(A True Story) We were the township rebels, cut from a rougher piece of cloth than most of our classmates. When we were around 12 we started raiding our parents liquor cabinets, siphoning off small amounts of alcohol from each of the bottles, just enough to keep our parents from becoming suspicious. We would get together down by the RR tracks off Saddle River Road at a place called “The Rope” and mix it all together. There was wine, whiskey, vodka, gin and rum all blended together into a concoction that we called “Jungle Juice”. Needless to say, most of us got sick from drinking this horrific blend, but it didn't deter us from making it a weekly event. Fast forward to 1963, we were 16 now and had developed new avenues for the procurement of alcoholic beverages. Some of us would go over to Paterson and give a wino a dollar to buy us a bottle of Thunderbird. Thunderbird for those of you that haven't had the pleasure, is a horrible tasting aperitif with an alcohol content of 21%. What it lacked in taste, it made up for in it's punch. Some of us headed upstate New York where the drinking age was only 18, and proof of age was almost never required. Butchie T., one of our Saddle Brook drinking buddies moved to Lodi in '63. He made some inquiries around town and was told that a liquor store owner named Louie, a short, round, bald man of questionable character with absolutely no integrity, was willing to put profit above the law and sell us anything we wanted for double the going price. We agreed to his terms without hesitation. Louie would take our order over the phone, box it up and meet us on the corner of Charles and Main St. at a predetermined time to compete the transaction. He wouldn't let us come to the store “too risky” he said. Selling alcoholic beverages to minors on the street corner seemed riskier to me, but those were his terms. Mike M. lived on Saddle River Road. His mother was in Florida and his father worked nights. It was Friday night and he had around a dozen people over for a party. We called Louie and gave him an order that would have kept Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and the rest of the Rat Pack drunk for a month. He told us to meet him on the corner in a half hour, but in our excitement we didn't take into consideration that there wasn't anyone at the party with a car. Mike had a solution, he had purchased an old Ford that he was fixing up for when he got his drivers license and it was sitting in the driveway. There was only one hitch, it wasn't registered and had no license plates. Well, Mike had a solution to this problem too, His father had told him that if he ever lost a license plate he could make a temporary license plate out of cardboard, at the time this seemed perfectly reasonable to us. Al Mamone and I volunteered to make up the fraudulent license plates and drive over to Lodi to meet up with Louie. Then another problem arose, neither one of us had a drivers license. We gave it some thought, knowing that the punishment for getting caught driving underage would keep us from getting our drivers license until we were 18, but after 30 seconds or so of deliberation we decided “what the hell, we'll take a chance”. So, we take our two cardboard plates out to the driveway and mount them on the front and rear bumpers of the car. It's agreed that I'll drive and Al will ride shotgun. I tried to open the drivers side door to get in but it won't budge, so I got in the passenger door and slide across into the drivers seat and Al got in behind me. I start the old Ford and she's blowing massive amounts of black smoke out the tail pipe, Mike assures us that it will clear up in a minute or so......it didn't. I back out on to Saddle River Road, put the car in drive step on the gas but it just sits there with the engine screaming. Turns out that it had a bad transmission and would only move forward at around 5 MPH, on top of that the black smoke was still bellowing out of the tailpipe. We only managed to get around 3 houses south of Mike's when I look out the windshield and see a set of headlights coming toward us, as the vehicle gets closer I realize that it's a Saddle Brook Township Police Car and it's slowing down to see why this smoke machine is sitting in the middle of Saddle River Road. The patrolman gets out of the car and starts heading toward the drivers side door as I'm trying to get out to run, but the door is still stuck. Al is sitting there with a deer in the headlights look on his face, so I yell “Get Out” and he says “NOW” and I say “YES, NOW”. We both scrambled out of the front passenger side door, run down the side of a neighbors house and head into the back yard with a slightly overweight patrolman in pursuit. Our only saving grace is the fact that we're only 16, in top condition and are pumped up on adrenaline. We're able to leap over the border fences between each property with ease, while the patrolman lagged behind. We worked our way back to Mike's and entered the house thru the basement door. In the basement we found a laundry basket with dirty cloths and changed into them so we couldn't be identified by our clothing. Mike watched from the front door as this fiasco unfolded, then he ran over to the phone, called the police department and reported his car stolen..... the police didn't buy it. They were at the front door by now and told Mike that they were sure that Mike's brother Bobby was the driver (Bobby and I were about the same height, build and had the same color hair). Mike asked the officer if he was SURE that it was Bobby and he answered YES, so he went over to the phone and called his mother in Ft. Lauderdale and had her put Bobby on the phone. You see, Bobby had been in Florida for the past week or so. With no other suspects the police left vowing to “get to the bottom of this”, but they never did. So the stars were lined up in our favor that night. The main suspect was over a thousand miles away and even though Al and I had on wrinkled, foul smelling clothing and looked a little nervous, we were never suspect in the stolen car caper. Hopefully, the statute of limitations has run out on this heinous crime. Either way I'm pretty sure they've stopped looking for us by now. By The Way- We never made it over to Lodi that night, Louie forgave us but added a surcharge to our next order for being inconvenienced. © Jimmy McKee SBHS '65, April 18, 2017



The Rope | The Hut | Saint or Sinner |Brother John's Unusual Request | Wasn't Cut Out To Be A Boy Scout

A Brook Tale

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