"Hartford"

Hartford was really Tom Keating. He was a local "Greaser" – a mechanic and motorcycle rider, who loved UHA's campus and the students. He was thin as a rail. There are hundreds of stories about or around Hartford: How we sneaked him into a posh faculty party, where he partook of the refreshments as though he belonged there. There was the winter night we followed him to the roof of one of the buildings to watch the Aurora Borealis. It was amazing shimmering red vertical streaks across the sky. Awe-striking. There was the time he helped us bring a stray cat into our dorm room. We used ashtray sand as cat litter. It was all OK until little "Shit" as we named her gave birth to kittens.

Here's my favorite story. I had brought my 1962 Rambler for which I had paid $200 of my summer job wages. Dad had helped me select the car. Dad was not very knowledgeable about cars, it became clear.

The car had a standard shift but the transmission didn't work properly. After a while, it only ran in second gear. It also had a bad battery that wouldn't hold a charge. And on top of all that, it needed a new quart of oil almost every ten miles. Since I could not get out of second gear, when stopped at a red light, I had to keep one foot on the brake and the other on the clutch. But I needed a third foot on the gas pedal, to keep the car from stalling. That's where my long-handled umbrella came in: Umbrella on the gas pedal. And there was always a black cloud behind me and a load of near empty, leaky oil cans in the back seat. The photo below is probably what the car looked like before it lost its sheen.

Rambler Classic 1962 (from a Google search)

Hartford offered to trade a television of his for my car. DEAL! He signed over the title and he promised to get a new registration right away. The TV didn't work, but I was finally out from under the LEMON car.

Until a few weeks later, I had a call from the local police, citing me for abandoning the car somewhere in West Hartford. They didn't say where. Hartford had abandoned it and NOT had it registered. It still had my plates and a pile of parking tickets had accrued on the windshield. I remember that SOMEONE had located the car for me, I paid the tickets, and called a junk dealer to pick up the car. It was only four years old.

"Hartford" (Tom Keating)