Something to be said for going out memorably.
Everyone else has to kick it via cancer or a heart attack, but not our old teammate, Fred. No sir, the doc gave him the bad news, but with his wife passed and kids long gone, he didn’t want to be a corpse found dead a week past.
Same grit Coach Thurston had always remarked.
So, he welded a surplus JATO engine assembly into the cut-out trunk of that ‘67 SS Impala you remember he’d bought off the Grimes family after their boy didn’t make it back from Vietnam . . . . and one cold moonlit night he tripped the ignition switch waaaay out the SR-11 river canyon road.
Woke every two & four-footed creatur in three counties.
The military and state people later reckoned that at 250’ AGL he’d made it to over 300-mph in sustained thrust given the three-mile straightaway, . . still gaining altitude as he cratered the cliff face.
Somewhere in a song, I believe he cleared it.
That rocket blast. It had been almost as loud as the crowd roar when he’d sacked the Alpine quarterback behind the goal line in the state quarter-finals.
.
