Post by brendanlucas on Jan 9, 2011 20:27:35 GMT 12
This is a chronological ,historical, slightly distorted version of how the Panthers came to be. Some of the characters are fictional, & there were no animals harmed in the making of this.
Long ago, even before the Palmertson North Panthers were formed, the original 5 members were friends, some of them went to school together, a school called Palmy Olde School. The five were all at Boy Scouts together, & it was here they migrated together due to there common interests, particularly in craftwork. They actually become high fashion guru’s in there own right & could cook most of todays chiefs under the table. Charlie was the best designer, Peter, & Jack would take care of the putting together, & Roy & Warwick would do the modelling (they had the best legs, the rest of them were just too ugly).
Roy and Warwick were off overseas (Australia) to a scouting jamboree, the driver of the plane was told to turn left at Kentucky Fried in Auckland, he got that wrong, turned right & ended up dropping them off in USA. Thinking they were in Australia, heading to their jamboree they got a bit lost. They were picked up by a bus driver who had mistaken them for a group of young girls that he was supposed to have picked up, Mr Charles Manson (the bus driver) flew into a rage & kicked them off the bus. Now in the middle of nowhere, not really knowing where they were, they resorted to hitchhiking. As luck would have it, they were picked up by a couple of African American guys (Jimmy & Malcolm were there names) heading to there own jamboree, they called it Woodstock. Jimmy, Roy, Warwick, & Malcolm all went off to Woodstock together, turns out Jimmy was quite the musician.
It wasn’t quite the jamboree they had been thinking of, but had a good time all the same. Jimmy gave Warwick a bunch of what he called Little Sized Disprins to take with him, & Roy was quite inspired by what Malcolm was wearing, Malcolm gave Roy an emblem off his shirt to take with him.
Upon the arrival back in NZ, the others were eager to hear of there travels. The group thought nothing of the Little Sized Disprins, but thought the Panther emblem looked quite neat.
A we while latter, due to Charlie having a headache, he tried one of Warwicks ‘Little Sized Disprins’, & found them most effective for getting rid of the headache, in fact he woke three days later in a barn next to a sheep, both of them smoking a cigarette.
It was while the group (they called themselves the famous 5 at that point) were together brainstorming on what adventures they could get up to & how to fund it that a light went on in Charlies head “I know, lets invent a machine that can be placed in every home that will revolutionise communications”, which lead to the rest of the group giving him dumb stares & calls to not be so idiotic. Shortly after that, Roy come up with the idea to start a racing car team called the Black Panthers, using the logo off Malcolm’s shirt that he had got whilst in America. “We could fund it by selling hotdogs, & by putting those ‘Little Sized Disprins’ in as a special secret recipe” said Warwick. It’ll work out quite good, because we can sell Black ‘T’ shirts which seem to be quite slimming (they knew this due to them being good at fashion), so we should be able to sell extra hotdogs” said Jack.
So there you have it, the Black Panthers were formed & the name came from Malcolm’s shirt emblem, & because the colour black allowed them to sell extra hotdogs due to black ‘T’ shirts making the wearer look slim.
Now with a funding base, the Panthers (after dropping the Famous 5 name) could move forward. They sold millions of thousands of the hotdogs, & perfected the recipe over a short period of time. Now with the task at hand of getting the racing car team going, it was left to us kids to tend the hotdog mines to keep up with production. I was now a student myself at Palmy Olde School, if we milked the cows in the morning, then tended the hotdog mines before school, they would give us lard sandwiches, which were a real treat.
The Panthers had a ritual of giving to there opposition free hotdogs prior to the racing. The opposition always took up the free offer, but hadn’t realise they had Little Sized Disprins in high dosage. For 4 years the Panthers were unbeaten, until a Wildcats side, running late to the track had to skip the hotdog thing & drive un-stupified.
In this period, we saw some driver changes within the team. Firstly, Roy having to tend the family business, had to depart. His replacement was the identical twin brother of Jimmy, whom Warwick had met at whilst at the Woodstock Jamboree in the USA. His name was Bruce. Sadly, Jimmy had passed away due to choking on a ham sandwich (or something like that) leaving his brother who Jimmy had cared for to fend for himself. Unwanting any attention, Bruce was trundled off to NZ. With the careful use of bleach, & the clever use of carpet cleaning products, Bruce now looked like the rest of them (almost), but if you look close you will see resemblance, pretty obvious really. Bruce also brought with him his soapbox derby car (the Americans always did things big). As it happened, this soapbox car looked a little different but was exactly the same size as our stockcars (see picture), so he easily converted it & joined the team.
