Union County recently made history again. If you are interested, just conduct the following Google search: “Pinto on a pole.”
I did so, and was taken to a link for a WATE-TV news story about the famous Ford Pinto that was located for as many years as I can remember at Jim Sexton Motors.
I remember once talking to someone who asked me “where I was from.” I tried to explain about Maynardville, but nothing connected until he asked, “Is that where they’ve got that ol’ Ford Pinto on a pole?” Now that the Pinto has been taken down per the anticipated widening of Highway 33, how will I explain “where I’m from?”
According to the information in the news story, I am older than even the car itself, and I know I’m older than the “new” Highway 33 that was constructed in the 1970s.
Yet I can’t remember very much about the present Main Street (on which I lived as a young child) in old downtown Maynardville having actually been the main thoroughfare between Knoxville and Tazewell. Every day as I drive home, I can look on what used to be called Dead Man’s Curve across the “new” connector for Highway 61 and Highway 33 just above Cooke-Campbell Mortuary. I’ve heard stories about how that curve so aptly received its name, but I don’t actually remember it also being part of the narrow state highway that connected Knoxville to Tazewell via Maynardville.
I do remember very well perhaps the only Ford Pinto in which I was ever privileged to ride. My good friend Judy Minor Brotherton drove her white Ford Pinto with its red vinyl interior to Lincoln Memorial University (LMU) when she and I and the rest of our gang of friends began our freshman year in fall quarter 1983.
Before I went to LMU, I spent a few hours talking to the late great Florence Chesney about her time as a student there. She told how strict things were. Each women’s dormitory had a house mother (I’m not sure what the male counterpart would have been called, but Ms. Chesney assured me there was one), and there was a nightly curfew that was strictly enforced. Ms. Chesney told me that special permission had to be obtained to leave campus, even to cross the street, much like on a military post. Ms. Chesney attended LMU in the late 1930s. She even told me about a former female graduate who had her degree revoked due to being caught in a compromising situation in the basement of LaFrentz-Poole (LP) with the gentleman who fired the boiler.
Things sure had changed a little less than a half century later. During my freshman year there were still head residents for each dorm, but there were no curfews related to students being off campus. There were all male and all female dorms, and special visitation times on allotted days were scheduled for visitation from members of the opposite sex. Grant-Lee and LP Halls offered co-ed and married housing, and visitation was more relaxed, especially for married couples, though students of the opposite sex in co-ed housing situations were supposed to be out of rooms of the opposite sex by 11 p.m. on weeknights and Sundays (I believe it was midnight on Fridays and Saturdays).
Yes, times had changed. Eighteen-year-olds were recognized as adults at LMU in 1983. And being an adult meant learning all about responsibility. There was no mom to kick you out of bed and make sure you were on time to your 8 a.m. history class. If you didn’t go to class, you’d flunk, and you’d either pay to retake the course or leave your spot at the university to those who might perhaps be wiser. There was no dad to come looking for you if you decided to drive drunk to Middlesboro around midnight to buy a pineapple.
As my mother used to say, “If you get burnt, you have to sit on the blister.”
I think 18 was the legal drinking age in 1983, not sure about that, but I do remember there were fraternity-sponsored beer keg parties on campus in what was known as the Old Stone House, located between the library and the gym. The thinking seemed to have been that it was better for students to drink legally on campus than to do so illegally on the highways and risk death or serious injury to themselves and others.
LMU had security officers on duty at all times. Even though there was a guard shack at the main entrance of the university during all hours after dark, rarely were cars ever stopped. The main function of the guard shack seems to have been for security to provide information to campus visitors and as a place for the night guard to be based.
It didn’t take even an overprotected kid like myself long to figure out that LMU in 1983 was full of opportunity for individual choice. Experiencing such freedom for the first time in life seemed very strange.
The first time I rode with my friend Judy and a few of our other friends to the Middlesboro Mall in her little ol’ white Ford Pinto was an uneasy but gratifying experience. That was in the days before the Middlesboro tunnel had been constructed, and Highway 25E that roughly followed the path of the legendary Daniel Boone’s Wilderness Road was steep and winding.
I know Boone had his problems hacking through the wilderness undergrowth, but that Pinto also had its challenges. It chugged along like “The Little Engine That Could,” but the way that little four-cylinder engine kept shifting into overdrive to reach an astonishing speed of twenty-five miles up the mountain incline had me thinking more “I Hope It Can, I Hope It Can”!
What I wouldn’t give for just one more opportunity to ride in that white Ford Pinto up the old Wilderness Road, across the mountain to Middlesboro with that dear group of friends. The road has now been reconstructed to be straighter, traveling under the mountain through the Cumberland Gap Tunnel. The Wilderness Road has been covered in an effort to restore it to more of what Daniel Boone would have seen. That little white Pinto would have had a much easier time on the new road, but by that time I’m sure the Pinto was history itself. Some of those dear friends who rode in that car have passed away, but in my mind and heart they still linger sweetly.
In my next article I’ll talk more about Pintos. For the present, I leave you, dear friends and Faithful Readers, with the following tidbits from my email world.
It’s probably my age that tricks people into thinking I’m an adult.
At my age, I don’t always go the extra mile,
but when I do it’s because I missed my exit.
"Any man who thinks he can be happy and prosperous by letting the
Government take care of him better take a closer look at the American Indian.” --Henry Ford