The Car Doctor!

Northland Age, Volume 1, Issue 4, 30 October 1931, Page 1

The Car Doctor!

A gentleman describing himself as Johnny Owen from Detroit, Mich., U.S.A., arrived in Kohukobu recently announced by a big drum of his own beating and a blare of trumpets, of his own blowing. He pronounced Detriot “Detroy” which seemed peculiar for a native of that flourishing Michigan village, and he freely interspersed his twang and Yankeeisms with the purely Antipodean superfluous interrogation “Eh?” Like many of his class Johnny was largely taken at his own valuation. Engine ignition was his long suit. “I am the doctor,” he announced, “bring your car to me, eh?” Several did, and Johnny waxed fat through the simple expedient of taking the car to the local garage and getting some trifling repair for 5/, rusbing it back to the pleased owner and charging him 30/. He certainly could drive a car at over the speed limit fixed by the local body, and when remonstrated w ; *h by the traffic inspector for reckless driving through the main thoroughfares, grandiloquently protested that it gave him a pain to crawl round at 75 miles an hour. The recent pronuncimento of a southern magistrate that every drink a driver took meant a degree less efficiency to his driving cut no ice with Johnny. “Fill ’em up again,” was his slogan and an uplifted glass his oriflamme of war. There was nothing mean about Johnny. He bought meat, vegetables, chocolates, fish and bottles of beer ad. lib. and presented , them promiscuously to sucß inhabit- ' ants as he happened to encounter. His little sojourn was a merry one while it lasted but the pace, as Nelson observed at Trafalgar, “was too hot to last.” A promising career was brought to a sudden and sorry end one Sunday afternoon with the arrival in Kohukohu of Constable Hodgens. Johnny accompanied him on his return tiip to Rawene, and, like Eugene Aram, “with gyves upon his wrists.” A day or two later he faced two Justices of the Peace at Rawene, who not recognising the great artist they had to deal with unfeelingly said after hearing the evidence: “Three months.”