Small World

On an overnight bivouac I was paired with a squad member in a two man pup tent. While laying in the dark before going to sleep you get a chance to talk a little bit about home, where you are from, family, et cetera.

We got to talking about names and I said one of the most unusual was that of the folks who rented me a room at college, Smrha. My tent mate said he had heard that name and also in Lincoln, Nebraska. Come to find out, this man had come to UNL to enter graduate school and rented a room in the same house I had lived in. He subsequently found he could not get the course of study he wanted and decided instead to leave for the University of Oregon.

He had a 1932 Model B Ford but it was late and he was afraid he couldn’t get to Oregon in time for the beginning of the semester so he decided to sell the car and use the money for a plane ticket that would get him there in time.

My memory began to kick in and I realized who this fellow was. Myself, my room mate, and a friend of his were the ones who bought that car from him! We scrounged up $16 and some odd cents each to buy him out for $50. How strange life is. I had seen this fellow in the squad room and in the field but didn’t recognize him. Of course it had been only for a day or so in Lincoln that we saw him and only for long enough to negotiate the car purchase. Here we were, in the same tent thousands of miles from that campus home, remembering something that brought us together several years earlier.

The incident helped me recall our experience with that Model B. It was not in that bad of shape, except an 18 year old car needs constant care (the use of pliers and baling wire). One of the partners in the ownership worked for the Lincoln Star part time while attending law school. He was assigned to cover a murder trial in Wilbur, Nebraska, some 30 or 40 miles from Lincoln and drove the car every day for several weeks to that small Saline County town.

At issue in the trial was not whether the defendant had committed the crime, but whether it was premeditated murder. The man was finally convicted of shooting his wife’s lover in a local bar (the Foxhole Tavern). He came in with a gun, pointed it and misfired. He walked outside, fiddled with the firing pin, came back in and shot again. This time it worked. The jury decided he had time to think about it and therefore ruled it was premeditated.

Our friend got experience in two fields…journalism and criminal law. The car was not faring two well, however, and we got tired of having to repair it so we decided to take it to a weekly car auction and get what we could for it.

We wired up the bumpers good and put air in the tires ( they tended to lose pressure over a couple days ) and took the car to the site of the auction, telling the people in charge to put a minimum bid of $100 on it.

That evening we went to the sale and got more anxious as our car came up to be sold. Bidding was slow but the auctioneer finally got two people going until one bid $75. We looked at each other and I shouted at the auctioneer, “Sell it!”

My tent mate thought the story about his former car was hilarious. He said he got the courses he was looking for at Oregon and earned his master’s degree in history.