Drinking & Driving

Mad Dog Summer 

One summer shortly after I got out of High School I had three minor traffic accidents, none of which drew the attention of the police. I was hanging out with my n'er-do-well friends and one of our favorite activities was drinking. Mostly we drank beer, three-two beer (3.2% alcohol) as this was Ohio and we were all under 21. Someone must have had a birthday because suddenly we had access to wine, and the most potent wine available was Mogen-David 20/20, otherwise known as Mad Dog, which was 20% alcohol. Driving the orange and white, 1963 International Harvester Travelall home through a construction site in Newark, Ohio, I managed to center punch an orange 55 gallon drum sitting alongside the left side of the road with my left headlight. Lights out for that light. Driving the red Ford F-100 back from the lake, I pulled up at the curb in front of someones house. There was a telephone pole right next to the curb I pulled up right next to it and as I did I whacked the pole with the right outside mirror. The mirror shattered and the bracket got bent back alongside the cab. Driving the 1967 Buick, I made a left turn onto a gravel road and managed to drop the right rear tire in the ditch which put a crease in the lower right rear quarter panel. That one was the worse, because that was real damage to the body work on the nicest car my Dad owned. The other vehicles were farm trucks and had already collected some nicks and scratches, and the mirror frame, well, it's just a stuck on bit of tubing in the first place. Still, it must have had some impact because I quick drinking Mad Dog. A year or so later I returned home after spending the summer hitch-hiking across the Western U.S. and I quickly returned to my old ways. A friend of mine and I were riding around in my $150 1957 baby blue Cadillac. We had had a few and I sort of noticed that I was weaving all over the road. I asked my friend about it and he agreed. So I asked him if he thought he could do any better and once again he said yes. So I pulled over and let him drive. He must have done better, because we didn't have a wreck. 

John D. 

Similar time frame and I was working as a carpenter framing houses. I got a job with a guy I knew. We would drive to Columbus from Granville every day. One day had been extra rough so we decided to pick up a six-pack of beer for the ride home. My co-worker had previously been arrested for a particular nasty drunk driving accident, so we did not want to run afoul of the law. So instead of taking the main road home, we took the quiet backway. Which was fine until we came upon a cop standing in the middle of the road waving us down. So we quickly stuffed the beer under the seats. Seems there had been an accident and the road was blocked. That was a close call. The nasty accident happened a few years earlier. John had been driving home, blind, late one night. A car going the other way had pulled over on the wrong side of the road. There was another car and some people there and they were standing there talking. John sees the headlights of the car on sitting on the right hand shoulder of the road and wrongly assumes they are in the left hand lane so aims to drive by them on the right hand side. This all happens at 60 MPH. He leaves the road, crosses the shoulder and is in the grass when he passes the car and runs into some of the people standing there. One person was killed outright. His body was torn in two. John was arrested. I have no idea what the sentence was. This was in the early 1970's. 

High School Deaths 

I knew two people who were killed in drunken automobile accidents when I was in High School. One was John Veetch. an acquaintance from Utica High School. He was driving on the freeway in Newark with three other people in the car when the car left the road. They hit a highway sign 12 feet up in the air. I think John was the only one killed. The other was Richard Bagley, a friend of mine from Bexley High School (Bexley is a suburb of Columbus). He and some friends had been out riding around in his father's 1967 Chevelle SS 396. Richard decided he had too much to drink, so he let somebody else drive. All I recall hearing about the wreck was that it involved an freeway exit ramp at high speed (100+ MPH).