"Turn it down a little," I say from my seat behind my buddy Rooster Croft, who is driving his dad's huge white Oldsmobile, The White Whale.

Turk Mudge, riding shotgun, reaches to the radio knob and turns up the volume a bit. They know that I don't like loud music, so they run it deliberately high volume just to bug me. I'd be riding in the middle seat, but Rooster's dad splurged and had an air conditioner put into his car, and it totally fills the space beneath the dash board where my feet would go.

We're on our way to The Big City, the county seat.  We have important business there, which, for 16 year old boys means that one of us wrangled the use of a car and we're going there to cruise the drive-in restaurant, Bummie's. 

If we had more time and enough money, we might have driven to Toledo, the really big city, to a new drive-in joint that we can never remember the name of, so we just call "the fifteen cent hamburger place," where our standard order is 6 tiny burgers, fries, and a milkshake.  Each. Eventually, we remember the name of this new place  because it kind of catches on in the market place-McDonalds. 

But, today, we'll content ourselves with cruising Bummie's in Adrian, and we'll be sure of seeing a significant proportion of the teenage population of our county.  The "fortunate" few will be driving their own cars, purchased at the expense of future college educations and lost high-school athletic careers as the owners work to pay for them.  The rest of us are literally driving our father's Oldsmobiles, Chevies, Fords and whatever.   The farm kids are in pickup trucks, which are decades away from becoming socially cool.

The Beach Boys are pounding away on the radio, which took almost a full minute to warm up and come alive when we first got in the car.  The radio is not a stereo, and it does not have FM stations or a tape deck or CD's.  The White Whale does have one particularly interesting radio feature, though---it has a "Reverb" button, that delays and replays the signal just a fraction of a second, giving a rich, echo-like effect to the sound.

The Beach Boys are in their conflict stage of career, caught between the surfer boy songs that made them famous and their new genre of hot-rod songs.  The folk singers have nearly gone away, but have begun a slight comeback with songs protesting the abysmal state of race relations, and giving a hint of the songs that will soon follow when the war in Viet Nam gets stoked up.

We're just a month away from hearing   "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" for the first time, to be followed by the full scale invasion of the Beatles.

Once at Bummies, we cruise in and through the parking lot a few times and finally settle into a stall.  A car hop comes out and takes our orders for burgers and root beer.  We get out of the car and chit chat with other teens doing the same thing.  After our meal, we cruise around the parking lot a few more times and drive back home, fully satisfied at having seen some pretty girls and having eaten a good burger.  We've burned 35 cents worth of gasoline and have broken every speed limit.

And when we get to our houses, we call each other to recap the day's events.  It's easier now-our phone company just installed a new switch so we have dial phones.  Wow!

I never thought I'd get to the "When I was a boy" stage of life.  Next thing you know, I'll be wearing shoes that fasten with Velcro and wearing one of those English driving caps.
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