The racing in those early days seemed to go mostly the way of the black panthers, building a formidable reputation along the way.
For a number of years through the mid seventies, I didn’t get to see too much of the racing, not in Palmy anyway, but I did go to school with some others that would go on to be involved in one way or another.
With my involvement in making the hotdogs, I was able to occasionally take some to school. One time, I gave a bunch of them to some older kids on our sports day. I remember this one kid who used to win all his running races, Parkes his name was, he won his 100 metre dash that day in a time of a little over three minutes. I don’t think the others even finished. Another kid, the Jones boy, I used to swap hotdogs for bike parts (he had a bike wrecking thing going on), & he couldn’t get enough of them. They ended up calling him stinky Jones on account of the gas from the hot dogs. I heard later on they called him Skidz, not sure why that was but I heard even his mother refused to wash some of his clothes. There was another kid I remember, bit of a bully, Roberts his name. He used to terrorise some of those smaller kids – especially this runty one called Peewee. Roberts would swap the sultanas from Peewees’s sandwiches with sheep droppings, put drawing pins on his seat, kick sand in his face in the sandpit, those kind of things. I thought one day that Peewee is going to get that Roberts kid back, I’d like to see that.
Across town there was another school called ‘Palmys Rich Aristocratic Tycoon School (or PRATS for short), the kids from our school & the PRATS kids never really got along, I think they had there sense of humour surgically removed. We would push them off there bikes given the chance, but normally there rich parents would drive them around. I remember there mums & dads drove the very latest Ford Anglias & Hillman Hunters, etc, while all our parents could afford was crappy old cars like Plymouth Barracudas, FJ Holdens, Chevy Nomads, Ford Twin Spinners, Ford F100’s, Chevy Bellaire’s, & old rubbish like that. Even the girlfriends they had seemed better – they wore shoes, had there own teeth & stuff like that. We were probably just jealous looking back.
I remember one time standing outside a milk bar, & there was young Norm.
Norm migrated from Ireland & fitted in pretty well with our lads, you didn’t want to mess with him. Anyway, out walked one of the PRATS girls, “Whaaooorraholahlah”, said young Norm (who got top in his class in English) to this Sheila, then out walked behind her a 9 foot teacher from Prats school (her father), whom said to Norm “would you mind repeating yourself young man”. “You know who you’re pickin” said Norm, “I rather have no idea” said the the 9 foot teacher. “You’ll find out” said Norm. Anyway, with that there was a break in the traffic, & as any Olde School lad knows when there is a break in the traffic, you never let a chance go by – so he buggered off quick. Norm was always late to school, we started at quarter to nine & he would always turn up at 2 to 9, we ended up calling him 29.
There were a couple of other older kids at this school a have memories of, the Evans & Anderson kids. These two would go around practicing there WWF moves randomly on kids that fell into there lair. Anderson would pin them down, & Evans would do the Summer Slam! I think they just enjoyed inflicting pain. These guys, along with the Parkes kid become part of one of the most successful reins of Panther power. Anyway, these guys each had an overseas exchange student stay with them for a few months, they were from France, & there English wasn’t that great. Dominic & Alain there names were. Dominic & Alain visited a few years later, & at the get-together, I remember someone asking Dave (Dave didn’t say much & didn’t repeat himself) why they stopped taking the tanks to Wanganui. His reply, “@#@t bloody 3v#n Mooney & #1s rainbow warrior”. I didn’t catch all what he said. Anderson chimed in saying “we used to get too much damage going over there, so stopped going”. We all knew Evan Mooney as the rainbow warrior due to its bright paint job & being a Wanganui Warrior.
Later on there trip, Dominic & Alain spotted what they had thought had cost there loyal friends so much grief, it was while they were strolling along the Auckland harbour, & figured “Awe haw, dis mus bee wut Da-viide wus tucking aboot”. Unfortunately, they got that horribly wrong, & in what they thought was getting even, they ended up getting in a power of 5hit with the cops.
‘Billy the Milky Bar Kid Dorn’, that’s what we called him at school on account that he was the Milky Bar Kid, was another colourful character from our school.
Bill pictured at the beach just after he got the Milky Bar Kid job-
He wasn’t a big bloke, which is why he managed to keep the Milky Bar job until he was 23 years old when his voice broke. At that stage he was in the third form, which is when most of us Olde School kids think about leaving school. The money they gave him from that job wasn’t quite enough to be able to buy his parents a new Morris 1100 what he really wanted, so he settled on buying them a paint job for there poor clapped out olde car.
He left school to drive a tractor on his parents farm, which is where he learnt his skills to drive his stockcar. This is when he become known as Billy the Kid.
