Pop, Cops, Fuzzbuster

It was in the early 1970’s that I got to see a side of my dad that I had not noticed before. Well I noticed I just did not give it much thought. My dad worked three different jobs in an effort to keep the family afloat. He was still working as a janitor at the local school district. He had also recently taken a job as a news paper carrier. He was also cleaning two bar rooms in the nearby city. All three of the jobs required him to drive.
On to the problem my dad was on his way into the city to clean the two bar rooms. This occurred at some ungodly hour in the morning three days a week. By this time he had been making the trip for many years and I suspect more than once his body was on autopilot for the entire trip. There is a requirement to cross a fairly good sized river to get from our house to the bar rooms. The bridge is long and arcs upward toward the middle the back down. My dad is making this run in his 1968 yellow Plymouth Fury-III. Big car, big engine, lots of potential to speed. But that was and still is out of character for my dad, he does not intentionally speed. This particular morning my dad capped the top of that bridge arch and on the other side of the bridge was a police officer with a radar speed detection device. In the early 70’s they were anything but portable. My dad is clocked doing seven miles per hour over the speed limit. There is no arguing with a cop, could not do it then, cannot do it now. They are right and you are guilty until proven innocent. So my dad took his ticket, caught by this new technology called the speed checking radar.
During my young years my dad rarely got angry or made a lot of noise about issues. He made some noise about the radar ticket. He was not happy years of traveling the same route doing the same thing had been declared wrong by technology. In NY then and now it was and is illegal to operate a radar detector while in a motor vehicle. But my dad was offended and was not going to be defenseless in this technology war. Radar speed checking stations were big and cumbersome. Radar detectors (Fuzzbusters) were not the small compact things we have today. My dad purchased one of the first generation fuzzbusters. It was big, heavy and expensive. It was just a little smaller than a Kleenex tissue box. That gave my dad and idea for camouflaging the “illegal” fuzzbuster. I cut out the front (long side) of a tissue box and stored the fuzzbuster inside. He then placed some of the tissue over top of the fuzzbuster and closed the front, sort of like a flap. So to the untrained eye it looked like a box of tissues on the dash. Keep in mind most eyes were untrained at that time as no one had the “radar guns” or “radar detectors”
This is where a side of my dad came through I had never seen before. After installing the “tissue box” and plugging it in my dad went for a drive. He went looking for police who were set up for radar speed control. It took some time but he found a radar team and drove by them. Under the speed limit of course. He then drove past them. This occurred several times as he had to “calibrate” the fuzzbuster for maximum performance. Once done the fuzzbuster gave out a loud signal and a big red light to alert you to the presence of a “speed trap”. From that time forward whenever my dad was driving the fuzzbuster was on and when alerted he would do the obvious, check speed, but more important he would declare with his delight that he saw the cops before they saw him. My dad for many of my early years was not afraid of technology in fact he would often be in front of it. My dad could also be frustrated and when he was he had no problems figuring out a way to resolve the source of frustration.