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Musicman they certainly were. ..they were good to those of us who survived them🤭. I remember more than a couple times when my dad had to swerve onto the almost nonexistent shoulder of the levee roads that were/are just wide enough to facilitate 2 way traffic at reduced highway speeds. There were a lot more drunk drivers on the roads then. ..my father being one himself usually.
I recall losing to an oncoming drunk driver the extra wide drivers side view mirror that my dad strapped on the caddy when he used it for towing the boat. We'd left the boat and trailer up at the delta in the marina where We'd left the boat tied off to our friends delta type houseboat with all the different levels and cabins and galley, decks and a flybridge, etc.
My dad and his "surrogate" father, a much older drunk neighbor than my father, lost track of the time and the tides and got hung up on the beach they decided to tie up to to spend our day. Us kids were off skiing with the skiboat and not at all paying any attention to the tides ourselves either, we had no need to. When we returned to the beach, we see the 4 drunken adults straining their heads to beet red trying to pull that bohemoth of a launch back into its proper buoyant state, to no avail. The California Delta is the point where the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivets converge as they terminate into the San Francisco Bay, so the ocean tide also effects the water elevation of the Delta.
Hahaha! Those beet faced drunkards had the nerve to try to blame us for our predicament. 🤔 looking back, I wonder why we never tried to yank it off the beach with the skiboat. I've been extremely successful in yanking boats off the riprap (boulders that define the levees) and back into the water that had launched themselves completely out of the water due to lack of experience (wow! So many memories now bubbling up). I yanked them all the way back in with that little 170hp seadoo twin jet boat.
So we were at the mercy of the tide, which gave them more time to get more liquored up before releasing us into the mid dusk part of the day, miles away from the marina. That's the night we all received the lesson of the value of a powerful spotlight, which turned out to be a little less than the value of a rabbits foot when trying to use it to find your way around in the Delta at night.
It was a bit tense, but somehow they eventually got us safely back to the marina safe and sound. I remember when we got the houseboat all tied off, my dad asked his "dad" (he even used to address him as pop) for a cigarette. He'd quit smoking years before but that night drove him back to the habit. ..especially after the rest of the trip home, narrowly escaping the near head on collision, threading the needle between a head on collision with a boat towing pickup truck and plunging back into the darkness of the water we'd just escaped.
My dad was still drunk, which is probably what caused him to do a 5 or 6 point turn into the direction of the truck and trailer. By the time he caught up to him, he (the truck) was already pulled over by whatever typical authority has jurisdiction, and finally to your point about the good ol days, my drunk father stopped to tell the cops what had just happened and the cops didn't think twice about my father's condition. They thanked him for his vigilance.. lol
It was years before my dad was able to give up smoking again. ..eventually giving up drinking many many years later, when my sister had her first kid (RIP😢). He told me he didn't want to be a drunk grandpa and miss or mess up that experience like he did with fatherhood.
Thanks for allowing me to participate in this thread. It's been a nice trip down memory ...creek? ..stream?
