Monday, January 01, 2007

Mad Max in the Low Country

I was looking over at E. Campbell's website and saw a photo of this truck:









The truck looks like something out of Mad Max.

And it reminded me of something that happened some years ago in my hometown of Brunswick on the coast of Georgia (the one adjacent to South Carolina, not Russia).


A fellow got locked up in the local jail which had just had an upfit and had an enormous plexiglass front into which you could actually look in and see the jail cells.


Locked-up-fellow's pals decided they needed their buddy with them rather than locked up. So they procured an enormous flatbed truck and went to work on it. Said friends were all handy at metalworking and welding and they built something that did, indeed, look like a contraption from some post-apocalyptic movie. It had a steel cage built over the cab and a gigantic, pointed battering ram over the top that stuck out about three feet beyond the body of the vehicle.


Bright and early one morning they drove their Mad Max monstrosity onto the main drag and to the jailhouse. Getting a good, running start, they floored the thing and rammed it into the new plexiglass window into which you could see all of the cells.

All for naught. The plexiglass was some then-new material. Their battering ram barely scratched the surface, leaving a small cloudy imprint at the point of impact. The truck bounced back and came to a dead stop and refused to start. The pair of morons inside of it leaped groggily from the cab and tried to make their own getaway, but the local cops who had stood in the jailhouse watching this madness through the enormous plexiglass window were on them like dumb on a whiteboy.


They soon joined their pal in the hoosegow.

If I can find a photograph of that contraption, I'll post it. This was in the days shortly before the internet, so it may be difficult to locate.

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