The Ringing Push-Button Plymouth

We all know of towel-snapping lockerroom behavior, the kind of horseplay you get with a surfeit of testosterone and spare time. The military also gets its share of jokers, coupled with access to better hardware for their jokes, and this last weekend I heard a new one, albeit from long ago.

It began when I called my Dad on Father’s Day and asked him what he remembered of his first Father’s Day.

It was roughly a half century ago, so he can be forgiven for struggling to remember. Mostly what recurred for him was memories of my birth a several weeks earlier, and getting out of the army several weeks later.

Per my About section, I was born at Fort Dix Army Hosptial, and we lived in Trenton for a little over the first month of my life. Dad remembered how he used to commute via bus and hitch-hiking between our apartment on Jackson street in Trenton and Fort Dix. It was a very different world, and several GIs who lived in the area used to go to a streetcorner where folks with cars would give a GI a lift. He remembered several drivers he got to know; an African-American busdriver, a retired highway patrolman from North Carolina, and a guy whose job it was to demolish everything the Army throws away.

It got my Dad reminiscing, including a story involving a fellow soldier, from Wisconsin, a practical joker I’ll call private Anderson. My Dad and Anderson both had to work with a staff segeant who was a bit of a horse’s ass, a loud guy who liked to throw his weight around and was very proud of a new Plymouth he’d bought with the latest fad in auto engineering: push-button technology. The sergeant loved his new wheels and walked around bragging about it all day long — they got tired of hearing about it.

So Anderson got his hands on a little sleigh bell, the kind people used to put on their horses’ harness when they went for those sleigh rides we only know through commercials at Christmastime. You know the ads, selling us on nostalgic rural holidays when families were close-knit and everybody was kind and rosy-cheeked and smelled of roasting turkey and fresh-baked pies, before life got crass and, um, commercial.

Anderson sneaked that sleigh bell out to the push-button Plymouth, crawled underneath it and hooked it up inside, hiding it well. The next time the sergeant started up his baby, his pride and joy, he couldn’t figure out where that little jangling noise came from: he went nuts.

So instead of listening to him bragging about it all the time, they enjoyed how crazy he went complaining about it. How neither he nor the auto dealer could figure out where that damn ringing noise was coming from. He listened for it, and explained how and when it occurred, and obsessed on trying to figure out what the hell had gone wrong with his new wheels.

“You know,” Anderson finally told him, “I think I know how to fix that.”

And he crawled back underneath the fancy new Plymouth, took the bell off, and told the sergeant, “try it now.”

The sergeant was pleased when the crazy-making noise stopped and his car ran just fine. It made life easier for Anderson and my Dad.

So Anderson let him go with that for a while, until the sergeant got obnoxious, and he went out to hook up the bell again.

This went on for a while, with the beneficial effect that the sergeant was in general easier to work with. And every so often, when he wasn’t, the noise would eventually start up again. The sergeant would ask Anderson for help, and he would truculently agree to go out and see if he could fix the Plymouth once more.

Anderson and my Dad were discharged at the same time, and they let the push-button Plymouth run ring-free until the night before they left Fort Dix; then Anderson crawled under the car and hid the sleigh bell inside one last time, before they left forever.

I wonder if the sergeant ever figured it out.

My Dad didn’t remember his first Father’s Day, but that’s okay, I’m not recalling much, either. I hope my Mom picked up a card on my wide-eyed, scrawny behalf. But either way, just asking the question brought back a good story.

Unless your Dad once owned a push-button Plymouth with an annoying ring to it.