The No Left Turns traveled in style.  Well, perhaps not at first.  As the amount of equipment we lugged around continued to grow, it became harder and harder to get all of it to gigs in fewer than three cars.  Unlike today’s SUVs, pickup trucks and crossovers, the typical family car back then was a sedan.  And while station wagons were popular, Dad traded in our family’s DeSoto wagon, a purple and white two-tone beast, for a shiny blue Pontiac Catalina sedan.  Not inclined to entrust the new family car to me and my bandmates, I was offered the use of his work car, a Studebaker Lark.  It was a cream white, two-door model with a standard shift on the column.  Cool!  I could just about fit all my stuff and half of my cousin’s stuff into it.  The other half of Mike’s gear and everything else were left to fate.

Sometime around the fall of ’66, Mike’s dad acquired a trailer frame.  It started out as just a plain old steel frame with two wheels and a tongue, but Uncle Bob transformed that hunk of metal and rubber into one magnificent hauling vehicle.  First, he constructed a plywood enclosure to mount on it, three solid sides and a roof.  He included a set of hinged double doors on the back end that opened out for loading, and closed with a hasp and padlock to keep them shut while hauling gear around.  Then he painted the entire thing jet black.

But he didn’t stop there.  To personalize it for us, Uncle Bob stenciled the band’s name on both sides, surrounded by our individual names.  He spiffed it up even more by painting a baby blue guitar under the band’s name.  We proudly hauled our gear in that trailer, pulling it behind my Dad’s Studebaker.  No photos of the trailer were ever taken and even if pictures did exist, they’ve long been lost.  That unfortunate circumstance in mind, I’m left to reconstruct a semblance of the trailer’s stenciling from memory:Carrying around our band equipment for miles on weekends, that trailer allowed all of us to travel in one car, with me at the wheel.  It wasn’t unusual to see it parked at the Hollywood Drive-In late at night after returning from a gig.  There we’d order fish and chips dinners and pay with cash from the night’s receipts.  The car would get a little crowded after Jim joined the band, but there was plenty of room in the trailer for his Farfisa organ.  Uncle Bob made him feel welcomed by stenciling his name between mine and Mike’s.

On the first day of summer recess, Mike, Tony and I drove the empty trailer away to check the tire pressure and add some air.  On the way back to my house we heard a strange rattling sound.  Pulling over to investigate, we found a few loosened bolts that secured the box to its frame.  Not having a wrench on us and fearing the trailer would shake apart, we unhitched it.  Tony and Mike would stay behind while I’d go home to retrieve a couple of wrenches.  It remains unclear exactly who did the unhitching, but driving off, I heard both Mike and Tony yelling “Stop! Stop!” while I watched them frantically waving their arms in the rear view mirror.  I braked, but it was too late.  Someone had forgotten to disconnect the electrical harness to the trailer’s rear lights.  About twenty feet of wire now lay on the pavement between the car’s hitch and the trailer’s tongue.  The ensuing argument lasted only seconds as Tony picked up the wires.  Radio volume turned up to drown out further rattling, we returned the trailer to Mike’s house where, sometime after Tony and I escaped, Mike was left to explain the day’s events to his dad.

The trailer was back in service by our next gig and we never spoke another word about the incident.  The No Left Turns even gave up trying to learn the song, Stop! In the Name of Love, three of us cracking up at every attempt, leaving Jim and Bruce to wonder just what was so damned funny.