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Reconnecting with an old friend

There’s a sign hanging over the bar in my basement. It reads: A good friend will come and bail you out of jail … but a true friend will be sitting next to you saying, “Damn, that was fun!”

Joe McCulloch was that true friend in college.

Joe and I met as freshmen in 1975. Neither of us were particularly enamored with our dormitory roommates the first semester, so we roomed together the second semester. The influence we had on each other’s behavior was, well, questionable, although Joe was instrumental in introducing me to my future wife and served as best man in our wedding.

We later shared an off-campus apartment. We made spur-of-the-moment decorating decisions like setting up one fish tank with piranhas and another with piranha-like oscars in the living room, and running a Tyco train set all around the apartment because, well, why not?

We rented the apartment from my future father-in-law. We had the top floor of what had been a house, with two apartments below. One day the tenant in the front lower apartment complained about water leaking from the ceiling.

My future father-in-law, being a good landlord, went to investigate, figuring the leak was probably coming from the bathroom in our apartment. Apparently, the keg he found being iced down in our shower was the culprit.

It’s a good thing I already had made a good first impression on the Kenison family.

Joe and I secured jobs with Burlington Northern the summer after our sophomore year, although we worked on different gangs for all but two weeks. The money was tremendous by 1977 standards – $6.25 an hour – and Joe decided he liked the paycheck better than studying for exams.

He worked for the railroad and then installed satellite dishes across the country. He went to work for a car dealership in Hannibal but didn’t like it. He married one of the bridesmaids from our wedding and they had two kids.

After graduating from Mizzou, I moved to Quincy and began working for The Herald-Whig. Joe and I stayed in touch, but the visits became less frequent because of my job, his job, our kids growing up – all those adult things we never thought about while we were in college.

Joe always liked cars. His dad, “Squeak” McCulloch, operated the Shell station in Griggsville. In the time we lived together, Joe owned a ’71 Plymouth Barracuda, a Mercury Cougar, a 1955 Chevy Hardtop, a 1976 Wrangler and a Buick Regal – often more than one at a time. In addition to a motorcycle, of course.

His pride and joy today is a sweet 1966 Pontiac GTO.

Joe eventually decided in the late 1980s to open a used car dealership, Wheels Unlimited, in his hometown of Griggsville, a Pike County community with about 1,200 people and one main drag about four or five blocks long.

For a long time he had a second location in nearby Pittsfield. He at times also owned a bar, a restaurant and had a car repair shop down the street. Joe always liked to dabble in things.

Whenever I have needed a vehicle, I call Joe and he finds what I want. Our kids have bought from him and so have some of their friends. A fair price, quality vehicle, no haggling. Go ahead and drive it for a week to see if you like it, Joe would say. Who knew buying an automobile could be stress-free?

Even though only about 50 miles separate us, we didn’t get together that often. Life kept getting in the way.

One morning earlier this week I made the trek from Quincy to Griggsville for the expressed purpose of putting new tires on my Jeep Wrangler. Joe got me a good deal and offered to mount and balance them.

“But you have to help,” he said. “I’m old, you know.”

Gone are the days when we both had 27-inch waists, lots of hair and energy to burn. The waists have expanded, the hair (what’s left of it, anyway) has thinned and grayed, and we now spend more time talking about things we can’t do anymore.

I could have made it back to Quincy in time to play in my regular 1 o’clock Tuesday golf game after we finished with the tires, but Joe asked, “Are you in a hurry to get back? Want to get some lunch?”

“Yeah, let’s get some lunch,” I said.

So we drove the 8 miles to Pittsfield to eat lunch and talk about this and that. When we finished, we picked up a car from an auto repair shop down the street and drove it back to Griggsville. Joe took me to his house that I had never seen just outside of town and then we went back to his small office at the dealership.

We sat around the office, minutes turning into hours. We talked about the crazy high prices of used cars, stock purchases, kids, grandkids, people we used to run around with, stupid things we did more than four decades ago – like the time in 1979 he spun out his Corvette with me in the passenger seat just west of 18th and State in Quincy and we hit a telephone pole.

“At least we missed the beauty shop,” Joe deadpanned.

One customer came by to check out the price of a car. Then three people came in to take a Ford Escape out for a test drive.

“They’re going to buy it,” Joe said. “They just want to drive it first.”

We talked some more while waiting for them to come back. “If we weren’t waiting on them, we could go have a beer,” Joe said. “I do get to set my hours.”

After about 45 minutes, the customer with the Ford Escape called to say they had taken it home – home being down the street – and would be in the next morning to sign the papers.

“Known them for years,” Joe said.

With that we hopped in a truck on the lot and drove back to Pittsfield to a local watering hole. One regular was sitting at the bar and two more were pumping money into gambling machines. Everybody knew Joe and Joe knew everybody.

While we were standing at the bar, another man walked in. He recognized me from my sportswriting days. We started talking about Pittsfield-Quincy Notre Dame football games played in the 1980s. I had not only covered games he had played in, but also those of two of his younger brothers.

That’s one of the beauties of small town America.

After about 90 minutes, we headed back to Griggsville. It was closing in on 5 o’clock.

Joe had told me about a luxury camper he owns near Sunrise Beach in the Lake of the Ozarks, so he pulled up pictures on his phone. He has a golf cart to ferry himself 10 minutes to the beach. There’s restaurants and watering holes along the water. Live bands often play on the weekends.

He was planning to spend this weekend at the camper before driving to Arizona to see his daughter and son-in-law, who recently moved there.

“You know,” I said, “we ought to spend a weekend in the Ozarks this summer. Would be like old times, except for the staying out all night part.”

We agreed to make plans.

“Let me know if the tires are noisy,” Joe said as we parted ways.

Driving back to Quincy, I kept thinking how enjoyable it had been reconnecting with an old friend. Joe’s second wife died in January and it seemed as though he enjoyed the company as much as I did.

So we’re going to have to follow through with plans to make a weekend road trip to the Ozarks this summer and be roommates again, if only for a few days. No more missed opportunities.

Odds are, we’ll probably sit around afterward and say, “Damn, that was fun!”