After the fall quarter was over, things changed. Several guys, including Raleigh, moved out of the house and new guys moved in. One man was ex-Army LT. Gary, just back from Vietnam, where he had been a Forward Artillery Observer. Another was an ex-sailor, named Harold.

Gary came with a brand-new Fiat 124 Spider. It was white with a black roof. Harold drove a white 1960 Austin Healey 3000, pictured above. They were both older than me. Harold was twenty-three or twenty-four. Gary was around twenty-two. To me, they were grown-ups. Gary was serious about going to school and learning. Harold made a game effort at attending class during the winter quarter and but tended to drift off into doing things that were less about scholastics and more about having fun. One of his drifts was into the college photo lab to learn how to develop pictures. That's how the pictures of the Healey and me doing a wheelie on Harold's Triumph 650 motorcycle came to pass. He needed some pictures to develop.

We had a pretty good-time together. Weather and classes permitting, we went fishing off the log booms in the harbor. We went scrounging at the city dump. Port Angeles had a great dump for scrounging. We went to an occasional movie, 2001, A Space Odyssey was debuting. We cooked together, did laundry together, shopped the bent-can grocery store together, studied together, or well at least we sat around and pretended to study together. Gary was actually the only real student among us.

Once a month we joined whatever the Olympic Sports Car Club was doing and took part in their event of the month. Harold entered his Austin Healey in a Road Rally and I have great memories of being his co-pilot, following the map, timing the sections, missing the landmarks and getting us last or next-to-last place out of a dozen cars. Gary and I entered his Fiat in some sort of competition and I remember being in a line of cars that included several MGA's, in varying states of repair and disrepair, a TR-6 Triumph, a Triumph Spitfire, a Volvo sedan, and some others.

The Healey had its own set of smells and sounds. It sounded so cool when he'd start it up. Like all good English sport cars, it would shake and shiver and rattle for several minutes until it warmed up and could be driven somewhere. When you combined it with Harold's "what-the-heck" attitude about life and his pancake-flat sports car driver cap, you thought you were in the movies. All warmed up and ready to go, he would blink, laugh, put the shifter into gear, puff on his cigarette and we'd roar away.

I think that Harold's Healey was why later I traded off a perfectly good Econoline van for a 1959 Triumph TR-3 sports car and lived to regret the decision. Once you have ridden a true English sport car, there has to be one in your life somewhere.

Harold, from Tacoma, Washington, had been all over the Pacific Ocean in the Navy. He was jolly and fun-loving and he loved talking to people about everything in the world and nothing at the same time. He also liked to smoke his cigarettes.

Of all the smokers I have known, Harold could truly make you think that lighting up a butt was the best thing in the whole world. I didn't smoke. And I would tell him they weren't good for him. He used to wheeze and hack in the morning like a dying man. But after the coughing ended, he would just laugh and pull out a cigarette, move his hands and the flame just so and then take in a big draw. He'd hold it in for a moment, look up at the sky or the ceiling, then laugh and then let it all blow away. As long as he had his smokes, what could the world do to him?

Gary Welch was a very nice guy. We eventually moved into the biggest of the rooms together and were roommates for spring quarter. He was smart, had a girlfriend named Margie in Seattle, and wanted to become a banker or something like that. He was a steady person. Once in awhile he would tell me something about the Army, but I was too ignorant and stupid to ask him about anything important. I knew very little about anything, though I thought I was pretty smart. Today, it is embarassing to think about how ignorant I was when I was a kid.

Sometimes Gary offered to help me with my BSA motorcycles and I remember one time we were going to a part store to make some repairs. He made a suggestion about a better way to do something on the motorcycle and I was so horribly nasty and rude to him that he lost his temper and jumped out of the car in the parking lot and slammed the door shut with a tremendous bang. It is amazing that the door continued to open and close properly after the big slam.

But, it wasn't his fault. I was horrible, nasty and filthy-mouthed in my reply to him and he was right to lose his temper with me. He should have knocked my block off. Later he forgave me but I was surprised that he did because I really didn't deserve it and I wasn't a forgiver by any means.

Sometime during the winter quarter, maybe towards the first or middle of February, Harold bought a nice 650 Triumph from someone. I was busy riding to school, weather permitting, on my BSA Gold Star. Harold decided to get a motorcycle to ride for the fun of it and also because the Healey would sometimes have a bad morning headache and not want to start properly.

It had developed an electrical problem and the battery would go down. We would have to push it along the street and then Harold would jump into it, no mean task for a husky-sized guy, and drop it into gear and let out the clutch to get the engine started. Sometimes on the coldest mornings it took two or three pushes. It was easier to get a motorcycle.

Washington State had it's helmet law in effect in 1969, I know cause I tested it in the fall and got a $15.00 ticket from a Port Angeles police officer. Harold needed a helmet and the one that came with the bike didn't fit too well. In those days, you could buy a decent motorcycle helmet for $20.00 to $25.00. The cheapie skid-lids were between $5.00 and $15.00. The high-quality, open-faced, Bell Helmet, my dream helmet, was about $ 50.00.

Well, Harold did something somewhere with someone in a deal and ended up with a black German WWII soldier's helmet which wasn't legal and which wouldn't give anyone any protection if they fell off. But it fit well and he liked it so that was his helmet, against my better judgment and advice, he wore it while riding the bike to school and here and there and nothing really every came of it.

At the end of the school year, Harold sold the Healey to someone for $400.00 and then he and another fellow rode the Triumph across the United States to Pennsylvania or someplace similar. I think the Triumph expired once they got there. Later Harold sent me a postcard picture from Mexico City, taken while he was sitting on the edge of a fountain in a plaza with a hippie-looking guy. They had driven down there in a VW microbus. Things being what they were, they continued down into Central America until the bus gave out or they ran out of money or something else happened.

Harold said he talked himself on to an airplane headed back to the United States and returned to the Pacific northwest. It is all stuff that makes for swash-buckling tales for the fervent imagination, but it's been too long for me to remember everything. And not only that, once he would get you all jazzed up telling you about one of his adventures, he would purposefully depreciate what he had just told you, letting the air out of his story to see how you would react. It was always a bit like a cat playing with a mouse and I was usually the mouse. He proved out to be an unusual character himself.

The last time I saw Harold was about eight years ago, the year 2000, and he was still up to his strange doings. He was driving a something-or-other sports car that had a bad hydraulic clutch cylinder and it had to be started by pushing it and jamming it into gear. Some things seem to go round and round and never change. I always know when he is in town. I get a phone call from a voice from the past wanting to know if I would like to go out and grab a "tomato pie", Harold's vernacular for a pizza.