My recent post on the Greeley Police
Blotter may give the impression Greeley is a tame town. Not so, and not in the
past.
1967-1968 found me ferrying single engine
general aviation airplanes for Dirty Dick Nolan, Nolan Aviation, Greeley, CO in
order to build flying hours without renting or owning an airplane. Dick offered
fuel, oil, and a bus ticket back as compensation but kept you busy. He did pay
for repos.
Here I met Bill S____, an 11th
Air Assault group veteran, fellow time builder, and one time Norte Dame
football player. We each had a room at an $8 a week flop house in Greeley and
had sleeping bags for nights out of town.
One night we were both in Greeley and hit
one of the bars along the tracks for a beer. The place had a shuffleboard and
Bill and I started to amuse ourselves. I had never played and he was giving me
pointers. Two individuals were watching and decided to interject themselves in
our activity. One lined up all four pucks across the very end of the table, one
on each corner, and two midway across. He went on to explain it was impossible
to knock all four off with one shot. Me, not knowing better, let fly and all
four went off the table. Yeah, couldn’t do that again in a hundred tries.
The puck setterupper became prody, got in
my face, and got knocked on his ass. His buddy jumped in and Bill took care of
him. Both of us were fairly fresh from the Army and had served in units with daily
fights the norm. The other two were your basic mouthy bar toughs.
The bartender requested we leave but did
allow us to finish our beers. As we left Bill picked up the bar toughs money from their
table. When I raised a questioning eyebrow, he explained,
“They lost the bet”.
Strange, I never heard a bet being made.
Must have been otherwise occupied.
No comments:
Post a Comment