“You had HOW many people in your Gremlin???”

This is one of those coming-of-age adventure car stories that we all had way back in the day. It is getting hazier in my aging mind, but I’ve told it many times over the years. There is a car at the center of it, so I’ve decided to record it for posterity here before it gets lost in the sands of time.

I believe I was 16 at the time, which would have been the Summer (of course) of ’76.  I hadn’t had my license for long, and didn’t have my own car. But my parents, for reasons that HAVE been lost to the sands of time, had an AMC Gremlin (no pictures, unfortunately) with a manual transmission and a sun-roof (a detail that will be important later…), and they actually let me drive it.

I have no idea why my Dad got that car.  We had a family of 6 at the time so it wasn’t very practical.  I’m sure he got it used, so it was probably a ’72-’74 model (I’m not a Gremlin expert).  It was actually kind of sporty looking; blue with the white stripes that you see on a lot of Gremlins.  And it was fun learning how to drive the stick-shift at that age.

Maybe he just got it because he knew it would be low-risk to the family to let me drive it.  Which he did on that fateful summer night when I drove to a friend’s house for a party.

After hanging out at the house for a while, people apparently started getting bored, so they talked me into taking them out for a joy ride through the neighborhood (…and it probably wasn’t all that hard to “talk me into” it).  What may have surprised me, though, was the number of people who ran out to the car for the ride.  It was packed!  There were people sitting on the roof with their legs hanging down through the sunroof.  And I, as the driver, was the only one in the car who didn’t have somebody sitting on their lap.

Off we went, through the streets of Flint, with, I’m sure, lots of screaming, laughing, yelling, and loud music.  Which, of course, would have drawn the attention of people like, oh, I dunno, cops patrolling the streets.  It didn’t take long before I got pulled over.  The nice officers tried their best to maintain a stern attitude, but they were laughing.  They asked the usual questions – license, registration, what the heck are you doing, etc.  Then they said I would have to take everybody back to where we started – but in shifts of no more than 3-4 passengers at a time which is, of course, what a ’72-’74 Gremlin is designed to transport safely.

As I’ve told the car story over the years, the first question is, of course, “How many people did you have in the car?”  I really don’t know for sure.  But I do know it took me at least 3 and maybe 4 trips back-and-forth (while the cops sat there watching to make sure nothing went wrong) to get everybody safely back to the house.  So my estimate for story-telling purposes got up to 16, though I can’t confirm that number for sure.

It would be nice if that were the end of the story, but of course it wasn’t.  I got a ticket for…I dunno…reckless endangerment or something?  And in those days in Flint, that meant I had to go to Teen Court (you know, to face a jury of my “peers”…) to take care of that ticket. After the judge read the “charge” to the jury, he uttered the words that serve as the title of this story, and the jury…laughed.  My Dad went with me, and since he had already administered our family version of punishment he tried to be helpful.  He said something like, “Well, the car does have a sunroof, so not everybody was actually IN the car.” (I’m pretty sure that didn’t help at all.)

So the jury went out to do their deliberations and came back with a sentence of 90 days without a license.  I’m sure I was crushed and upset at the time, but as I look back on it now, it seems like an appropriate punishment, and I was left with this cool car story to tell.  So I made out just fine!

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