Oh, the places a little T-bird roadster can take you

I saw a sweet little black ’57 T-bird ragtop roadster tooling down the street the other day, and I couldn’t help but think of my Uncle George.

I guess nobody in the family was all that surprised when my Uncle George pulled up to the curb in front of our house in his shiny new Ford Thunderbird that Sunday long ago when I was eight or nine years old. He was, after all, my mother’s brother, and he often came to visit.

But never in a car that cool.

He was the only one in the family who could afford a ride like that, because my father and all my other uncles were manual laborers — carpenters, cement men, steel workers — who drove sensible station wagons that matched their budgets. But Uncle George was a successful businessman with an office high up in Chicago’s brand-new Prudential Building, the tallest skyscraper in Chicago at the time, the most blue-chip business property in town.

It might have been a bit surprising for others to see Uncle George zipping around with the top down in a little roadster like that, because he wasn’t what you would call “sporty.” But he certainly was what you would call “impulsive,” so a T-bird on his resume wouldn’t raise family eyebrows all that much.

In fact, you might say that “impulsive” was Uncle George’s middle name.

He would never even have become a successful executive if it weren’t for his impulsive response to the employer’s question when he walked in as a young man to apply for a job: “Do you have a business degree?”

“Yes,” George answered. It seemed like the right thing to say, even though he had never spent a day of his life on a college campus.

“From which university?” asked the man.

George scanned his brain for the name of a college, but couldn’t come up with one. But hey, this was Chicago, and a city that big probably had a college named after it, right?

“University of Chicago?” he ventured — as it turns out, one of the finest universities in the world. Go figure.

The man wrote it down. Nobody bothered to check transcripts way back then, I guess, because George ended up working for that company for decades.

He was good at his job, which was a bit surprising because he was also an impulsive scamp. Once, when a mouse somehow found its way into his office, he corralled it beneath a coffee cup and then spent most of the day fashioning a “saddle” from rubber bands, and a paper-clip “leash.” The plan was to take his new pet for a stroll through the secretarial pool, launching shrieks that would echo down Randolph and Michigan Avenues.

Try a stunt like that today and you’d get a call from human resources, animal welfare groups, and probably spark a secretarial “me too” movement to boot. But no such calls or movements took place way back then — mostly because the mouse bit Uncle George on the finger and bolted before he could put his mischievous plan in place.

His company benefits included a housing allowance generous enough to live in high-rent properties like Marina Towers, but Uncle George found addresses like that a bit too pretentious and stuffy when he tried them. He preferred much smaller suburban digs, and even lived for a while in a trailer park on Touhy Avenue way outside the Chicago limits, which he loved because he actually got to know his neighbors.

Still, his wife — my Aunt Dorothy — loved the posh life. She displayed every imaginable Hummel figurine and Bradford Exchange decorative plate on delicate glass shelves. She smoked her menthol cigarettes in a long cigarette holder, and she refused to drink beer unless it came in a tall-stemmed pilsner glass. If you saw her at their trailer park home, “Green Acres” would come to mind.

Uncle George’s tastes, by contrast, were far more common. His greatest passion was ice-fishing, and his impulsiveness led him often onto the first ice of the season, when (he believed) the fishing was best. But he rarely got the chance to prove his theory, because he broke through the ice and lost all his gear three years in a row. The price, I guess, of impulsiveness.

Still, when I came home from college on Christmas breaks, he was the only one I could tempt to hit the lakes and rivers when the temperature dipped below zero. On one blistering cold day I arranged to pick him up at dawn, but he answered the door in pajamas with apologies for oversleeping. While I sipped coffee, he rummaged through a closet for his ice fishing gear and kept finding surprises he had bought on impulse but never used. “You golf, don’t you?” he said as he handed me a dozen new golf balls. “What’s this?” he said, pulling out an unopened box about a foot square. It was a state-of-the-art, portable, battery-powered Sony TV. This, too, he gave to me. And an army surplus insulated flight suit. Complete with arctic gloves.

When he retired and Aunt Dorothy died, Uncle George moved to a houseboat in the Ozarks and took up with a brassy redhead because — well, it seemed like a fun thing to do at the time. Many in our family were scandalized, but I thought it was vintage Uncle George.

Uncle George is long gone, but he sprang back to life the other day when I saw that sweet little black ’57 T-bird drop-top roadster tooling down the road, the spitting image of the car he drove when he pulled up at our curb some 60 years ago.

There was glare on the windshield, so I couldn’t see the face of the guy driving the car.

But in my heart, I hoped he was tooling back to a houseboat where a brassy redhead waited for him.

Author, musician and storyteller TR Kerth is a retired teacher who has lived in Sun City Huntley since 2003. Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com. Can’t wait for your next visit to Planet Kerth? Then get TR’s book, “Revenge of the Sardines,” available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other online book distributors.

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