I'm guessing I was about 14 at the time because I was still riding the bus back and forth to school. This was one of those days. It was one of those warm spring days and I was on the bus sitting next to a buddy that most of my Lakeshore people will know, Danny Ingram. Anyway Danny suggested I get off the bus at his house so we could mess around...14 year old boys mess around a lot. So I got off at his house about 750 feet from Downtown Red Oak, Georgia, his house was directly on Roosevelt Highway. We went inside and told his Mom we were there and I called my house to say I would be late, I only lived about a mile from Danny straight down Will Lee Road after the big curve where it changed from Ben Hill Road to Will Lee Road...My Red Oak people will know what I'm talking about.
We had as much fun inside as we could so we moved outside to see what we could get into. Directly across the street from Danny's house was the Railroad tracks and we thought the coolest thing we could do was to put pennies on the tracks so a train would mash them flat and we could see a train coming. We ran over and put 3 or 4 pennies on the track cause the train was coming...It was coming sloooow. The Engineer yelled at us to get away from the tracks but we ignored his request. Get the picture this was a VERY slow train. There were a few tanker cars about 30 automobile carrying cars and about 30 boxcar.
Thats when we saw it, an open boxcar and it was like divine intervention because we both thought and did the exact thing at the exact time without speaking a word...Yep we both took off running for the open boxcar and we jumped and pulled ourselves in laughing so hard we were crying. The train was still going very slow and we said we will jump out in a minute and walk back to Danny's house. There we were standing in the open boxcar waving at the cars on Roosevelt Highway and having the time of our life until we realized the train was now going too fast for us to jump out without getting hurt.
We were still having a ball and we thought when we got to Fairburn it would slow down and we could jump out and walk home...Nope if anything it was going faster. At this point we were making plans on how to get home from Miami.
We were moving right along and still waving at everyone we saw until we got to Palmetto when we waved at a Palmetto policeman. He was heading north and we were heading south. He threw his blue lights on and did a very fast U-Turn and he rode along beside us for a couple of miles then he took off to the front of the train. After about 5 minutes the train started to slow down and we decided it was almost time to jump and run for it but before it got slow enough the police car was right beside us. He was out of his car when we stopped and motioned for us to come to him and we did. He said "Just where the Hell did you think you were going"?
We didn't have a good answer. He put us in the back of his car and we went to the Palmetto police station. We thought they were gonna lock us up but they didn't. Danny called his Mother and she came down and picked us up. Not a word was said on the way back to Red Oak and that was the last time I got off the school bus at Danny's house.
The next day at school Danny told me the policeman told his Mom that he had a hard time getting the train to stop and we were almost to Newnan before it stopped. Oh the trials and tribulations of a 14-year-old boy. I'm guessing the mashed pennies are still there if anyone wants to go look.
No comments:
Post a Comment