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Part Two of ‘Cruising Broad Street’ with Miami Alumni, Randy Chapman. This series was done as part of GMTimes coverage of Globe High School’s Centennial celebration; September 2014. The interview was done by Joyce McBride.
7JM: Did you guys drink? Were you guys drinking?
RC: Oh, ABSOLUTELY! Oh my gosh, yes!
8JM: Well, that helps with the mooning.
RC: Yes, well for most boys at that age it didn’t take any kind of alcohol to encourage mooning somebody. It was just something to do!
9JM: So, off hand, how many times did you do that?
RC: Me? I don’t, I don’t think I mooned anybody. I don’t think I did.
10JM: Were you the driver or the passenger?
RC: I was mostly the passenger. I didn’t have a big enough ham to stick against the window. It would’ve looked like somebody’s elbow pressed against the window, it wasn’t. I broke a hundred pounds when I became a senior, so my butt was almost non-existent.
You’d meet people while you were cruising, and that’s where you would get your beer busts, your gatherings. They’d say, “Let’s go to the lime caves! We’ve got a party going on at the lime caves, in Wheatfields. Or, we’d go to the CC Camp or we’d go to Round Table, or “Hey! There’s a party at Cherry Flats!”
That’s also how you made those connections. Cruising was a way to find somebody that was willing to go buy you beer, somebody who had graduated two or three years ahead of you and they could go buy beer. They would go to Connie’s and buy beer, because not a lot of places would sell you liquor, you know, small town. But you would go to these beer busts and you would do really treacherous dangerous things like you would build a bonfire and you would throw empty cans into it. That’s how wild wacky you got.
11JM: Did you throw aerosol cans in it?
RC: That was always saved for hiking, for camping, when it was just the guys. Well, you didn’t do that with girls because you were always trying to impress girls. Yeah, the high school boys would never throw an aerosol can into a fire to impress a girl, they would WALK through the fire to impress a girl, you know, JUMP through it or dance as close to the edge as they could to the edge of it. THAT they would do, but they wouldn’t do anything so simple as throwing an aerosol can in that would just make a big pop after a while.
12JM: Did you smoke?
RC: No. There was a very small group that smoked, but they were elsewhere, usually. You saved your money for beer. You couldn’t afford both beer and cigarettes. Oh, my gosh! They were like 25 cents a pack.
But we would often go to the Whiting Brothers Station, which is now a vacant station up by Copper Bistro. And there they had in the men’s room two condom stations plus a machine that you put in a quarter and you got a goofy little coin that had heads or tails. Heads would be a woman’s facial profile and tails would be a naked butt shot.
We would take paper towels from where you would wash your windshield; go into the bathroom and stuff paper towels up into the condom machines on Friday afternoon. So Saturday, we would go by and stop by the men’s room, pull the paper towels out and oftentimes you would score maybe four or five, maybe even six condoms. It was a real safe way to get water balloons, because who was going to tell the attendant, “I lost a quarter in the condom machine.”
I forget whose idea that was but it was pretty lucrative. Once we discovered that we did it in two or three service stations. So then we would fill them with water. They were much more dramatic! Think about it! They were much more dramatic.
But you would drive from one end of Broad Street to the other end of Broad Street to the turnaround there, and make your turn.
13JM: And there was a line of you.RC: Oh! A constant line! Yes! Yes! And the police were very good. They just kind of turned their heads; they had other things to do. They knew where you were. It was, you know, American Graffiti. There are some scenes in there that were very similar to what we did. You just took your car there to show it off. You took your car to Broad Street to cruise and run small block-to-block drag races if you could, you know. Or if you were really serious you would go out by Cutter or the Apache Trail and get it there.
Mostly, it was a lot of socialization. That’s where you met a lot of different girls. You met Globe girls instead of Miami girls and Miami girls met Globe boys. So, it was just a bigger socialization pool.
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