The Jon Bloom Story
1957
Our missed opportunity
Written 10/2011 and Re-written 02/2016
Howard Yasgar
I met Jon Bloom in 1956, Jon was a tall lanky handsome guy with wavy hair, he wore horned rim glasses.
I believe Jon and I first met at a hot rod club meeting, and we became good friends.
I lived in Westville Connecticut, (New Haven), and Jon lived about 20 Miles up the road from me.
When I went to visit Jon, I would drive up Amity road and a few miles past the Bethany airport. His house was up a hill on the left.
Jon’s house was a renovated farm house with an old barn behind it.
The barn is where his family kept their Model “A” Ford.
In 1956, when I met Jon, I had just gotten my driver’s license and I had a green 1940 ford convertible.
That convertible was a pretty nice car back then, and it still is, I sure wish I had that car today.
My friend Jon had a penchant for owning very fast Ford State Police cars.
Jon taught me that every few years, the Connecticut State Police, bought a limited amount of Ford factory hotrods.
They needed them to catch speeders on the new Connecticut turnpike.
Most people knew absolutely nothing about these special cars, but Jon was an expert on the subject.
Jon told me that when the Connecticut State police auctioned off their old cars, he knew which one had the special engines in them.
The first police car I saw Jon driving was a black 1955 Ford, it was one of the state police special cars.
His car had an overhead valve V8 engine, with a four barrel carburetor. It also had a heavy duty special 3 speed transmission and a heavy duty suspension.
So by 1956, Jon had already built up quite a reputation around New Haven. He was known to have one of the fastest Ford’s around.
To avoid confrontations with the local State Police, Jon started to drive to upstate New York, where he would always find guys to race.
When I went with Jon, he said that the interstate highways in upstate New York were perfect for racing, they were all wide and smooth and didn’t have much traffic, and best of all few New York State Police.
Jon had a system, he would drive up a New York Highway until he spotted a Roadhouse with hotrods parked in front of it.
He would then pull up in front and rev his engine three or four times.
It always worked, he knew that in a few minutes he had several guys coming outside wanting to race him.
I never known what a roadhouse was until I met Jon, and went to upstate New York.
They were a throw back to the prohibition days when they were restaurants that had illegal booze if you wanted it.
At the time we were there in New York, the drinking age was 18, but they never checked your age.
In Connecticut the drinking age was 21, so kids from Connecticut would all go to New York if they wanted a beer,
One evening in 1958, we were returning from Montreal Canada and e had passed through New York State.
I was driving my father’s 1955 Oldsmobile.
Jon was sitting on the passenger side and my cousin Allen was snoozing in the back.
We had decided to stop at a roadhouse in New York to have a few beers.
At the time we were 18 years old and we couldn’t legally drink in Connecticut.
Well, by about 10 in the evening we all had a few too many beers, and we hit finally hit the road heading for New Haven, Connecticut.
By the time we crossed the border into Connecticut, I was only following the yellow line in the middle of the road, and I’m sure I was driving a little erratically.
As I drove through some small town in Connecticut, a local policeman pulled us over.
I rolled down my window, and it was pretty obvious to the cop that I was a little woozy.
He said, “Do you know you were doing 60 miles per hour in a 45 mile per hour zone?”
I didn’t reply, I was already resigned to the fact that I was getting a ticket.
Jon, who was also as drunk as I was, leaned over my lap in front of me to look directly into the cops face.
I could see that Jon’s horned rim glasses were kind of crooked on his face and they were sliding off his nose.
Jon looked up at the cop, pushing his glasses up with one finger and he said in very slurred speech, “Officer I can absolutely verify that he was only driving 45 miles an hour,
and I’m, willing to testify to that.
I was listened as Jon said this, he again pushed his horned rim glasses back up as they had again slid down his nose.
Jon had the most earnest drunk expression on his face that I had ever seen.
The police officer who already had his ticket book out, was speechless.
He stood there just staring at Jon, and said, “And who the hell are you, his roommate?”
The cop asked where we were going and I said, Westville Connecticut and he said, “Slow down and drive carefully” and he let us go.
Fast Forward, it was in July of 1957, about 5 in afternoon, I was sitting at the supper table in the second floor kitchen of our two family house in Westville.
All of a sudden we all heard a tremendously loud noise, it sounded like thunder, and it was coming up from our driveway alongside our house.
I rushed out to our back porch to look down and see what the loud noise was.
And there was Jon Bloom just getting out of a brand new shiny 1957 Ford 2 door coupe.
By the time I got downstairs, Jon already had the hood up and I could see a big Ford V8 engine with two four barreled carburetors on it.
Jon was just beaming, his smile stretched from ear to ear.
He said, “It’s factory new, this car has the same engine that the Connecticut Highway Patrol has.
He said, “This car was designed with a special three speed manual transmission, and the same suspension that the Connecticut State Police have”.
