I love it when this blog provokes a reader to recall and tell a memory. That happened recently from my mother; she came by on a Saturday and we strolled from my place to lunch on College Avenue, and on the way back she told me a story about Dad.

She said it happened in Chula Vista (we arrived there in fall of 1958). The plot involved election results and I wasn’t told about the event when it occurred, but it makes sense to us to place the escapade in November 1960, when I was 10 and John F. Kennedy was running for president against Richard Nixon.

Dad’s car was a 1958 two-tone Austin Healey. He loved that machine. One night he was stopped by a policeman and given a speeding ticket. It was an unjust bust, he told my mother. And he decided to contest it.

He went to court. He was allowed to explain a feature about his beloved roadster. The weak part in that Healey was its radio. A simple AM unit, it didn’t have good fidelity or strong sound. In fact, you couldn’t hear the radio if you drove the car at any speed; the roar of the engine just drowned out whatever the radio was broadcasting.

Dad’s argument was simple. He’d been listening to election results while driving. He declared that there was no way he could have heard the radio if he’d been traveling at the speed the ticketing cop claimed.

Dad won.

And Mom says he always maintained that his argument was true. He hadn’t been speeding. He was an early victim of red sportscar profiling.