There was a time, long before today’s smartphones and cell towers came into being, that citizen’s band radio ruled the airwaves as a prime method of communication.
I was a teenaged ‘CBer’ in 1976, with a base unit on my bedside nightstand and a mobile unit in the Ford Bronco my dad had bought new from my step-brother, Jack, who “gave him a great deal” at the Ford dealership where Jack worked.
Dad knew he would be needing a 4-wheel-drive vehicle to navigate the muddy-in-winter, dusty-in-summer dirt roads that accessed his retirement dream – a 40-acre plot in the middle of the woods with a creaky old house and no water, electricity, or phone service.
He’d bought that parcel of land decades earlier, and looked forward to moving mom and I up there once his first retirement check cleared, while I anguished over the thought of doing without my Saturday morning cartoons and silly sitcoms like My Favorite Martian.
Dad had bought a big, fancy color television console in 1969, and it was the first color TV we owned. I always found it ironic that he’d purchased it specifically to view the much-hyped Apollo 11 moon landing in July of that year, yet the entire live feed of the event was broadcast straight out of NASA in glorious black and white.
“That’s one, small step for man…”
For a kid who’d spent the majority of his kid-hood in suburbia, with friends right down the block and the local school just a few blocks away, being dropped into the rural hills of El Dorado County was a culture shock at best, and a lonely nightmare for an only child at worst.
Dad’s retirement heaven had originally been known as “Eel’s Ranch,” which I found out when asking about a dusty old sign with that name along the side of the road as we arrived. I was 12-years-old and settling into my new, tiny bedroom in the really old, crickety house when I asked dad where I could find some eels, having the mistaken belief this tract of forest land was somehow named for the aquatic creatures.
He explained that it had actually been named after Charles Eels, the guy who ‘staked-it-out’ and built the house there in 1929. The place was full of spooky delights to be discovered and, after a while, 13-year-old me had forgotten about the fancy TV set that 12-year-old me had thrown a fit over when dad sold it.
One such piece of weirdness was a tiny, unofficial cemetery plot with exactly two graves, out in the middle of the towering pines that surrounded the house. It had rusty old metal posts driven into the soil at each corner, with a cable strung around its small perimeter and an ancient “KEEP OFF” sign swinging in the slight breeze.
Legend had it that Mr Eels employed two caretakers for the property to keep an eye on things when he made business trips down to Sacramento and “Frisco.” One summer night while he was away, they both got so snockered on hard cider that they each thought the other was a trespasser, so they shot each other down in a flurry of gunfire.
Mr Eels returned from his trip to discover that not only had they accidentally murdered one another, but they had buried each other too, so their boss wouldn’t have to deal with that unpleasant task after such a long journey. Apparently, they were really dedicated employees, who loved working for “Ol’ Charlie.”
Dad told me it was Mr Eels who put up the posts and cable to keep folks from trampling the little plot. When I scoffed at the part about them “burying each other,” he just winked at me and said, “prove otherwise.”
Cancer got dad in 1976 and whisked him away, leaving mom and I to fend for ourselves out there in that ramshackle old house, listening to the ghosts of Charlie Eels and his caretakers creaking away at the tin sheathing on the roof and groaning like the wind late at night.
Dad had seen to it that we had propane lighting installed, since knocking over one of the assortment of kerosene lamps we had used our first year there would have turned us all into crispy corpses. We also had a small, battery powered black and white TV set in the living room but it was the CB radio that filled my spare time. It quickly became my social life as I drained many a 12-volt battery late into the night, chatting away with the happy, disembodied voices that wafted into the gloomy darkness of my room.
One such friendly voice soon became a welcome sound to me on those lonely nights. Everyone used a ‘codename’ in those days, otherwise called a ‘handle,’ and this fellow who called himself “Little Foot” liked to talk about cars a lot, but he was down to talk about other things too. I wasn’t sure if he had little feet, having not met him in person, but most of the handles people used weren’t very literal anyway.
One night I asked him if he’d ever seen a “Big Foot,” since we all kind of lived in or around the woods. I went by the handle of “The Galloping Goose” so he asked me in turn if I had ever seen a goose that was galloping, and that was pretty much the last we ever spoke of that topic.
I finally got to meet Little Foot in the parking lot of a Grange hall somewhere just outside of Placerville one summer evening in 1977, as he stepped out of a tan ‘69 Dodge Dart. It was then that I noticed he had totally normal sized feet while I, in turn, did not arrive on a galloping goose, but in the Ford Bronco I’d inherited from my dad the year before.
The occasion was a pot-luck dinner put on by a local CBers club, and all of those previously disembodied voices were there! I finally got to meet Taco Bender and his wife, Sweet Sally, along with Rowdy Dog, Steelhead, Horny Toad, and of course, The Great White Father, who had brought along his wife too, known as “Mrs Great White Father.”
