Tales of Morris

STT Memories

I arrived in STT on March 4, 1974 with an old friend from Eureka named John Salizzoni.  John and I had gone to High School together.  In 1973 the recession had hit Eureka hard and I was part of the chronic near 30% unemployment that plagued the area.  At 6’4” tall I weighed 175 pounds wringing wet.  I needed a few meals and John wanted to get out of town for all the same reasons.  I traded him a place to stay in St Thomas (my Dad’s place) for letting me borrow the money for a plane ticket down.  Getting there is another story, but John and I arrived penniless and in need of the basics of life:  beer and a car (and girls).

Dad knew a crazy guy from Santo Domingo who sold cars in Sugar Estate named Eddie Francis.  Eddie had a bar on the Sugar Estate side of Government Hill just below “Hippy Haven” called the “Blue Dolphin”.  It wasn’t much; just a bar, a pool table and a juke box. But the drinks were cheap (even for St Thomas in 1974!) and he had some regulars, so he was in business.

Eddie owed dad some money and I think they had agreed to make it even if Eddie gave me a car (which meant I would keep my hands of Dads!).  At any rate, we went over to his lot and he took us to the back of the lot where an old Morris Minor sat.  It was a deep maroon color with black seats and an automatic transmission and looked like it had once been a cab.  If you have never seen a Morris before think of the car they used in “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets” painted maroon and you have it.  It ran pretty good but I noticed a bottle of transmission fluid and another of brake fluid in the trunk.  Automatic transmissions were not the best thing to have in St Thomas in those days.  The near vertical roads made it very hard on brakes without the braking effects of engine compression to help (hence the extra brake fluid in the trunk).

We started “Morris” (as we immediately began to call the car) and the engine ran good, though the muffler sounded suspect. We drove it off the lot and the transmission started to slip, so back we went and Eddie showed us how to add fluid.  Off we went again and made it home with no problems bigger than a little fume and smoke.

Over the next few weeks John and I drove all over the island in Morris.  The tires were bald and needed air every three days or so.  The brakes ran through about a pint of fluid a week, but the transmission used a quart of fluid in about half that time, depending on how many trips up Mafolie hill we made.  The muffler got steadily worse until it fell off after a week or so.  Then the rest of the exhaust system fell off all the way up to the manifold.  Now Morris was really loud and the hot exhaust gasses tended to make the thin coating of transmission fluid that was all over the engine smoke in a threatening way so we had to do something.

With little or no money getting it fixed properly was out of the question, so I dug around the house and finally found a “Snappy-Tom” tomato juice can that fit over the manifold end.  I stuffed it with a couple brillo pads (steel wool) and poked a few holes in it then hose clamped it over the manifold pipe.  Morris was as quiet as a new Cadillac and ran without smoking.  The only problem was that the steel wool burnt out every three days or so.  That was no big thing until I used all the brillo pads and the maid got mad at us!

About that time rumors began to circulate through the bars that Timmy Ellison was working on having a huge beach concert / party.  We all talked about it in the Sand Box and Fat City for days till finally it was announced than it would be at Mandall Beach.  The days ticked off to what had now become “The First Annual Mandall Beach Festival”.  John and I were defiantly going and were not at all surprised when Dad said he was coming with us.  We were a little apprehensive when he told us there was no way he was taking his hot Toyota Celica “down that road” and that we were taking Morris instead. 

At that time the road to Mandall was dirt and near vertical for the last half mile.  Once you made it down it was worth it though.  The beach was protected and totally beautiful.  The area behind it was flat, which made it an ideal place for a large concert / party.  We got Morris down ok and arrived earlier than most. I started to park close to the stage but Dad wanted us to park back at the base of the hill so we would be able to leave any time we wanted to.  I agreed and we were off to the party.

To say “The First Annual Mandall Beach Festival” was a success was a complete understatement.  Though I seem to recall that Timmy Ellison lost a lot of money putting it on it became a legend and an annual affair.  The music was great and the night was perfect.  The party got going at about 10:00pm and kicked into high gear at midnight.  About 2am I ran into Dad and John near Morris.  We were drinking from a bottle of Crown Royal that Dad had brought when the first few drops of rain began to fall.  Then a huge flash of lightening hit with the thunder blast at the same moment.  We jumped into Morris and fired him up.  I hit the gas and pulled onto the road in front of a thousand other people who were all bent on doing one thing:  getting up the one lane dirt road to the top.  The transmission was already slipping as we careened toward the base of the dirt road up and out of the bay.  I slowed for a second, intending to let a large 4-wheel drive Dodge Ram onto the road, but dad stomped his foot down on mine pinning the gas pedal to the floor.  He was yelling something about “no dam time to be nice” and something about “our ticket out of here” but I was too busy trying to keep us out of the bush to pay much attention.

The rain was coming down in buckets now, and the dirt road had become a sticky, slippery mess of St Tomian mud.  If you have ever had to deal with the volcanic mud of the Islands you know that there is no other mud as slick or sticky or impossibly muddy as it is.  Morris’ bald tires had almost no purchase in it and as we hit the bottom of Mandall hill, I was terrified of what was going to happen next.  We were sliding and bouncing along at almost thirty miles per hour as we shot up the first part of the hill.  Morris’ transmission was delivering about half of the engine’s power,   but we were still moving up, despite the gullets of rain and mud that were flowing down.  We made it half the way up the road when the laws of physics finally stopped us.  The engine was howling as the last of the brillo pads burnt away.  The transmission was pouring smoke out from under the car and Morris was parked squarely blocking the road with a few hundred drunk,  sopping wet festival goers all desperately trying to get out behind us.

The Four wheel drive Doge Ram was still behind us.  One of the guys in it tried to get out and come up to talk to us, but as soon as his feet hit the mud he slipped and fell in it, sputtering and cussing in the rain. He got back in and the driver moved forward, engaging the huge iron bumper with Morris’ tail lights.  The lenses exploded in bits of plastic and the bumper sank six inches into Morris’ trunk, but we started to move!  Dad yelled “Just stay on the fucking road!  Don’t let him push you off!”.  I put several years of truck driving experience to use and did just that.  We skidded and swayed all over the road as I counter steered against the big trucks efforts to push us off the road.  There was no where to go but up the road so within about five minutes of smoking wrenching metal noise and muddy terror we were suddenly on the concrete road at the top!  We stayed glued to the Dodge’s bumper until we were over the top, rolling down the road toward Tutu. 

Morris barely got us home.  The transmission was gone, and despite my best efforts to drown it in transmission fluid, never moved the car again.  The trunk was caved in and the brakes were gone too.  I had used the driveway retaining wall to stop us when we finally, after rolling down Skyline Drive at two miles per hour with the engine flat out,  turned in our road at four am in the morning.  We towed him to Bovoni dump a few days later and abandoned him.  I drove by a few weeks later and there was nothing left but body.  The engine, bald tires, leaky battery… everything was gone.

I had a few other “Island Cars”, and some of those stories are pretty crazy too.  Morris was pretty special though and, if there is an eternal place where cars that people loved enough to name them go, I am certain that he is anchoring the lot.  Guzzling a never ending supply of tranny fluid and remembering that last run up the road from Mandall.

More to come…

Tim