Back in the era of the "Double Nickel" the rear ends of my cars all sported "Ban The 55" bumper stickers courtesy of Car & Driver magazine.

One day in the summer of '85 I was eating lunch at a diner/choke 'n puke out on I-40, seated next to me were two huge State Troopers. I'm 1/2" short of six feet tall, and at the time I was just starting my career as a "barroom brawler", and these two made me look like Pee Wee Herman.

So when my cheeseburgers arrived I made a great show of carefully squirting the "Ban The 55" logo on each burger....

Wouldn't ya know, they followed me out of the parking lot and down I-40 for twenty five miles, and my Canary Yellow Camaro didn't exceed 54 mph the whole way.

The young 'uns these days missed all the fun back then.

 

I had a '65 Ford Fairlane back then. It was a 2 door sedan black in color with two red 'racing stripes' on it.

The previous owner had put the stripes on it and I left them because I figured I'd just screw up the paint if I tired to remove them.

The stripes were the only 'racing' equipment on the car. It had a 200 ci straight six and a three speed transmission so it was not exactly a 'race' car at all.

The chrome trim kept falling off so I removed the little spring things that held it on and filled the holes then resprayed the sides of the car with fresh black paint and touched up the top where it was sun faded. I took some paper lace curtains you could buy at the Ben Franklin store for not much money and laid those over the racing stripes and used a rattle can of pretty Royal Blue paint to make the racing stripes more custom.

It came out pretty decent.

Cops tended to follow me quite often. Some would even pull me over then work real hard to find something to write me up for. Of course back then I had a badge of my own in my wallet {I was in the police reserves back then, not an actual full time paid officer} and when they would come to my window I would have my wallet out and open so they could see my badge while I was getting my license out for them to 'run' it on their radio.

Most would either just let me go or give me some kind of warning, there was never anything really wrong with my car, I even ran a stock muffler on it so they couldn't write me for excessive noise.

Fun times being under 21 with a 'race car'.

 

I never had anything fast but a stock 3 on a tree 6 banger '62 Chevy II with machine guns on the fenders (and trigger wires to my dash), a #3 washtub on the roof with sewer pipe for my howitzer and Army paint with a star completed the look. I was always getting stopped for other reasons...lol