The Roadman was a guy from my younger days. Where I grew up there wasn’t a lot to do for entertainment. Just drive-in movies and drive-in restaurants. The drive-in restaurants were where the cool cars were. And dare I say cool kids too. The cars were usually Fords or Chevies with shiny paint and throbbing V-8 engines. And I liked the cool cars. I those days guys named their cars. Sometimes they were named for pop songs such as”The Wanderer”. Not too sure about the cool kids but some of those do stick in my memory. The one that really sticks in my mind was the Roadman. Some said he was from out of town somewhere. Maybe even the land we dreamed of, California. I never found out where. The girls seemed to like him though. There was always a good looking girl with him in his candy apple red ‘54 Chevy. Nobody, I mean nobody drove a candy apple red 54 Chevrolet two door sedan. And with a six cylinder motor. Most of the guys I knew wouldn’t be caught dead in a six cylinder powered car. But the Roadman drove one. Gotta admit the six banger sounded pretty good with a split manifold and a pair of glass packs. But his ride was not the most unusual thing about him. It was the way he talked. He didn’t have a funny accent or anything like a yankee or some other foreigner. It was not his voice but how he said what he said. He always spoke in rhymes! It was an amazing thing. There was a rhyming disc jockey on the Augusta radio station, but he was nothing compared to Roadman. We didn’t see much of the Roadman except on Saturday nights. Nobody seemed to know where he worked either. We thought he worked in a cotton mill about twenty miles away or maybe that machine shop out on Fairlane Flats. They had a lot of foreigners working at that shop making some kind of parts for Frieghtliner trucks. Sometimes he would circle back through the Dixie and Ranch Drive-ins after taking his date home. We usually hung out under that tree at the Ranch after taking our dates home. Sort of comparing notes, you might say. The truth was stretched a bit no doubt! But the Roadman didn’t talk a lot, but if you said something good about his ride he would talk. My cousin had given his name. (He had given everybody a nick name.) So we never got to know the Roadman very well. One day we realized he had just gone. No more rhymes…except on the radio. Not even the girls he left behind seemed to know much about him. If you asked them, they would just smile coyly and say, “he was just sweet”.
I don’t think anybody ever found out what happened to the Roadman.
No more rhymes from anyone.
But I believe that somewhere out there there is a old man with a candy apple red Chevrolet mumbling rhymes.
