Larry and I went into town one day to do the laundry.
Larry was used to living on very little money, so when he came across things that might be useful and were free or extremely cheap he collected them, and kept them. This meant that he had lots of clothes, all old, mostly ragged. He had boxes of them all over the main room of his rickety two room house; there was plenty of space, as there was almost no furniture. Since he had so many clothes and it was a forty minute drive to a town with a laundromat, we did laundry seldom, and had lots of clothes to wash when we did.
Lar had a lot of skills to scrape by on, and fixing cars and motorcycles was a regular necessity. It was likely that some of the clothes had old oil soaked into the cloth. That’s not something I remember thinking about when I put our clothes together to wash them.
My clothes were hardly fancy at the time, and in fact Lar was teaching me to do basic maintenance on my car, so I likely had motor oil and other volatile hydrocarbons on my clothes also, although in lesser quantities. So I wasn’t too worried about my clothes being contaminated by the grease on his. Nor was I as careful then as I am now to only wear clothing made without synthetic fabrics, so there were undoubtedly plastics in our laundry. These substances in our clothes were to have unexpected repercussions.
When the washers at the laundromat were finished, we took the clothes out and put them in the dryers. When they were thoroughly dry and quite hot, we stuffed them into our laundry bag and put them into the front trunk of his fifteen year old VW Beetle. Then we headed for home. On the way into town we had to switch to the reserve gas tank which was the old VW substitute for a gas gauge. So we had to get gas before we went home or we would be stranded with no gas station within the range of the one gallon reserve tank. The last or possibly the only town with a gas pump on our way home was Freestone.
The way you could tell that Freestone was a town was that it had a fire station and a general store. Behind the general store was a bar, and in front were two gas pumps, regular and ethyl.
We stopped the car to fill up. Then we noticed that the odd intermittent burny smell that we had been smelling for a while was more constant with the car stopped. The source of the smell was not evident. After a quick look around at the car in case one of the tires was getting hot (no) or an oil leak was smoking (no) it did not appear that there was anything we needed to do something about. Perhaps someone in town was burning their trash and it was blowing our way.
We opened up the front trunk of the Beetle where the gas tank lives to get access to the filler pipe and fill it up. The smell was a lot worse, something was smoking. We removed the laundry bag from the car to get a better look inside the front trunk where the smoke seemed to be coming from, and since it was hot and unwieldy we dropped the bag on the ground. No more smoke in the trunk. It appeared that the smoke was coming from our laundry bag. We opened the bag to try to find the source of the smoke, and the clothes burst into flames. Some of the clothes fell out of the bag, and there we were, standing next to a gas pump with an open flame at our feet.
Neither of us was known for having a cool head. There did not seem to be a hose nearby. I don’t recall being able to do anything or having any clear ideas. Either we managed to communicate what the difficulty was, or someone else noticed, and the bartender came out of the bar in back with a beer pitcher full of water to pour on our burning clothes. That small quantity of water did not douse the flames, but it discouraged them somewhat, so soon we were running back and forth to the bar filling up beer pitchers with water, and pouring it out onto our scorched clothing.
This is where my memory leaves off. The fact that I lived to tell the tale seems to indicate that we extinguished the fire before any gasoline ignited. We were left with a bad scare and a diminished wardrobe.
