Here's a different perspective on the guy who collected all the stuff as told by someone who knew him. He gave me permission to repost it here. I thought it was interesting.
Figured word of this would be on here, and had to check. I'll be there, hoping to buy an old basketcase sportster to look at for a few years and maybe do something with.
T was my hero when I was a kid, Dad and he were very close. He'd sell me armloads of shirts from his Harley shop for a buck, gave me a whole box full when he sold the ultralight I used to play in at his bike lot when I was about 8. He was a pretty decent musician, and in my opinion does a better Roadhouse Blues than the Doors, and for a long time, when nothing else would calm him down, my little baby son would go to sleep when I'd play "Still in Saigon" from the CD he gave Dad. Still holds records in some flat bottomed drag boat classes, open cockpit stuff. 160 mph on the water. This man had more fun in the average weekend than most anyone in the world will ever have in a lifetime. When I was a kid and bored, all you had to do was wait, and T would either stop by, or better yet, buzz the house in a WWII Navy Stearman biplane. Ever look DOWN at a Stearman coming at you?
He saw some real Hell at Camp Coryell in Vietnam. Only leveled with me about it one time (usually it was just funny anecdotes of this or that) and I could tell it was a bad night for him, because it was some heavy, heavy stuff he told me. If it was worth owning or doing, T probably had it in stock. One of his sayings was "I swear on a stack of four speeds!" and there's probably a few stacks of them there.
He messed with hot rods and won some awards at the Columbus Autorama, I think they called it, in around 1972-74. I have the newspaper article from it somewhere in my T files. Also was pretty noted in flattrack racing, and may have done some other classes as well, but I haven't been able to research it yet to confirm the details.
I've got the founders of the United States on one side of my hallway, T is on the other, right above Chuck Yeager.
I can handle people being angry that he had so many animals, but he was a bit of a dare devil, drag racer, you name it even before Nam. Nam changed him in a big way, and I think his way of coping with things was to go faster. Drag racing (he had some sort of straight axled '57 Chevy) got boring, flat tracking got boring, custom cars got boring, drag boat racing got boring, aerobatic stunt flying in the old Stearman got boring, and the only thing that, I think, kept him going were the animals. And with T, if he liked something, he liked it A LOT. SO there you go.
One of the problems with the media in all of it, is that most of the people they talked to didn't know him, or were folks that T could not stand. So basically, around here, you might hear 15 T stories and 1 will be true. Sadly, some of these people contributed to an author of a two-bit poor excuse for toilet paper book on him, and their half-assed stories inspired the author to question his military service. His MOS was basically a Huey Mechanic, the same MOS that a crew chief or door gunner would have. Some of the local idiots talked about medals and stuff, so this idiot calls T a "helicopter deck helper and clerk (whatever that is) and insinuates that he made everything up. Now, like T, when I like something, I like it a lot. I've sort of used my time away from throwing money at rusty old cars to throw money at military uniforms, which is something I've always been interested in, and no doubt the fact that T was a vet and seemed 10 feet tall when I was 8 factors into that. Knowing my interests, and knowing some of the pieces I had, I'm pretty sure if he was full of s**t, I'd have heard him make a claim about some sort of medal, and he never once mentioned any damned awards. In fact, when I got my first Vietnam jungle uniform, the response was decidedly heavier than I had hoped.
I will never forget him, and still look every time I go past his house to see if he's out, same as I've done for almost 25 years. And as I talk to people around here, I have met several people my age whose fathers were friends of T's, either through horses, the Harley shop, etc., and almost all of them liked him because he had a way of making a kid feel like they were big stuff. I got to walk around drag cars, airplanes, bikes, literally most people's idea of paradise, I wanted to go there whether Dad was stopping there or not. He was damned nice to my step kids the few times he was around them, and it kills me that they and my 2 year old won't have the same influence in their lives.
Definitely a different look at the guy.
Kevin
