Flashy ride won’t mend a broken heart

During the summer of 1967, the Boy Scouts invited me to work in Montreal, Canada, at Expo '67, the World's Fair celebrating the 100th year of Canadian confederation. My job was stamping passports at the Ethiopian pavilion.

One afternoon, two ravishing girls came by and I dutifully entered the Ethiopian seal into their passports.

"Where y'all from?" Her voice made my knees buckle. She thought I was Ethiopian and was surprised when I told her the garb I was wearing was a Boy Scout uniform. Her name was Cheryl and she was from Atlanta.

When my shift ended, Cheryl was out front waiting. We strolled through the Expo '67 complex. She was 19. I was 16, but I told her I was 18.

We gazed into each other's eyes each afternoon until she left for Atlanta a few days later. After my stint at the Ethiopian pavilion, I took the train back home. All I could think about was Cheryl.

I wrote her every second day during grade 12, about 150 letters, and she wrote back almost as many. We planned on seeing each other the next summer after I finished high school.

I decided to call her one February evening, but didn't want my parents to know. So I went to a local telephone booth with $5 in quarters, enough for about four minutes. I listened to Cheryl's sultry Southern drawl for an eternity before hanging up. The payphone immediately rang, so I answered, thinking it might somehow be Cheryl, but it was the operator demanding $40 in overtime charges.

"Forty dollars!" I told her I had to wash 133 cars at my part-time job for that kind of money. She was sympathetic but warned if I didn't pay, they would charge Cheryl's number. With an hour's reprieve, I scraped up the money then dropped 160 quarters into the payphone.

That summer, I washed cars at the dealership, daydreaming about Cheryl most of the time. I promised her that if I got an entry scholarship for university, I would visit her in Atlanta, so when the scholarship materialized, I called with the news.

I still can't believe my parents let me go. I was 17 and had only been on an airplane once.

"You're not going there looking like some kind of a hick." From Mum's tone I knew wherever she was headed, I would oblige. "You're wearing a suit on that airplane."

So, like an imbecile, I wore my Sunday best on the overnight flight to Atlanta. My outfit consisted of a black miracle-fiber suit, a white shirt and a thin black tie with a shimmering green stripe down the center. A pair of hopelessly pointed fake alligator shoes complemented the ensemble. I looked like a cross between Jerry Lee Lewis and Liberace.

I spent the night talking to everyone on the airplane. Before meeting Cheryl at the Atlanta airport, I went into the washroom, filled the sink with water, and plunged my head into it. After drying my hair with paper towels, I slicked everything back into a ducktail with a high frontal wave à la Troy Donahue.

Cheryl was waiting by the baggage claim. She was more beautiful than I remembered and had an equally stunning girlfriend in tow. Two drops of water trickled from my hair into my left eye. I suppose they thought I was crying. Her friend stifled a giggle as I lugged Mum's Samsonite suitcase out of the airport and placed in into the trunk of a new red Cadillac convertible. I had never been in a Cadillac and made sure to tell them.

"Why don't we stop and get something to eat?" Cheryl suggested, as I soaked up Atlanta from the back seat of the Caddy.

At the restaurant, I didn't understand much of the menu and ordered what Cheryl did. I started talking about cars, but they didn't seem excited that my dad's new pickup truck was one of the few in my hometown with the optional 352-cubic-inch V-8 engine.

Dinner dates back home didn't amount to more than a couple of plates of fries with gravy and and a bill over a few dollars was considered hefty. So when the $56 tab came, parting with more than half of my spending money for the week was a real shocker.

At Cheryl's house, I met Mother. Daddy was away on business. Cheryl invited me into the backyard and, after I commented on never having been at a house with a swimming pool, advised me she had to go out and wouldn't return until midnight.

I smelled a rat. And then she told me she was meeting the guy she was about to marry.

"But y'all can borrow Mother's car and go for a drive."

I thought about the flashy Cadillac ragtop and cheered up. After she left, Mother told me her car was in the garage, in front of the Caddy. The blue 1964 Ford Falcon didn't even have whitewall tires.

I cruised around in the Falcon, rubber-necking at a world I had only ever imagined. When I got hungry, I stopped by a Kentucky Fried Chicken and brought the booty back to Cheryl's house.

Getting out of the car, I slammed the door on my thumb and it swelled to twice its normal size. That evening, I watched color TV for the first time. Her mother and I chatted during commercials, mostly about plans for the upcoming wedding.

Two days later, Cheryl drove me to the airport in the red Cadillac. We didn't talk much. My slicked-back hair was blowing in the wind. My thumb was throbbing. Or maybe it was my bruised heart as it was my first real lesson in love.

I would find it again soon enough, but much closer to home. My time with Cheryl was the first and last for the miracle-fiber suit, fake alligator shoes and Mum's Samsonite suitcase.

Garry Sowerby, author of "Sowerby's Road: Adventures of a Driven Mind," is a four-time Guinness World Record holder for long-distance driving. His exploits, good, bad and just plain harrowing, are the subject of World Odyssey, produced in conjunction with Wheelbase Communications. Wheelbase is a worldwide provider of automotive news and features stories.