Zoobie, from Pat Musi's story, was a character you would never forget as I met him back in the early 70's, always remembered him and never thought I hear somebody else telling a story about him.
My older sister was a full time flat out hippie back then in the NYC area and with her friends got a brainstorm to buy an old mail truck, paint a picture of Mr. Natural in his "keep on trucking" pose on the side of it and use it as a "free bus" in their neighborhood. This led them to a junkyard in Carteret N.J. where they had seen an ad for old mail trucks for around $500.
Since I was the best motorhead they knew (uh oh, trouble already, I was only about 16 years old and still getting my dipstick wet) they took me with them to evaluate the truck.
This was a real culture clash, a bunch of hard core hippies coming into a pretty classic hard core Jersey junk yard. I remember the owner sitting at his desk giving the bunch the once over and it seemed like the wheels were spinning in his head on how to extract the most amount of dough from this gang.
The owner was in a garage style shirt and had a classic 50's style greaser hairdo, black hair with a big pomp on top and shiny slicked back wings on the side, a big contrast to the long haired bunch of hippie kids.
The owner showed us a couple of the trucks, and the group picked one they liked and I pointed out some concerns about a few things. The owner then shouted out to the yard for Zoobie to come take care of them.
Zoobie came in the office, dressed in a dark green pair of overalls that looked like they had about a quarter of an inch of dirty grease on them, face matching that also. He looked like he had been sleeping in the junkyard for about a month. Zoobie eyed the gang with a combination of surprise and amusement, and then set about doing the things the boss asked, with only grunts in response to any inquiries.
They paid for the truck and agreed to come back later that day after Zoobie had "taken care" of a few things. Unfortunately I think the owner had hatched a plot to do some more money extraction. When we went back to pick up the truck it ran pretty well in the yard, but died a block or two out of the gate.
Back to the owner, who didn't seem that surprised to see us back, but was now taking the position "hey, you own it now, what do expect from me". So we had to come to an agreement to pay him for Zoobies time to get the truck running again. This turned into a probably well orchestrated fiasco, back and forth to the owner to try to get it running, it crapping out again, more paid work for Zoobie, about 3 or 4 times. We ended up having to stay the night with about 6 people sleeping in a station wagon in a rest station on the Jersey Turnpike.
Carteret is a pretty tough town, and coming back from the rest stop to the junk yard we needed to make a phone call and tried to go into a bar close to the yard. They turned us away at the door, and said "you have to go to the "slovak" bar across the street". They at least let us make the call.
After a couple of iterations of paying the boss and Zoobie more money and then having the truck crap out again, I started looking at it and realized that somebody had swapped the plug wires around.
Confronting the owner with this info he played dumb, but maybe realized he had push the group far enough, and with some final work by Zoobie, still in the same greasy overalls, the truck finally ran good enough to drive back to NYC. It threw a rod about a month later, but the memory of the classic "junkyard dog" named Zoobie lasted a lot longer.
Paul T.
