Thunder Road Northwest of Chandler, 1964

The star of this short tale is my cousin Arthur. Born in 1945, he attended rural Oak Grove School northwest of Chandler through the eighth grade and came to Chandler High in 1959, the same year as my classmates and myself. I’d skipped the second grade out in California, so I was a year younger than everyone else in my class in Chandler, making me the runt of the litter. Of course my new classmates didn’t let me forget it--until I became pals with Joe Sam, who was several inches taller than the other boys and had taught himself to box from The Encyclopedia Britannica.

Country kids like Arthur didn’t play sports because they didn’t have the time, even if they did have the talent. My dad, likewise an Oak Grove 8th grade graduate who transferred to Chandler High, explained this to me more than once. Country kids didn’t have the leisure to play sports. They couldn’t stay after school to practice because they had to get home to do chores and help out on the farm. This was particularly bitter to Daddy’s older brother Melvin, a gifted athlete who would have loved to play football. No question that he was big enough and tough enough. He got some satisfaction later in midlife by winning gold trophies in the California bowling competitions. He was also a superb horseshoe pitcher, according to his four sons-in-law, who shook their heads in admiration and swore he was unbeatable. 

So Cousin Arthur didn’t play sports. His dad Glen had 320 acres under cultivation, mostly in pecans, plus some additional fields that he rented to raise corn and grain, and both of his sons were required to help. Glen had them driving tractors by the time they were eight years old, using a piece of harness strap to belt them in the seat to be sure they didn’t fall off. This early-learned skill paid off for Arthur. The summer after his eighth grade graduation, he went off to Washington D. C. with the 4-H Club and won the national tractor driving contest.

So when he enrolled in Chandler High School that fall, he was more than a little proud of himself, and rightly so. He wasn’t just a country kid come to town. He the National 4-H Tractor Driving Champion, while his classmates were still learning to dribble the basketball and not to fumble the football. There was an additional payoff for myself and another friend the night we replayed Thunder Road. Arthur’s tractor skills had transferred to the automobile when he got one, and the boy could drive.

The other friend was Joe Sam, and after Arthur came to town and started high school with us, the three of us became inseparable. We were teased for being the three musketeers, which we took as a compliment, being acquainted with Dumas’s famous novel. Joe Sam and I didn’t play sports either. Our pastime was reading, and before leaving junior high we had both become regular patrons of the county library, located across the street north of the courthouse. 

Arthur’s favorite song and movie in these early years was “Thunder Road,” as sung by Robert Mitchum (1958). Probably none of us knew that Mitchum had written both the song and the movie scenario, though we liked the way the song was backed up by that twanging fifties bass guitar. 

Let me tell the story, I can tell it all;

About the mountain boy who ran illegal alcohol.

His daddy made the whiskey, the son he drove the load;

And when his engine roared they called the highway “Thunder Road.”

Cousin Arthur loved this movie so much he modeled his driving on it. A lot of the old time whiskey runners from the forties and early fifties went on to become stock car drivers, most famously Junior Johnson, the celebrated NASCAR driver. They would soup up their cars and roar around the track. They had no way to increase the engine displacement, but they could add an extra carburetor and put a cut-out on the exhaust. It was the cut-out that made the roar on  thunder road, but Arthur never did that. He added a four-barrel carburetor but never a cutout. Arthur was not ostentatious. His family were good church-going folks and wouldn’t have tolerated a hot-rodder in the family.

He about got us all killed late one beer drinking midnight on a dark country road northwest of Chandler crossing a one lane bridge at the bottom of a hill with another car coming on fast from the opposite direction. We’d been drinking, but only 3.2 beer, maybe a six-pack apiece, which would have been our usual pace. Arthur was driving a ’57 Ford with a Thunderbird decal on the hood. It didn’t have the super-charged T-Bird engine (312 CID) but it had the next size down, which was 292. The year 1957 was when that Ford came out with those big tail fins. The motor was big enough and the tail fins too that Arthur could pull a Thunder Road stunt. That night, both cars must have topped their respective hills doing about 70 and seen the opposite car approaching a half mile away coming along the curve of that dirt road. When Arthur saw the danger coming, he didn’t slow down, didn’t hesitate, just punched the gas. The transmission dropped from overdrive down to third gear like a kick in the ass, the four barrel carb opened up, and we were off to the races. 

It was too dark for me to see Arthur’s face, and anyway I was sitting in the back, but I know how he would have looked. There would have been a level look of pure concentration--the look of a man who can be defined by his insouciance in the presence of death. He sees what’s before him and in the instant of that glance has fully calculated the risk. The rest is just Go! It’s a look you can see on the face of Junior Johnson in his stock car except it’s obscured by his goggles and the blur of speed. 

Those of you who remember the movie will recall that a trick Robert Mitchum pulls more than once. He doesn’t slow down for danger. He hits the gas. I don’t recommend this trick to anyone who wants to live a full four score and ten, but it worked for Arthur that night. Over time, the footings on a dirt road bridge wash out, and the road grader builds a a ten foot grade on either side of the bridge. A car traveling 90 miles per hour would be flying as it came up over the slope onto the bridge. That race to the bridge scared Joe Sam and me shitless, and the oncoming driver must have pissed himself.

In the retrospect of fifty years, I see our flying race as bathed in a brief glory, but I know in my best mind that the truth is that Lady Luck was riding with us. It would have been impossible for an observer to say exactly what happened because of the dust clouds raised by the two cars. I can only guess that the other car must have slowed down--there was no time for either car to stop. I know Arthur didn’t try. He put his foot in the gas.

He himself stayed lucky for a while--through college, the U. S. Navy, a computer job in Pennsylvania, marriage and two children. Then his luck ran out.  A black spider ballooned  in his brain that sucked out first his wits and then his life. From onset to death took about a year, and he died in  October of 1985, ten days after his fortieth birthday. I went to the funeral in Mechanicsburg PA, though I couldn’t afford the airplane ticket from Austin, Texas. 

It was little enough to do for Arthur, and I’ve always been glad I emptied my checking account and borrowed some cash to make the trip. Arthur’s parents who had probably never flown before and his older brother Lyndon were there, all from Chandler. When Sherry, Lyndon's girl, said she'd already signed the guestbook, Lyndon said, "Well, sign it again.  It don't cost anything." The funeral was held in a big church, with a backslapping goodtime preacher in charge of painting a saint Arthur I never knew. “Jesus is Free for All,” I read on the wall, and I signed the deathbook too. Signed it for the free-for-all. Signed it for you, Prince Arthur of the 4-H Tractor Pulls, King of the Cornfields, and thank the Good Lord one helluva driver.

On the flight back from Harrisburg, amidst the first tears I’d shed, I wrote a poem for Arthur. He are the last four lines: 

Arthur, I turned up a glass for you in the Harrisburg Airport,

For you and for the gone years, the liquid writing of our lives.

Keep the pedal to the metal and enjoy your flight out.

Your story's just begun.

Sources

Wolfe, Tom. “The Last American Hero Is Junior Johnson. Yes!” Esquire Magazine. Collected in The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (1963). https://classic.esquire.com/article/share/0162ac6c-ece8-4d24-aeb2-0046fb1a4655. Consulted November 2022.