I thought that glossy black 1957 Ford was absolutely beautiful.
Jon said, “How much money you got on you?”
I checked my wallet and I had a little over $20.00.
John said, “I got $18.00. That means we have enough money, lets hit the road for upstate New York.”
What a thrill it was, to be riding in a brand new, hot looking car like that, it had less than 100 miles on it, and it had that intoxicating new car upholstery smell.
Jon backed out from my drive way, went down the Davis Street hill and took a left onto Whalley Avenue.
Once we were on Whalley Avenue, Jon laid on it, shifting smoothly through the gears, I thought it was like we were flying.
Once we were on the Merritt Parkway, John took out his wallet and told me to look for a folded piece of paper with a telephone number on it.
He said it was the phone number of a fellow we had met once in an upstate New York roadhouse.
Jon said, “If we call him, the fellow could set up a few races for us that very evening.
Jon stopped at a public phone and I called the fellow.
He answered the phone and gave me directions to get to his home, it was in the town of Oniota.
Jon drove straight all the way to Oniota, and it was about 9 or 10 in the evening by the time we were sitting in front of the address the fellow had given me.
As Jon and I sat there in his car, we thought I had made a mistake.
We were parked right in front of the wooden porch of a hardware store.
The whole area was pitch black and absolutely silent with no sign of life anywhere, there was only the sound of Jon’s engine idling.
After a few minutes of silence, Jon revved his engine, it was so loud I thought it would wake the entire town.
I heard a window open on the second floor of the hardware store. I was waiting for someone to stick their head out and complain.
I looked as a guy came out of the window backwards. He was on the roof over the stores front porch.
He ran along the roof, and jumped down next to where we were parked. I let him into the back seat, he said we needed to pick up his buddy who lived a few blocks away.
He said it was his buddy that had all the racing contacts.
We stopped in front of a small white bungalow with a white picket fence.
Jon revved his engine and a guy came out the front door buttoning his shirt.
When they both were in the car, he said he had called everyone that he knew that wanted to race, and they said we would all meet at a roadhouse in Oniota. But he said it was now getting pretty late in the evening.
We got to the roadhouse in just a few minutes.
Inside, it was fairly crowded, so we sat down at the only vacant table in the place.
The two guys with us ordered beers for all of us and they said they were hungry. I looked at Jon and he looked at me, we only had $38.00 between us and we knew we needed money for gas, and food for ourselves.
After we ordered hamburgers and several more rounds of beer, it became obvious that these two guys weren’t going to produce any money to pay for anything.
The bill was over $20.00, leaving Jon and me with less than $18.00 left.
By about 12:PM in the evening, we noticed that the roadhouse was filling up with girls.
That’s when we began thinking our two friends hadn’t really called anyone to come and race.
We asked the guys who all the girls were?
They said that there was a college nearby, and the girls were all students there.
After a few minutes our two friends got up and went over to talk to some of the girls, leaving us with two empty chairs at our table.
It didn’t take long before two of the girls asked if they could sit there.
We were shocked, how exciting for us, they were really good looking girls.
So we made some small talk telling them we were from Connecticut.
One of the girls sitting next to me, asked if we would buy them a drink.
Wow, what a stroke of luck, what could be better than a good looking girl that was intoxicated.
When the waitress came over Jon ordered four beers.
The girl sitting next to me said she didn’t drink beer, she wanted vodka on the rocks, so I ordered her one.
I knew it would cost me $1.50, but then she caught the waitress by her apron and said to make it a double.
Now I started to sweat, as I knew Jon and I were going to run out of money.
The girl looked at me and said that her father had taught her how to drink Vodka.
Well, I thought, after this girl drank another double shot of vodka, luck would be on my side. I felt that after the double drink she would be pretty drunk.
But then She said that she could drink vodka all night with no effect.
I nursed my beer, but I was mentally calculated how little money we had left, as I watched her sip her double vodka.
I felt it wouldn’t take long before the vodka would take effect on her, but nothing seemed to be happening.
We made some more small talk and then the girl sitting next to me got the waitresses attention, and she ordered another double vodka.
We then paid for our first tab and Jon and I saw we only had about $12.00 left, and I knew we needed gas for the car, so I nudged him.
Then I asked if we could be excused to go to the restroom.
The restroom was in a hallway right near the back door of the roadhouse, so Jon and I ducked out the back door and we made it around the rear of the building to his car out front, and we drove straight back to Connecticut that evening.
We has escaped.
It wasn’t many weeks after that, when Jon came to my house one evening.
He caught me while I was working in my backyard garage.
Jon announced that he was getting Married, and to me, it looked like our racing days were over.
Several months later, I went to visit Jon, He was living in East Hartford.
I saw the 1957 Ford was gone.
Then we lost track, but over the years, I often thought about Jon and what had happened to him.
(See the Jon Bloom and the miracle story)
