The apple green ambulance…

My father has many stories from when he was younger and as he gets older it sometimes seems as if I have heard the stories 100s of times before. This used to bother me but lately I have realized that I am craving the stories and often ask him to remind me of things that happened when he was younger  or retell old stories so that I can file them away to recall at a later time…

A lot of the stories resolve around the Wynnum Manly area where he grew up and also where he lives now (and we live with him) so it helps that there are often landmarks in the stories that I can relate to.

Like the time him and his three friends from highschool wagged school, after stealing some condy`s crystals & glycerine from their science lab at school. They congregated at Manly Jetty and mixed it together and it shot off like a rocket and they managed to put a big hole in the jetty because it caught on fire. The jetty was closed for awhile apparently (and now the end of the jetty is made from concrete). So that is always an interesting story to tell people, especially locals, because not many people can say their father blew up the jetty.

Condy`s crystals are purple & apparently a couple of years after this they turned the fountain on the round-a-bout near Preston Road purple with them. Needless to say it is not a fountain anymore but a garden.

Or going back years before that even when he was an alter boy (!) in primary school and would travel to Stradbroke Island with a radical priest to do a service and after they were allowed to sit on the rocks, pull of oysters and eat them as they go. You simply can`t do this anymore because there are not enough oysters…

There was also another time when he wagged school at about 13 years old and was playing in the park with a friend who shot him in the face with a cap gun. Dad waited a bit before going home (despite having blood on his face and the begginings of a black eye) because he didn`t want his mum to know he was wagging school. When he did go home and she asked what happened he just said he had been in a fight. Several years later he was in a car crash in which he broke his leg and his head went through the windscreen and when they did an x-ray of his head the first thing the doctor said was “Who shot you?” the cap gun bullet that had hit him 5 years earlier was embedded in the bone under his right eye (It is still there!)

I think my favourite story though is of the apple green ambulance. My father, when he was about 18 years old, and two of his friends, put in $50 each and they bought an old ambulance for $150 dollars and painted it apple green. It could fit up to 20 people in it and they would drive from Brisbane to the coast with surfboards on top with the Beach Boys playing on the radio. He says it was also great for taking to the drive-in theatres because you could fit heaps of people in the back.

I think it is because I can just imagine this apple green ambulance zooming along the old highway…

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