# July fourth massacre On narrowly avoiding a 4th of July parade massacre Every since our boys were little, we've gone up to the same little town in the California mountains to play. Every summer, the entire town – and hundreds of visitors – line up in folding chairs along the highway to watch the 4th of July parade. It’s small-town Americana done right: the National Anthem sung by a local, a few floats, advertising for the local museum or volunteer fire department, firetrucks, a smattering of beauty queens, a gaggle of Harleys, and so forth. ![[july-massacre-calm.png]] Anybody can join the parade just by filling out a form, so for several years we would sign up to participate with our 1967 Ford Galaxie 500. I’d take a couple of hours the night before to wipe down the car and festoon it with some flags and bunting, and the morning of the parade we’d pile a bunch of kids in and drive down into the parade. It was tons of fun. The kids would smile and wave their flags, people would point at the car and give you the thumbs-up sign, and periodically a random spectator would goad me into popping it into neutral and revving the engine, unleashing a raunchy ear-splitting gargle out of the dual exhaust. And at the other end of the parade route, everyone would park their cars in a lot out behind the local bank, and we’d wander around admiring each others’ vehicles. It was all good, clean fun, minus the excess hydrocarbons. This one summer our Ford was placed in line right behind a dance troupe of 15-20 little girls, none more than 8 or 10 years old. They floated along the highway in front of us, all glitter and hair bows and ruffles, twirling and bowing and doing their thing. Fortunately for them, the highway slopes downward from the start of the parade to the finish, so it was an easy journey for their little legs. Unfortunately, however, about halfway through the parade the brakes suddenly failed on the Galaxie. At one moment the pedal easily stopped the car, and the next moment it did nearly nothing to slow our roll. ![[july-massacre-route.png]] So here I was, several tons of American steel and the force of gravity working against me, trying to figure out what to do. I couldn’t go straight, lest the troupe end up – every single pastel-and-sparkles one of them – trading their tap shoes for splints, traction, and crutches. I couldn’t dive left or right, due to the shoulder-to-shoulder spectators festooned in red, white, and blue – babies, puppies, invalid grandparents, multi-generational families – waving their little plastic American flags in oblivion. (Why didn’t I use the emergency brake, given that it was, well, an emergency? Because over the years the cable had stretched and it no longer stopped the car, especially on an incline at speed. Note to self: Get that fixed.) As such, for the second half of the parade, I was no longer waving and laughing and making the engine roar for the spectators. Rather, I sat in a stoic panic, pressing with much of my body weight on the (now manual) brake pedal – which, in turn gently pressed on four aging drum brakes – while holding a false smile on my face and being careful to not spook the kids in the car with me ("We're all going to die now! We're going to crush people!") nor the spectators along the route. ![[july-massacre-part.png]] ↑ The elbow, before breaking Fortunately, we made it safely to the end, and nobody was ever the wiser. Well, except for you, dear reader. I later determined what had gone wrong: a plastic elbow connecting the vacuum hose from the block to the power brakes had cracked. I bought and installed the replacement elbow (total cost: $1.50) but never did take the Galaxie back to the parade route. ∎