Remember the scene in The Blues Brothers when John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd drove the decommissioned police car through Chicago in a classic chase scene? The other day I had a flashback of an experience like that, but without the police chasing me.
I was in high school and my Dad had purchased a decommissioned police car at auction. It still had the distinctive black and white paint like the California Highway Patrol. It also had the souped up engine that flat out flew.
Dad asked me and my buddy Mike to pick it up in the East Bay and drive it to San Jose. Talk about a dream job for a high school kid! We got a lot of double takes as we drove down the road, and everyone ahead of us pulled over into the slow lane.
Obviously we expected — and got — a few stares. But it wasn’t until we stopped for lunch when a real cop explained why we were getting even more looks than expected.
Mike and I had both arrived for work that day wearing the exact same outfit — blue jeans and a blue denim shirts. To the suspicious eye we looked like a couple of young escaped convicts who had stolen a police car! The policeman we met in a parking lot even said so, though he was quick to realize we were just a couple of kids.
That was a fun afternoon. The movie Blues Brothers came out a few years later, which is probably a good thing because had we seen the chase scenes it would’ve inspired us to be a lot more reckless in the old car!