Shag

Mobile Home Tractor

We were talking about people we used to know and the subject of bikers came up, as in motorcycle gang type bikers, and this dislodged an old memory.

One evening I caught a ride home from Columbus with a biker named Shag and his girlfriend is his shorty semi-tractor. Evidently, he had a day job delivering mobile homes. We're headed for Newark which is about 40 miles east of Columbus and we see a vehicle on fire on the other side of road. Shag pulls over, grabs his fire extinguisher, gets our of the truck, crosses the road and proceeds to battle the fire. He's been over there for, I dunno, maybe 30 seconds, maybe a minute, not long in any case, and the girlfriend steps on the gas and the engine starts racing and roaring. I'm just a kid, maybe 18 years old, I've never seen a car fire before and I have no idea what she is doing. Shag runs back over to his truck and he and his girlfriend have a bit of a shouting match. He was worried about his truck being damaged, but she was worried about him being injured. Pretty tough girl to stand up to Shag, but then she would have to be to even be hanging around with him.

As I recall, the fire extinguisher was ineffective, it was too small and the fire was too advanced. We went on our way.

I remember the girlfriend though her name escapes me. She had long black hair and a pretty face that was always perfectly made up. She worked in the box office at the movie theater in Granville.