Following high school, I started college at Newark College of Engineering. In the fall of that year, the school was having a road rally where drivers follow a set of instructions, drive a set speed and distance, and arrive as close as possible to a predetermined time. The emphasis is on navigation and teamwork. Allen jumped at the idea. It was decided he would drive his Volkswagen Beetle and I would be the navigator. So off we went to Newark one Saturday morning for our first road rally. . We got to the rally nice and early, signed up, and started looking over the general instructions. The first thing was to put the number on our car, with white shoe polish. We were assigned #54. Now coincidentally, there was a TV show about two bumbling cops, Gunther Toody (Joe E. Ross) and Francis Muldoon (Fred Gwynne) from the 53rd precinct in the Bronx. Toody and Muldoon were assigned to car 54. And the name of the show was, “Car 54 Where Are You?” It was to be an omen of things to come. . Cars started at one minute intervals. One minute before our start, we were given the directions. The first leg of the rally was to calibrate the speedometer and odometer against the official car that had made up the directions. We got our instructions for the first leg, and one minute later we were off! . We took off out of the parking lot and got on High Street heading south. Great, this was easy, what a team. We had effortlessly navigated the first instruction perfectly! “OK,” I shouted to Allan, “We go ½ mile and turn right, what's the odometer reading now?” “Forty-nine thousand, three hundred fifty one,” came the answer. “And how many tenths?” “Hrm…there are no tenths,” Allan replied. No tenths? I leaned over and looked. Sure enough, no tenths. Silence. Being the soon to be brilliant engineer, I decided we could simply interpolate, look at the last digit and estimate how far it was between mile 1 and mile 2. So I explained my plan to Allan. “Good idea,” he said, followed by more silence. I knew something was wrong. It seemed the last digit on the odometer did not turn slowly; it simply waited until we had gone another mile and then all at once, clicked over to the next mile, giving us no indication on how far we had traveled until we had gone a full mile. We were flying down High Street and in the words of Yogi Bera, “We were making great time, we just had no clue where we were.” . After turning around and going back to the start, we ‘eye balled’ a half mile and turned right. We then looked to see if the next instruction matched up with where we were, to see if we had turned at the correct street. More often than not, we were wrong and had to go back and guess again. At the end of the first leg, the ‘calibration leg’, we had 27 miles on our odometer. The correct mileage was less than ten. So with a calibration that was useless and an odometer that was little more help, Allan and I started off on the main rally. . It was a long day, but we were determined. One wrong turn after another, we back tracked and found our way. There were clues in the instructions and checkpoints along the way. One by one we found each of them. The end of the rally was at a fraternity house, Tau Lambda Chi. When we finally got there, we proudly walked in. “Car 54 where are you?” came the cheers and jeers of all the other drivers inside. It seems all the other teams has been commenting on how they had seen ‘Car 54’ pass them in both directions, coming and going. With lots of laughter, and smiles all around, we proudly accepted our status as “Last Car, But Finished”. Complete with trophy in hand, we had officially completed our first road rally. We socialized with the other drivers, our status having made us celebrities. I found out Tau Lambda Chi was the organizer of the rally and they held several rallies each year. I met a lot of friends that day including Ralph Jannelli, who would pledge the fraternity with me, was to be my roommate in college and a life long friend. Allan and I had agreed before the rally that when we won the rally, the trophy would go to the car. So as it was to be, this was the day I joined a fraternity and Allan got a trophy. 
Joseph DiMaggio Oct. 5, 2010 |