A few years later, Bill received a royalty cheque from the Milky Bar people, & with that he purchased his second stockcar (he’d already been racing for several years by now) for the outrageous record breaking price of $6500!
A student teacher we had, Mr Easton, known more commonly as Smokin Jack, on account of his ability to snap the smokers in the bike sheds was another from our school that you could write a book about. Smokin Jack would become one of the best teachers we had. One time, we were telling him about how we were in the boy scouts & what we got up to, & he said "the girl guides are better, & I know how to get you into the girl guides". He was true to his word, one night he picked us up & took us to meet some of his girl guide friends, & yes we actually got into the girl guides……, just not the way we were expecting.
One of these girl guides Jack really liked, Helen was her name. Helen was actually a student teacher at Prats school. I think he carried a thing for her for a long time.
The car Jack drove was one of those beat up old Alloy bodied 32 Ford Coupes the Americans made when there was a steel shortage. He was so poor that when he built his stockcar he recycled this old alloy body, it looked OK though.
I’m going to skip a few years, & comment on something I was directly involved with, then put this Panther Tail to bed for a wee while – I think I’ll have my hands full for a while.
I can now confirm (I was sworn to 10 years silence) to the conspiracy theorists that Mr Bootes car did not get that high in the air without ‘outside assistance’. My payment for remaining silent was a full set of Pokemon cards, which I recieved from the promoter at the time. If you look close at the photo, you will see a bungy cord attached to the car tied to the roof of the stand.
It was my job to park the car in a non-conspicuous place, get out of my seat, chuck my ‘high-vis’ coat on (I had to make sure I was gonna be safe), & attach the bungy cord as the Nelson car went past. We almost stuffed up cause he nearly went over the fence. The whole idea was to create a spactacular crash to generate gate sales – it worked. I remember we had to take all the un-needed weight out of Craigs car – the back seat, we took all the Amway tapes out of his glove box, we even took the George Michael poster he had attached to the under side of his roof plate, we took everything out we could think of that wasn’t needed. One sour note for me, when I got the Pokamon cards, they were in much worse condition then I expected, which I thought was a little dodgy but that’s another matter.
This tail will continue at a later date……..
Long ago, even before the Palmertson North Panthers were formed, the original 5 members were friends, some of them went to school together, a school called Palmy Olde School. The five were all at Boy Scouts together, & it was here they migrated together due to there common interests, particularly in craftwork. They actually become high fashion guru’s in there own right & could cook most of todays chiefs under the table. Charlie was the best designer, Peter, & Jack would take care of the putting together, & Roy & Warwick would do the modelling (they had the best legs, the rest of them were just too ugly).
Roy and Warwick were off overseas (Australia) to a scouting jamboree, the driver of the plane was told to turn left at Kentucky Fried in Auckland, he got that wrong, turned right & ended up dropping them off in USA. Thinking they were in Australia, heading to their jamboree they got a bit lost. They were picked up by a bus driver who had mistaken them for a group of young girls that he was supposed to have picked up, Mr Charles Manson (the bus driver) flew into a rage & kicked them off the bus. Now in the middle of nowhere, not really knowing where they were, they resorted to hitchhiking. As luck would have it, they were picked up by a couple of African American guys (Jimmy & Malcolm were there names) heading to there own jamboree, they called it Woodstock. Jimmy, Roy, Warwick, & Malcolm all went off to Woodstock together, turns out Jimmy was quite the musician.
It wasn’t quite the jamboree they had been thinking of, but had a good time all the same. Jimmy gave Warwick a bunch of what he called Little Sized Disprins to take with him, & Roy was quite inspired by what Malcolm was wearing, Malcolm gave Roy an emblem off his shirt to take with him.
Upon the arrival back in NZ, the others were eager to hear of there travels. The group thought nothing of the Little Sized Disprins, but thought the Panther emblem looked quite neat.
A we while latter, due to Charlie having a headache, he tried one of Warwicks ‘Little Sized Disprins’, & found them most effective for getting rid of the headache, in fact he woke three days later in a barn next to a sheep, both of them smoking a cigarette.
It was while the group (they called themselves the famous 5 at that point) were together brainstorming on what adventures they could get up to & how to fund it that a light went on in Charlies head “I know, lets invent a machine that can be placed in every home that will revolutionise communications”, which lead to the rest of the group giving him dumb stares & calls to not be so idiotic. Shortly after that, Roy come up with the idea to start a racing car team called the Black Panthers, using the logo off Malcolm’s shirt that he had got whilst in America. “We could fund it by selling hotdogs, & by putting those ‘Little Sized Disprins’ in as a special secret recipe” said Warwick. It’ll work out quite good, because we can sell Black ‘T’ shirts which seem to be quite slimming (they knew this due to them being good at fashion), so we should be able to sell extra hotdogs” said Jack.
