Well, you know what they say - time flys when you're working from home during a pandemic. It's back-to-school time already and that said, and with my recent soliloquy about a 1965 Plymouth Sport Fury fresh on my mind, it jogged my engine block about the 1967 Plymouth Sport Fury driven by the crossing guard who used to help us kids not get killed on the way to our elementary school back in Oceanside, New York. I'll use this fairly well-worn but still achingly cool white-on-red '67 as a illustrative stand-in for the dark green on black '67 our crossing guard drove.
Her name was Mrs. Baer and she was one of those unflinchingly kind human beings that we seem to only know when we're very, very young and we're lucky to have known such people. She wore a dress uniform that looked like something you'd see in a documentary about women in the military during World War II and she parked her big Plymouth Sport right there at corner of Fortesque Avenue and Foxhurst Road. Even back then when I was what, seven, eight or nine years old I found the juxtaposition of someone who dressed so authoritatively driving something so out-of-this-world cool and fantastic as that car to be fascinating if not enthralling. I couldn't get enough of it.
Plymouth got back into the "true" full-size game in 1965 when they introduced the new Fury I blogged about last week. The first reboot of that car was these '67's. Although only three-and-a-half inches longer, they looked much bigger because of the coke-bottle styling. 1968 Fury's look all but identical to the '67's and, full disclosure, Mrs. Baer's may have been a '68. 1969 brought about the awful "fuselage" era of full-size Chrysler design. I didn't like them them and I like 'em even less now.
One day I stayed late at school and when I as walking home I noticed Mrs. Baer was not at the corner of Foxhurst and Fortesque. Terrified at the prospect of crossing such a dangerous intersection on my own, as narrow as the streets are, traffic was quite heavy, I set out north on Foxhurst with the plan to cross whenever I saw a break in traffic. No sooner than I decided that, Mrs. Baer swooped by in her big Plymouth and picked me up and drove me home. She was still in her uniform and said she saw me in her rear view mirror as she was leaving her post and thought that I could probably use a ride home. It was after 4 PM and it was getting dark already.
To say I was delighted to be inside her car was an understatement. We got to talking about it and she said she didn't know much about it; it was her husband's car. She thought it too big and hard to handle but she didn't seem like she had any trouble with it. She dropped me off at home and I waved to her as she drove off. Humbling to think that memory is now pushing fifty-years old.
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