The Birth of the "Blue Missile"

By Andrew Cohen

The coming of age true story of a young man and his car in the 1970s. This story will take you from Fast Times in South Florida to Deliverance in the Tennessee mountains and back with an amazing cast of characters.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Andrew Cohen
• Release date: Nov 29, 2011
• ISBN: 9781466040892

Andrew Cohen

Andrew Cohen is a spiritual teacher, cultural visionary, and founder of the global non-profit EnlightenNext and its award-winning publication EnlightenNext magazine. After the collapse of EnlightenNextin 2013, Cohen took several years off from public teaching. In 2020, he and a group of collaborators launched Manifest Nirvana, a sanctuary for deep transformation, where 21st- century spiritual explorers and integral pioneers will find their home. The author of several books, including Evolutionary Enlightenment, he lives in India.

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The Birth of the Blue Missile™

Written by Andrew Cohen

Published by Andrew Cohen at Smashwords

Copyright 2010 Andrew Cohen

All images and graphic designs within the body of the book are the property of and copywritten by Andrew Cohen 2011

The cover images of Miami and the Mountains are royalty free photos from stock.exchang

The photo of Bob Horrigan is by Alan Potter

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

DEDICATION

I would like to dedicate this book to all of those who are yet to go there and to all of those who have already been there and done that and survived.

Also to Bob and how I wish we could laugh together again.

Table Of Contents

Chapter 1-Black Ops 101

Chapter 2- B.B., And Jannis, And Brandy…Oh My

Chapter 3 - Life At The Academy

Chapter 4 - We’re Not In Kansas Anymore

Chapter 5 - Sunny South Florida

Chapter 6 - Year Two: The Rockets Red Glare

Chapter 7 - On To Miami Beach

Chapter 8 - A Life Of Higher Education

Chapter 9 - The Hunt For Red….Oh Yeah A Car

Chapter 10 - The Birth Of The Blue Missile

Chapter 11 - Psilly Us

Chapter 12 - Breaker, Breaker, Who’s Road Is This?

Chapter 13 - The Birth Of A New Me

Chapter 14 - Tested In The Wilderness

Chapter 15 - What We Have Here Is Failure To Communicate

Chapter 16 - B.B. And Barry And Kiss…. Oh My!

Chapter 17 - The Truth? You Can’t Handle The Truth

Chapter 18 - Old Man River

Chapter 19 - Blue Missile 1.5

THE BIRTH OF THE 'BLUE MISSILE'™

©2010

By Andrew Cohen

As I look back on my life and recall these tales, it seems miraculous that I’m still around to tell them. The title of this book refers to the name given by my friends to my first car a 1973 340 Plymouth Duster. Most who have read this story describe it as Fast Times at Ridgemont High meets Deliverance.

I have come to understand that there are two types of people in this world regarding cars, ones who only look at them as a means of transportation, and the others who look at them with passion. I could never have imagined I would turn into the latter. I must say that these tales of my life experiences are all true and woven with the threads that brought me to the place of wonder regarding muscle cars.

On top of that, this one car brought me to places and people who would weave the fabric of an adventure of unbelievable proportions. I start this tale well before the acquisition of my first car. You see, the streak of mad scientist / covert operative I’ve been accused of having, and is still with me today, started early.

Chapter 1-Black Ops 101

The mission was to silence an alarm signal heard by a couple of hundred occupants in a very large compound. There were regular sentries, and taking them out was not allowed. This particular signal was a large brass bell in a bell tower a couple stories up from the ground surrounded by a security cage. In order for us to cover our tracks, everything had to look untouched. There was no way to get the bell out of the tower and disposed of. Cutting the rope used to ring the bell was also out of the question, it would be noticed immediately.

Battery powered power tools were not yet invented; so cutting the clapper loose from the bell was out of the question, besides, that would be heard by the sentries. We discussed CAD Welding (the use of thermite) the clapper to the bell but the possibility of starting a fire down below was real. On top of that the bell tower could be seen all over the compound, so the light caused by the reaction would give us away. Cyanoacrylate (superglue) adhesives were just being developed by Kodak, so they were not yet in our arsenal. Whatever we did, we had to do it silently.

We were a team of five, and were camped about a quarter of a mile away from the bell tower. Under the cover of darkness, about one o’clock in the morning, dressed in all black and navy blue, we made our way to the objective building. This compound was located in the mountains off the north east coast of the United States. It was summer and the air was very still. Lighting was sparse, and the moon was about half full with a clear sky. All we had to work with were the hand tools and the supplies we had in our backpacks.

