My family has always been into cars. Be it sports cars, trucks, SUVs, you name it we can have either owned it or worked on it. My grandfather has worked on many cars during his time, and now. He always talks about his 1940 Ford Standard-Line Coupe. It being the fastest car in town, he loved pushing it to the limits and seeing all the envious people. He told us about the flat head v8 221 engine he spent countless hours modifying and tuning to try to get it perfect.
There was one snowy night, my grandfather wanted to go surprise his girlfriend at the time, my grandmother. He had left his house in Wyocena, Wisconsin planning to go to Genoa, Illinois; it’s a three hour ride on a good sunny day. Being eager to see her, much as any young male would be, he set out going a little too fast. He didn’t notice his speed, nor did he care, until he passed a state trooper just past Janesville Illinois. Looking down at his speedometer, he just smiled. It was reading just over 100 miles per hour.
Not wanting to stop in the cold weather or maybe he just wanted to see how well he could handle his car or maybe he want to play with the cop a bit. Whatever his reason was, my grandfather didn’t stop even as the trooper was chasing him with lights and sirens. “I decided to just put the pedal to the metal and see what she could really do”. It was a very straight road, no turns to speak of for most of the way. He just shot by cars, some of the time with the trooper right on his tail. Slowly, as my grandfather’s car gained speed the trooper would back off, either to give him space or because the trooper’s car couldn’t keep up. After several miles, he could no longer hear the sirens nor see the lights, but oddly enough he didn’t slow down. He kept pushing the car though the blankets of snow endlessly falling and the snow banks slowly piling up to be much taller than the car leaving him to wonder if his tires were even sinking far enough down to touch the road or if...