Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/536502
July / August 2015 6 EDITOR'S COLUMN By Stan Thorne Am I the only one? I NAME MY CARS I'm not to sure when this car naming business started. But, as long as I can remember my family has named their cars. If I were to put a finger on it, it might have started with my Dad. He was always buying cars and fixing them up for extra money for the family. He did it so much it was hard for my mom to keep them straight; Lexus 400, 525 BMW, 300 ZX. I think you get the picture. Fast forward to today, and I don't buy and sell cars like my father. However the naming of cars continues. In fact I think I have already started the next generation. My kids name all my cars. They named the red 944 Turbo 'Red Racer'. They named our big white Mercedes R350 SUV 'Olaf' after the snowman in the movie Frozen. The ocean blue 996 was named "The Blue Bullet'. I really liked that name. In my quest for the perfect Porsche, Blue Bullet was sold and a biarritz white 996 Twin Turbo was headed our way. This lead to much quandary in my household. What are we going to name the... white car? My girls were quick to toss out 'Snowball' and 'Snowflake'. With my manliness at stake I told them to keep thinking. "How about Cloud?" McKenna offered up. Ugh. I can't live with Cloud. Kendall said 'Lightning'. Better, I thought, but not it. Then came our family vacation to Arizona. Olaf took good care of us on an over 3,500 mile drive from Kansas City through the southwest and back. One evening we decided to go see a cowboy show. The show ended up to be more show, as in singing and chuck wagon, than cowboy riding and shooting. Anyway the food was good and the guitar picking cowboys were not that bad. To end the night they dimmed the lights, and the audience went quiet. A lone guitar began to pick out the first few bars of Johnny Cash's big hit Ghost Riders. As the trio of harmonizing cowboys sang the chorus, "Yippie I aye ye ye, Ghost Riders in the sky..." A brilliant strobe light lit up the field surrounding the dining hall. A lone horseman reared on his steed and began to gallop around the building. The strobe light gave an eerie cadence to his horse as he rode. He was dressed in a black hat with his ghostly white sheet trailing in the hot wind. McKenna grabbed my arm, pointing, and said "Look it's the Ghost Rider!" That night McKenna and Kendall agreed the white turbo should be named Ghost Rider. Ya, I can live with that. - STAN