They're everywhere it seems. Go to just about any parade in North American and you will see them driving among the walking and marching throngs, zipping behind the floats and between cars filled with local dignitaries. They are Shrine Cars.
Custom bodied go-carts sporting five to eight horse power engines taking up large spaces in the parade route in order to loop and maneuver through pre-set patterns, this slice of Americana goes back, it seems, to before recorded history since no one seems to know exactly when they were started. But there they are, possibly second or third generation Shriners at the wheel, sporting their classic chapeau, the Fez, running figure eights and circles with the throttle wide open, wind blowing the tassel behind them. Fabricated mini Corvettes and Mustangs and flame sporting hot rods all tearing up the road in order to entertain and spread the word of this organization's good deeds.
When I was growing up I got some first hand experience with a Shrine Car go-cart. Sometime in the mid to late 1960s my father, proud Shriner that he was, decided to leave the drum and bugle corp unit of which he was a cymbal playing member and, along with a handful of other adventurous gearhead rebels decided to form the Syrian Shrine Motor Pool. From clashing cymbals to Mustang bodied go-cart my dad just climbed the cool ladder.
My brother and I would drive that go-cart all over the neighborhood, even taking friends and neighbors along for a ride. Hey, there was plenty of room in that seat when you were 11 years old. Driving up and down the mean streets of our subdivision and even standing up to the obnoxious neighbor up the road who threatened to have me arrested until my dad took a turn and shut him down elevated my status among the neighborhood cool.
Sure it was just a go-cart but it had a lot more kid cool juice than the Pontiac Tempest that the old man drove at the time.
I remember so many times just driving around and feeling the wind in my face. It couldn't have been much because I think wide open I could still probably beat it with my three-speed bike with its banana seat and "Easy Rider" handle bars. But it wasn't my legs providing the power. I could hear that engine, not so much roar but at least whine behind me and smell the gas and oil and exhaust. It smelled of freedom.
In the summer of 1971 we moved across town and my father, for reasons I didn't know at the time, decided that he was going to leave the Motor Patrol. He sold the go-cart. I was getting ready to head into high school so I couldn't be that upset at the loss. Besides, I was banging away on the guitar and bass by then and dreaming of being in a rock band. But for a couple of years, until I turned 16 and started driving real cars, something was missing; that freedom that I felt when I smelled that gas and oil and exhaust and heard the whine of that Briggs and Straton engine.
Recently I was taking pictures of a holiday parade for an on-line magazine when I heard and saw them. Not one but two units of Shriner Cars, two Motor Pools, keeping the tradition alive. Long live that tradition. And as Donald Fagen and Walter Becker so profoundly declared, "I'm never gonna do it without the Fez on."
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