Old Man In A Hat Drivers

Old Man In A Hat Drivers

A couple of Saturdays a month I wake up early, about 5:30 AM, and drive for about 45 minutes to Irvine California. There, at a secret location, I attend Cars and Coffee. It’s a get together of collectors, auto enthusiasts, car restoration projects…basically anything auto. There are usually about 300 rare cars that show from 6:30 to about 8:30 in the morning. By 9 AM everyone is gone and you’d never know it ever took place. Millions of dollars in autos show up and the auto makers, they know of the gathering, will even bring in prototypes. I could spend a lot of time here talking about the cars I’ve seen there; Tuckers, Vectors, gullwing Mercedes, Ferraris, GT40s, rare Jaguars, Hot Rods, Rat Rods, the list would stretch from here to the moon. Car people from all over the world make it a pilgrimage stop if they’re in Southern California. If you want to see what I’m talking about, here is a link to a website I admin so you can view a sampling of photos.

http://www.socalcarforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=8085

Today, while viewing the cars, I noticed an elderly collector, who was literally having trouble walking, slide into a high performance vehicle and drive off. This sparked a memory of my folks visiting us last year.

To begin with, my father is in his eighties and is getting to the point where my siblings and I are going to demand his car keys. He’s a typical “Old Man Wearing A Hat” driver. Dad is a pretty mild mannered guy. An immigrant with a thick Polish accent. He never swears. When he gets mad about the worst you can expect to come out of his mouth is, “Oh Jeepers Guys!”

When he visited, he was still pretty good behind the wheel. I drove him to the rental car place to pick up the Ford P.O.S. I’d reserved for them. They needed one to get around to all of the places they had on their agenda. I sat outside in my car waiting.

He’d been in the office for quite a while, I was about to go inside when I heard the sound of a muscle car engine revving. Slowly, around the corner of the rental car building, I saw a silver 2008 Ford Mustang GT roll toward me at about 5 mph. Behind the steering wheel, with only the upper half of his head visible, was my father.

This man, who had never driven anything more powerful than our Chevrolet Bel Air station wagon in the 1970’s, was now sitting inside a 300 horse power, 0 to 60 in 4.8 seconds, testosterone buggy. He pulled up next to me and rolled down the window.

I looked at his smiling face in total shock. “Dad!”, I said, “What happened to the Ford Focus?”

“Oh Jeepers” he replied, “they didn’t have one to rent so they upgraded me to this one.”

“You can’t drive this car!”

His mood changed. “Stop treating me like child, I’ll be fine.”

I reluctantly gave in, got back in my car, and led my father out onto the street to go back home. In my rear view mirror I could see my dad’s eyes bug out wide every time he hit the accelerator and the engine roared to life. His driving was pretty jerky so I took a back road route home. He needed to get used to the car. This road was one lane in each direction, it went through some orange groves with the last part of the trip ascending a rather large and lengthy hill. All the way up the hill, in my rear view mirror I could see my dad, going about 20 miles per hour, with a long ribbon of cars behind him with no place to pass. There were a lot of pissed off people.

When we finally got home my dad gave me one of those, “Don’t say a single word!” glances and went to take a nap. I snagged the keys and spent about an hour with the Mustang opened up on the freeway and cruising back roads.