We left our campsite traveling through the woods at the perimeter of the compound until we were directly across from and about fifty yards away from the bell tower building. Between us and our objective was the main headquarters building. The other fly in the ointment was the fact that the sentries’ office and barracks were in a wing attached to the mess hall, which contained the bell tower. If things went wrong their response time would be momentary, this also meant they could come around a corner without notice.

Using the main headquarters building for cover, we moved along one side keeping low and staying between the landscaping bushes and the building. From the corner of the building, it was about ten yards of open exposure to the mess hall. The barracks were on the opposite side of the building, so we still had a shot. We arrived at the mess hall undetected. There was a large covered patio on our side of the building we could access from the deck. The four of us got a boost from the ground level lookout man, and he then retreated back to the bushes next to the headquarters building to keep watch. From there he had a clear enough view to warn us in time to take cover.

In this case taking cover is a dubious term, the roof was a shingle roof with a 4/12 pitch and the bell tower was four feet square wrapped with a wire cage, but otherwise open to view. We laid low and flat on the flat patio roof until he gave us the all clear, then we climbed the main roof and got to the tower. We proceeded to cut our way through the cage with a small pair of bolt cutters. With each cut of the cage, the snap could be heard echoing in the compound. About half way through the process, the lookout signaled for us to cease and lay low, so we flattened ourselves against the roof which was also dark in color. At that moment two sentries came around the corner to check the camp, but they never looked up. We watched them make their rounds and go back to the barracks with us remaining undetected.

We completed cutting our way into the tower, and with one person holding back the cage, two of us were able to get inside the tower to work on the bell. We wrapped the clapper with washcloths and taped them in place. We then took towels and stuffed them inside the bell until there was no space left, and completely taped up the bottom of the bell. This left the bell mechanism fully operational from down below, but there would be no alarm when the rope was pulled. We exited the cage, and wired it back in place so it looked undisturbed.

We quietly scrambled down the roof, and made our way back to our campsite to await the continuation of the mission.

The year was 1968, we were fifteen years old, and you see, habits start young. Not only did the wake up bell at summer camp not sound, neither did the mess call. Because of how well we had done our job, and because it was almost impossible to tell what had been done by looking up from down below, it took the lighting fast waiters quite a while to figure out how to fix the problem. Oh yes, the chain link cage was installed a few years before, because some of the waiters had temporarily borrowed the bell for a few days. Since the sentries were also the waiters, for them, removing the bell as a team was not that difficult. As a result, the staff decided extra security measures had to be taken to make sure that it would not happen again.

Chapter 2- B.B., And Jannis, And Brandy…OH MY

The location of this summer camp is rural Massachusetts, and it’s the July/August summer break. I was in the last of my five years of attending summer camp. All of the parents in the area I grew up in sent their kids off to summer camp for a couple of months during the summer. This was so that they could have the summer off, without the kids, and go traveling, say to Europe. They would all congregate one morning in the parking lot of a large centrally located high school, and put their children on busses for a couple of different summer camps that catered to mostly Jewish families.

The first year I went to camp was a disaster, it was a sports camp my older brother went to, and it was eight weeks of torture for me. The second year was gold. The camp had an all-around format, and yes, there was a big sports program especially tennis, but there were many other activities for all to enjoy.

Since I was not the athletic type, I tended to hang out at the science bunk, or you could find me swimming or fishing. I did complete the one thousand lap preparation, and the seven mile swim to the state road and back. I guess that’s athletic.

We always had fun at the science bunk pushing the envelope, testing what we could get away with. I do remember us tossing small chunks of pure sodium, or potassium, in a barrel of water and watching the resulting explosion. There was always the obligatory pouring of sulfuric acid into a large glass beaker half filled with sugar, and watching the resulting column of carbon and steam rise out of the beaker.

We even had a demonstration of how volatile a suspended cloud of dust could be. Back then, in New York City, there were still buildings with central incinerators to handle the occupant’s garbage for the building. There were stories of people throwing away partial bags of flour down the shoot and blowing up the entire system. To demonstrate this, we took a large can, put a small hose through a hole at the bottom, which we would blow through. Then a pile of flour was put in front of that hole. A small lit candle was also placed in the bottom of the can. One good blow, and the fire ball was amazing.

My final year, the science counselor was a young chemistry