I had brought baked beans with bacon, and Little Foot brought a robust chicken dish that his mom had cooked up, which I think would have delighted the pickiest of actual Big Foots. Or is it “Big Feet” if you encounter a herd of them? I guess I’ll never find out because, if I ever encounter a herd of them, I will be too busy running in the opposite direction to even think about it.
We ate, drank, and danced with some girls to the live band, then ate some more as The Great White Father regaled a table full of us with stories from the second world war, where he had served as some kind of commander. I eventually found my way back out to the parking lot with Little Foot.
He wanted to show-off the work he’d done on his ‘69 Dart, so he popped the hood and started pointing at things, describing how this gizmo was better than the original gizmo that had been there, and how he could “squeeze more horses” out of the piston block due to the airflow of the conduction foils, or something. I had no idea what he was talking about but, being a 17-year-old boy, I should have known what he was talking about, so I faked it.
He caught on pretty quickly that I didn’t have a clue when I asked him how many horses fit into his gas tank and, for a moment there, I thought he was going to poke fun at me and send me back inside the Grange hall. Instead, he invited me to the races.
“Goose, you ever been out to Hangtown Speedway?”
He had called me ‘Goose,’ despite the fact that my name is Dave, and it somehow stuck. He called me that for years afterward, and no one else did. He’d claimed the right to do so early on, and he owned it.
I told him I hadn’t been out to the speedway, and I wasn’t sure where it was. He told me to be at the fairgrounds next to Raley’s on Saturday afternoon and look for him by the gate. So that’s what I did.
I’d asked him if there’d be any girls there, because I was 17-years-old, as was he, and he assured me that the place “would be crawling with speed-bunnies.” *snork* I WAS IN!
It was the noisiest, dustiest, and most exhilarating thing I’d witnessed to that point, and it kicked off a long friendship between Little Foot and myself. During the course of that summer evening I’d eaten about seven hotdogs, downed a couple of beers because IDs were easy to fake in 1977, cheered on the cars that Little Foot cheered on because I figured he knew what he was talking about, and jumped to my feet along with everyone else when someone crashed and flipped; then we all cheered when the driver climbed out of the wreck and gave us spectators a thumbs-up to show he was okay.
I even talked with a speed-bunny or two, who were more than happy to give their phone numbers to a guy who didn’t have a phone. Good thing pay phones were everywhere in those days.
I joined the Navy the following year but, before I flew to San Diego on a big airplane to learn how to sail the seas on a big ship, I spent quite a bit of time with Little Foot: going to the races at (then) Hangtown Speedway, racing around in his Dodge Dart, sweet-talking a speed-bunny or two, and just generally being teenage boys on the verge of being men.
We kept in touch over the years, and he even showed up with a shiny new girlfriend one time to visit me on the Navy ship I called home, long ago. We strolled around the decks and reminisced of cruising the boulevard, going down to Sacramento “for some action,” and listening to The Eagles, The Doors, Grateful Dead, Lynyrd Skynrd, and Jethro Tull on his stereo. He’d since sold the Dodge Dart in favor of a Pontiac Firebird, which foreshadowed a long line of muscle cars that would grace his garage over the years.
The last time I saw him, he brought his beautiful wife along to visit with my wife and I at our place in San Francisco, nearly forty years after I had sailed my final sea. We four seniors-in-training shared memories over dinner and much higher quality beer than he and I used to get back in the day. He told me of his two grown boys and how proud he was of the men they’d become, and how one of them even drove a race car that they’d built together, participating in races at what is now called Placerville Speedway.
It was only a short time after that when the checkered flag dropped after the final lap of his life, and Little Foot drove off into the sunset, leaving a legacy behind. I like to imagine what he would have thought when we were watching those noisy racers spinning around the oval so many years ago, if he’d only known that someday there would be a race night dedicated in his honor – a night that his family would attend, and his longtime friends would gather to remember not only the boy he was, but the man he became.
This joyful gathering would bear his name: The “Carnett Clash.” It would become an annual event to cheer on your favorite driver, have a hotdog and a beer, and maybe meet a nice speed-bunny (or speed-buck!) if you don’t have one of your own yet. But, most of all, to remember the legacy of one of the greatest friends that some of us were lucky enough to have had in our lives… Bryan Carnett.
I find it fitting that a guy who loved cars so much, even had the word CAR in his name. Godspeed, Little Foot.
Written by DW Rhodes
DW Rhodes is the author of numerous books that haven’t been written yet. He can be reached with comments, criticisms, greeting cards, and cash, at [email protected]