutch, rubber V-belts, and a pulley to mount on the rear drive axle. My dad’s toolbox was at hand.

The old engine was revived with new spark plugs and a carburetor clean out. I worked on the assembly, though my attention was less focused on craftsmanship than on anticipating the thrill of high speed just 6” off the pavement… well, that and how much more noise the engine could make. I experimented with various muffler mods before finally choosing a really effective noise-maker made of half-inch galvanized water pipe. The rumble wasn’t worthy of a Harley-Davidson, but then no one would confuse it with a lawn mower. When my mother ran to the door to see what the roar was the first time I tried it, I knew I was on to something.

The problem with all the attention to speed and noise was that there was never any planning for a way to stop the vehicle. It may sound incredible even to the minimally safety conscious reader but designing and installing a brake system just fell through the cracks. On those hot afternoons, all the fun was in getting going. Later in life (if you are fortunate enough to survive these things) you learn to plan for projects’ endings, but at age twelve the go-kart was all about the thrill of racing forward, not stopping.

In no time I got to that dangerous place where was no brake, and no patience to wait until the go-kart had one either.

Brake or no brake, one Saturday afternoon I talked my father into letting me take it on a test run in the south parking lot of Lamar Junior High two blocks away. Perhaps my excitement was contagious, or maybe he just overlooked the minor detail of the missing brake.

Dad and I rolled the go-kart down the drive and into the street. After some huffing and yanking on the starter rope, the engine sputtered and caught. I scrambled into the driver’s seat.

Did you notice that I wasn’t wearing a helmet?

Easy to forget that back then I’d never seen a helmet on anyone other than a Martin High football player, a fighter pilot, a soldier in a Washington’s Birthday parade, or a race car driver. It was a different time: we didn’t have a car with seat belts until we got a ‘64 Chevy Impala in 1965, you could buy DDT and arsenic at the garden store, and there were no health warnings on cigarettes. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring would come out later that year, and Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed was still three years away. Laredo didn’t have real snowflakes, much less the metaphorical kind people mock nowadays.

I put on the gas with the little cable mounted at my side. More noise as the rpm’s increased and the clutch began to engage. A little more gas, and a little more. I moved slowly forward. To say that it accelerated would be more lie than exaggeration. The engine slowed down as it labored to power the load down Garfield Street. My father was walking along beside me faster than the go-kart.

When I turned up the hill on Milmo Avenue headed for Lamar, the unwilling and unable engine coughed and died. Far from the racer I’d imagined, this go-kart was out of  The Little Engine That Could. “I think I can. I think I can…” were not at all what I had in mind.

The combination of its iron frame and my 80 lbs. aboard, the go-kart was just too heavy for the single horse in the engine, and there was no low gear to help us up the slope.

But with a never-say-die — or more accurately — stubborn attitude, I left it on the side of the road and ran up to Mier Street in search of neighbors to push the go-kart where the engine couldn’t. Chester wasn’t home, so Beto Piña and Johnny Snyder were pressed into service. My dad stood there watching for traffic.

Back in the vehicle, I fired up the motor again. Dad waved us on, unaware of the danger ahead. Beto and Johnny pushed me up the hill to the corner, and I began rolling down the slope of Mier toward the Lamar parking lot a hundred yards away.

If the go-kart was a weakling uphill, it was a beast going down. In seconds, I was doing 15 miles per hour and gathering speed quickly. Everything was great. The lust for speed was completely satisfied.

And then the too-late recognition: I’d spent enough time on bicycles to know that I was going way too fast to make the left turn into the parking lot over the 3-inch curb.

No brake and no way to obey my dad’s shouts as he chased me down the street, arms waving. “Slow down!” “Put on the brakes.”

What brakes?

I hadn’t cared about the brake, and he hadn’t noticed. Too late to install one now.

In the last second as I approached the turn, no safe alternative occurring to me, in a moment of empty-headed “hey, watch this!” hillbilly folly natural to us with Appalachian DNA, I managed to hang a tire-screeching hard left on two wheels into the lot. My dad’s frantic “Look out!” could well have been the last thing I’d ever hear.

Hitting the curb, the go-kart caught some impressive air, and some would say that fate, others the laws of gravity and physics, or good luck, or statistically meaningless randomicity, or my guardian angel, depending on your religious affiliation, kept it from rolling over.

The go-kart and I landed with a thud in the gravel and skidded to a stop. Only my father’s face was whiter than mine. Beto and Johnny were red-faced at the top of the hill, doubled over with laughter, unconcerned about my brush with death. There was no more test driving in the parking lot that afternoon.

And that was the one and only run of the go-kart, Chester.

On the Monday after, my dad took the motor and reusable parts back downtown and sold the rest for scrap at the junkyard. We already had a long-standing unspoken agreement not to talk about this sort of adventure within earshot of my mom. Wise to our conspiracy of silence, she never asked what happened to the afternoon go-kart project.

Ever since, that missing go-kart brake has reminded me not to neglect the dull duties of finishing.

Not that I’ve done a very good job figuring out how to stop this runaway tale.