Beating the System

Johnny, Palm Springs 1965

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After breakfast at Silver Diner, Dad and I waited for Matt to get the car while Nana took Po to the bathroom. I don’t know how it came up, but as we sat on the bench in front of the restaurant he began a story…


“One year license plates would be black with white lettering, and the next they’d be white with black lettering.

Once, the state trooper came right to the house to take the tags off my car. Like the one in the garage at the beach…that one was ’63, but I painted ’64 right over it and it looked pretty good. I did such a good job, it fooled the police. They didn’t look too close though.

The ticket you got, when it was the one where you knew you would lose your license, that was when you went right to DMV, say you misplaced your license, and they’d give you a duplicate. After you went to court and they took your original license, you had the duplicate. They didn’t have computers back then.

Sonny [one of his friends] lost his license until he was 21 in Virginia, so he went to West Virginia and got one there and lost that. He was always racing and speeding.

My brother Frankie, he used to pull into the coffee shop all the cops used to go to [in Fairfax City] and he’d smoke his tires in the parking lot then race off.”

Frankie

Tommy, Dad's twin, in Japan.