My thumbing adventures didn’t end with my 1964 NYC to
Florida to Arizona hitchhiking odyssey. In early 1966 I I needed
work more than school so when my buddy Jim Walters asked me to help him open
his Village Inn Pizza Parlor franchise in Fort Lauderdale I jumped. Jim had been
my boss at the original Village Inn in Tempe for a couple of years and we’d
become good pals. He suggested that I meet him in Dayton, Ohio where he was
training then we’d drive to Florida with his wife Sandy and their toddlers
Jimmy and Michael.
I lacked dependable wheels at that particular moment. My
grill deficient 1954 Oldsmobile with mismatched tires could barely make it from
North Tempe to Tempe proper. That left me the option of hitchhiking east in a
borrowed ASU letter jacket. My roommate at the time, the swashbuckling Vance
Dernovitch, thought I’d have better luck masquerading as a jock than a hobo. He loaned me his basketball playing brother Rex’s jacket, a garment we
had used to great effect in gin mills throughout the Valley of the Sun.
It took me three rides to get to the outskirts of Dayton
where Jim picked me up. The first ride took me from the north side of Phoenix
to Flagstaff where Pat Conley, an All-Big 10 linebacker at Purdue, took me to
Fort Wayne with no stops. We traded driving shifts, had a quick beer
and I got a ride to Dayton within ten minutes. Pat told me that he wouldn't have stopped but for the jacket with the big gold A.
The garment sure did the trick. I got from Phoenix to
Dayton as fast as if I’d driven straight through in twenty some odd hours.
Alas I have no photographs to burnish the hitchhiking
part of the tale but do have a photo taken by brother Dernovitch just after I
returned to Tempe at Christmas of 1966.
We were shooting north of Phoenix when Vance caught
me with the moustache that triggered a wagon train of trouble.