Evil Elf

Evil Elf

I guess you always meet some of the most memorable characters in your college days. But Dick Saltzman was a cut above even by those standards.

Where is he going with that?
Note Evil look on his face

My family was still living in South Florida when my Filipino roommate Donnie had to drop out of school. Donnie's love Annette was a fiery Roman nosed little Italian hand grenade with a sweet disposition and the temper of a Tasmanian devil. I can only imagine that if she was as hot in bed as she was when angry the fireworks must have been amazing. While Donnie was pretty laid back and he and Annette probably complimented each other well, apparently college did not provide enough education to keep her fertility in check...or maybe it was that they both had been raised as Catholics. At any rate she became...with child...and there was no question that Donnie was not an honorable man and did love her...so he dropped out to marry her and, unfortunately, I quickly lost track of both them.

But Donnie's strong sense of honor also resulted in his commitment to get a new roommate for me. My memory on the timing is a bit fuzzy, but at first I think it might have been Gene Blackwood, who also was from the same area around Cape Canaveral as Donnie, but then through an ad a graduate student from New York appeared...or were Dick and Gene there at the same time? God...you would think I'd recall all of this, right? It was, in the words of the protagonist in one of Tom Robbins novels...altogether too vivid, but alas the fog of time has dulled things a bit in my synapses.

At any rate, I showed up after a summer break to find a 64 Corvette convertible, a ratty single axle trailer, and what I viewed as a weird and uninteresting two wheeled conveyance in the yard,

Yeah, You've seen this before
But this time look at the Vette...
and that ugly trailer
But where's the bike?

and a 27 year old grad school student ensconced in the front bedroom. Somehow I think this was the Fall of 1967, but at any rate just before I met Marcia. Again, things are a bit fuzzy (no, not because of illicit substances...yet), and I do recall also another grad student who at some point occupied the back bedroom with the queen sized bed (and was there an en suite bath?)...who was there only during the week. This became important later.

So I guess maybe Dick and I were supposed to share that front bedroom with its twin beds. I gotta say I doubt I was happy about this as this guy looked like some perverted derelict..the cover of the Jethro Tull album “Aqualung” comes to mind. Actually...he was more of a degenerate than that.

Dick was actually employed as an engineer, though his job sounded totally deadening to me...designing landing gear for Grumman Aircraft in Bethpage, Long Island, New York...oddly and coincidentally a town very near to where Sherri grew up in Elmont. It sounded utterly dull.

Grumman had sent Dick to Gainesville to get his Masters in Engineering, though what possessed them to choose UF is still, 50 years later, beyond my comprehension. While the Engineering school at the University is better than decent, it's not like there are not equal schools in New York...ones where the company might not have to pay a living allowance, and where they certainly would not be absorbing out-of-state tuition fees.

On the other hand these were the heady days of the Space Program as well as Vietnam, and Grumman was heavily involved in both. Among other things they were the designers and builders of the Lunar Module...and though I never asked him exactly what landing gear he worked on, for all I know it might have been for this spindly, wonderful craft.

Dick and I hit it off quickly and rather well. He had a sharp wit...but I could, in those days, stay right with him...and our discussions were technical and wide ranging. He paid me a real compliment in the middle of a chat about nuclear physics, of all things. He broke off in the middle of the chat and allowed as how he was amazed that, lacking a deep technical background, I was able to quickly grasp very technical subjects, no matter how complex. I have thought about that comment many times over the decades, and realize how deeply that skill contributed to my business success. I think my first real boss, Frank Nichols at the First National Bank of Miami, was Dick's successor in grasping this, which led to his interest in giving me a start in the computer industry.

Dick acquired a kitten...a purebred Siamese he tongue-in-cheek named Deja Vu...though I never did figure out the joke. Maybe just that it was French? Or was it another of his notorious double entendres?

The most glaring example of the latter was aimed at a sweet young lady who was visiting the girls who lived in the next door unit of our fourplex. Though I never did meet the occupants of the other two units...maybe the far side of the building was just too distant to be of interest?...the girls next door were really cute. I guess I was too much of a self-conscious nerd to ever have the idea of asking one of them out cross my stupid little brain.

But I do recall that one owned the first BMW car I'd ever seen...a 1600 which was pretty rare in America.

Wikipedia Photo of 1600
Note what looks like 60s Stingray behind it

The three girls and a friend were visiting with us...I seem to recall alcohol being involved, when their guest asked Dick for a ride home. As I recall, none of these young things were over the age of 20...which made Richard qualify as a “dirty old man” by comparison.

What the young thing said was “Would you drive me home?” I have no idea if she had the hots for the elf, though I somehow can't picture that, or if she was just too inebriated to give things much thought.

“Sure,” Dick replied, looking at me with his cockeyed grin, “Bend over.”

He wasn't the neatest of roommates, and was too cheap to buy kitty litter for Deja Vu. Instead he tore up strips of newspaper to line the litter box which, as you can imagine, absorbed little of the odor and was totally useless unless changed daily. And, of course, the box lived in the bedroom we shared. It came to a head one day when I threatened to dump the box on his bed if he didn't clean it. Obviously I wasn't thinking straight as my bed was less than three feet away in the same room.

Once Marcia and I started dating, after sensitively easing this young freshman virgin into a very willing start at exploring a deeper physicality (I was, after all, a big man on campus senior by then), we were like two rabbits in heat...which once included stupidly and insensitively romping in the back bedroom on the other grad student's bed while he was away for the weekend. Of course he found out and penalized me, appropriately so, by refusing to pay his share of the rent that month.

