Every once in a while I drive on I-70 100 miles from Columbia to Oak Grove and back. There are two lanes of solid traffic on both the east and westbound lanes no matter what time of day or night. It frightens me to think of all these cars going down the road 80 mph that one of them might be drunk. That driver should loose his license forever.
Sixty years ago it was a different story. After midnight, there wouldn’t be more than one car per hour going down 40 Hiway, which was replaced by I-70. We had no speed limit, and there was no law against driving and drinking. However, if you got stopped for abusing either of these, the patrol could give you a ticket for careless and imprudent driving.
In 1950 when I was a senior, on Christmas Eve and New Years, almost our whole class gathered at the Ranchhouse, a roadhouse saloon located between Grain Valley and Blue Springs on 40 Hiway. The Korean War was on. All our classmates who had quit school to join the service or had gotten drafted and were home for Christmas knew to meet at the Ranchhouse. That Christmas Eve, my closest friend Daren Davis and I left at 1:30 a.m. and went out to the car to go home. It seemed like we had been driving quite a while when I asked Davis if he could see where we were going. I couldn’t see a thing. We stopped the car and got out. It became obvious that while we were in the saloon an ice storm had hit and there was about a half an inch of ice on the windshield. We could see the lights of the Ranchhouse, but we weren’t on 40 Hiway. We had headed southeast and were stuck out in a field.
The wind was blowing and it was bitter cold. We called good old Roy Warren, who ran a wrecker service in Bates City, to come pull us out. His cable wasn’t long enough to reach us. He had to take another cable and tie on to it to finally get us out. We asked him how much we owed him. He said we didn’t have enough money to pay him for getting out of a warm bed at 2 a.m. Christmas morning, if he hadn’t known our folks so well he wouldn’t have come at all, and please never call him again.
Back then there was no such organization as Mothers Against Drunk Drivers. If there had been, Davis and I could have been their poster boys.
Jack can be reached at PO Box 40, Oak Grove, MO 64075 or jackremembers@aol.com., www.jackremembers.com
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