"Engineheads" or "motorheads" are slang terms from my youth. An enginehead back then was a guy who lived and breathed all things car. An enginehead worked on his car, talked about his car, polished his car, read car magazines, talked about his car some more, and even occasionally drove it. With an enginehead, the basic male ulterior motive for owning a car, which of course was to get girls, didn't even seem that important.
I got thinking about engineheads because of a guy I saw at a little restaurant in Lansingburgh where I had coffee. He was a wonderful, throwback, 60's kind of motorhead, sitting down the counter, grease ground into his knuckles, a copy of CAR AND DRIVER in front of him. And he was even wearing engineer boots, a particularly clunky wardrobe accessory of engineheads everywhere in the 60's. He was a big guy, too. I mean really big. Two hundred eighty or two hundred ninety pounds style of big. Seeing this extra large motorhead sucked me back in time to the spring of 1965 just prior to my graduation from R.L. Thomas High School.
My recollection first took me to two guys who weren't engine heads but were the biggest guys in our class. They both topped 300 which was huge in a time when the average NFL lineman might have weighed 250 or 255. I'll recall these two as D and R. Although, I can't imagine them searching the internet hunting down references to their one time girth, I will still protect their identities. This is after all a gentle kind of recollection. D wasn't quite as big as R, but he was big, and generally in a pleasant mood. Although, he seemed to be struggling to get where he was going sometimes because of his size, he was always smiling. And although his front teeth were decaying and not pleasant to look at, the smile seemed always genuine. R was a nice guy, too, and really the biggest of the bigs. He had a Humpty Dumpty kind of build. I remember that people loved to be in his gym class, because when we did tumbling and gymnastics, R loved the trampoline. He wasn't bad at it, either, capable of doing a truly gigantic somersault. But what captivated the others in his class and caused them to watch was the possibility that while bouncing, R might actually make the canvas cover of the trampoline touch the gym floor. I recall those guys fondly and hope they are doing well.
The third big guy was the enginehead of my recollection. I can't call him by a single initial because I would have to use D or R, one which signified his actual name, and the other a name often used in place of the actual name. So, I'll call him EH. In our senior year, EH sat next to me in study hall. He brought one notebook but never did homework, because the notebook was full of car magazines, which he read and drooled over day after day. Often he pretended to drive, working the imaginary clutch below the desk, shifting through 4 speeds, and making the accompanying transmission/engine noises. What I remember most is that every time he would see another enginehead, he would say, "Beat ya quarter pedal! Beat ya quarter pedal!" and then grin broadly. I didn't know EH well enough to ask him what that meant. If he hadn't been such an imposing enginehead, all 260 or so pounds of him, I might have inquired. I decided that he must have meant that his car could beat the other guy's car even if he only pressed the accelerator a quarter of the way to the floor. Certainly, if that were true, such a car would be amazingly fast.
Like the enginehead in the restaurant in Lansingburg, EH always wore engineer boots. He also wore green work pant like old guys who used to be mechanics like to wear, white socks and bowling style shirts with flat tails, which were usually worn out. I also remember his large head of greasy dark hair with the sprinkling of dandruff visible along the part. Strangely, while most of the engineheads drove their cars to school, EH didn't. Maybe he had really big parents who wouldn't let him, but I've often wondered if EH's quarter pedal car was imaginary.
So, thanks to the guy in Lansingburgh, who started, and to D and R and EH, the subjects of my journey down memory lane. EH, I hope you are still beating folks "Quarter pedal!"
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