I guess I was “blinded by the light.”

But Dick found our intensity amusing. He once insisted that, one day, rather than having sex, I would instead express a preference for being alone and doing something like taking a pistol and going with a friend down to the dump to slug rats.

Yeah, right? Certainly not at 27. “What is WRONG with you?” I asked. Oh...did I mention he had been married and was divorced? No, huh?

I had my second, civilized Austin Healey Sprite by the time I met Dick. In fact you have already seen this picture of my toy and his beast alongside the apartment. (pic) I didn't really know a lot about Corvettes, but did think they were pretty sexy looking. When Dick said I would likely drive it more than him as he preferred “the bike” I figured he was nuts, but was not about to complain. He was not exactly “into” the sports car idea.

“What makes it a 'sports car,'” he asked. “You can hardly fit a set of golf clubs in it.” God, what a tool. He was 25 years ahead of the first SUV, which is what he really would have wanted.

So here's this lovely shape, with 300hp, that he has no clue how to use. Lemmee at it. His Vette was bought with fuel economy in mind, so it had a 3.08 rear end ratio, the highest available that year, and best I recall it was an automatic. Thus the slowest accelerating 64 Vette....

The thing was a frickin' rocket ship compared to my Sprite, which you timed from 0-60 with a calendar.

Dick “conned” me into a deal where he would give me the car for a day if I would wash it for him. This became virtually an every weekend ritual. Wash Friday morning/play for hours after.

In fact, my first date with Marcia involved the Vette.

It came about like this.

I had known a really pretty black haired angel in high school named Betty Goldstein. She and her older brother Jack were by far the top of the status and beauty heap of north Dade County in 1963. So when I learned Betty was in school in Gainesville I somehow overcame my nerdy self-consciousness and decided to ask her out.

But when I reached Jennings Hall, the girl's dorm where I learned she lived, something got screwed up, and the voice which answered the pay phone on the floor quickly and obviously did not belong to Betty. Instead I was talking to Bettte Goldenstein, who also knew something was wrong as she always went by her middle name, Marcia, and not Bette.

“What the hell,” I thought, and asked her to lunch. Dick advised me to “go Dutch” if she turned out to be a dog, or pay for her lunch if she was OK. He also loaned me the Vette for the date. What a guy.

I was really impressed with myself, and decided to equally impress everyone else by doing a handbrake turn to park the car in front of the dorm. This is an old trick where you grab the handle 9which only a few cars have anymore, by the way) as you floor the throttle and spin the wheel, enabling the car to do a 180 degree turn in about its own length.

The Dorm mother was less impressed with this than either me or Marcia, who turned out to be tall, not anorexic by any means, and with legs that seemed to be perhaps nine feet long. As she slid those miin-skirted gambe into the seat of the Vette I had already decided that lunch at Jerry's (a sort of local version of Frisch's Big Boy) was on me.

One Saturday night I borrowed the Vette to take it out on the newly completed I75 and “see what it would do.” What it did was about buck 30...but even at my rudimentary level of driving knowledge I noted that that pretty front end wanted to make it an airplane at that speed. I could virtually spin the steering wheel from lock to lock and the car would continue in a straight line. As I also realized that even its metallic brakes (drums) would not slow the car down substantially without a parachute and an anchor I lost my nerve and backed off.

When I relayed this to Dick he got a funny look on his face.

“You do realize it has bald tires,” he asked rhetorically.

Oh. Therein began my discipline about walking around an unfamiliar car before driving it.

Then there was that two wheeled toy...which turned out to be a Suzuki X6 “Hustler” motorcyle. 250Cc, two stroke with a built in oil pump (no manual mixing of gas and oil), drum brakes (twin leading shoe front), electric start, and a six speed transmission...I believe the first on any street bike.

“So what,” I thought, unimpressed. I went out a couple of times as a passenger with Dick. I had not been on two wheels since high school, and it took some time before I stopped really screwing things up by leaning opposite to Dick in turns. While it was...ok...any 250 with two people up is not exactly Corvette quick.

Then one day Dick renegotiated our deal. There's that cockeyed grin again.

“Clean the Corvette,” he offered, “and you can take the bike out for a ride by yourself.”

I was not exactly thrilled, but decided to humor him. I should note that, in those simpler days, Florida did not have a separate cycle license, and you needed nothing but bravado and cajones to ride. So I tooled the thing sedately out past the edge of town, onto an empty county road in the middle of empty Alachua County. Whereupon I thought I'd see what the fuss was about.

I stopped the bike, put it in first, cranked the throttle, and popped the clutch.

Holyyyyyy Shiiiiiit! The beast shot out from under me, leaving my ass hanging off the rear end of the seat. I hit red line in the first three gears so fast that I was shifting as fast as I could move my hands and feet. 60 came quicker than the Corvette, and the “toy” did not show any signs of anemia until I was doing 100...whereupon I thought about its flexible flyer frame and those drum brakes.

Took awhile to get things moderated. Took a lot longer after stopping to get my right leg from shaking so hard I was afraid I was going to drop it.

After returning home I looked up the specs on it: 0-30 in 1.3 seconds, 0-60 in 6 flat, and a top just over that 100 I had hit...out of a two stroke with all of five or so moving parts!

If I were single and still willing to ride, and wanted to have only one bike, one of these would still be in my garage. I have never ridden or driven anything which equalled that rush for the first few seconds. 

Not the fastest
Not the quikest by today's standards
But an amazing machine

Maybe that evil elf Saltzman wasn't crazy after all.