So there you have it, the Black Panthers were formed & the name came from Malcolm’s shirt emblem, & because the colour black allowed them to sell extra hotdogs due to black ‘T’ shirts making the wearer look slim.
Now with a funding base, the Panthers (after dropping the Famous 5 name) could move forward. They sold millions of thousands of the hotdogs, & perfected the recipe over a short period of time. Now with the task at hand of getting the racing car team going, it was left to us kids to tend the hotdog mines to keep up with production. I was now a student myself at Palmy Olde School, if we milked the cows in the morning, then tended the hotdog mines before school, they would give us lard sandwiches, which were a real treat.
The Panthers had a ritual of giving to there opposition free hotdogs prior to the racing. The opposition always took up the free offer, but hadn’t realise they had Little Sized Disprins in high dosage. For 4 years the Panthers were unbeaten, until a Wildcats side, running late to the track had to skip the hotdog thing & drive un-stupified.
In this period, we saw some driver changes within the team. Firstly, Roy having to tend the family business, had to depart. His replacement was the identical twin brother of Jimmy, whom Warwick had met at whilst at the Woodstock Jamboree in the USA. His name was Bruce. Sadly, Jimmy had passed away due to choking on a ham sandwich (or something like that) leaving his brother who Jimmy had cared for to fend for himself. Unwanting any attention, Bruce was trundled off to NZ. With the careful use of bleach, & the clever use of carpet cleaning products, Bruce now looked like the rest of them (almost), but if you look close you will see resemblance, pretty obvious really. Bruce also brought with him his soapbox derby car (the Americans always did things big). As it happened, this soapbox car looked a little different but was exactly the same size as our stockcars (see picture), so he easily converted it & joined the team.
The racing in those early days seemed to go mostly the way of the black panthers, building a formidable reputation along the way.
For a number of years through the mid seventies, I didn’t get to see too much of the racing, not in Palmy anyway, but I did go to school with some others that would go on to be involved in one way or another.
With my involvement in making the hotdogs, I was able to occasionally take some to school. One time, I gave a bunch of them to some older kids on our sports day. I remember this one kid who used to win all his running races, Parkes his name was, he won his 100 metre dash that day in a time of a little over three minutes. I don’t think the others even finished. Another kid, the Jones boy, I used to swap hotdogs for bike parts (he had a bike wrecking thing going on), & he couldn’t get enough of them. They ended up calling him stinky Jones on account of the gas from the hot dogs. I heard later on they called him Skidz, not sure why that was but I heard even his mother refused to wash some of his clothes. There was another kid I remember, bit of a bully, Roberts his name. He used to terrorise some of those smaller kids – especially this runty one called Peewee. Roberts would swap the sultanas from Peewees’s sandwiches with sheep droppings, put drawing pins on his seat, kick sand in his face in the sandpit, those kind of things. I thought one day that Peewee is going to get that Roberts kid back, I’d like to see that.
Across town there was another school called ‘Palmys Rich Aristocratic Tycoon School (or PRATS for short), the kids from our school & the PRATS kids never really got along, I think they had there sense of humour surgically removed. We would push them off there bikes given the chance, but normally there rich parents would drive them around. I remember there mums & dads drove the very latest Ford Anglias & Hillman Hunters, etc, while all our parents could afford was crappy old cars like Plymouth Barracudas, FJ Holdens, Chevy Nomads, Ford Twin Spinners, Ford F100’s, Chevy Bellaire’s, & old rubbish like that. Even the girlfriends they had seemed better – they wore shoes, had there own teeth & stuff like that. We were probably just jealous looking back.
I remember one time standing outside a milk bar, & there was young Norm.
Norm migrated from Ireland & fitted in pretty well with our lads, you didn’t want to mess with him. Anyway, out walked one of the PRATS girls, “Whaaooorraholahlah”, said young Norm (who got top in his class in English) to this Sheila, then out walked behind her a 9 foot teacher from Prats school (her father), whom said to Norm “would you mind repeating yourself young man”. “You know who you’re pickin” said Norm, “I rather have no idea” said the the 9 foot teacher. “You’ll find out” said Norm. Anyway, with that there was a break in the traffic, & as any Olde School lad knows when there is a break in the traffic, you never let a chance go by – so he buggered off quick. Norm was always late to school, we started at quarter to nine & he would always turn up at 2 to 9, we ended up calling him 29.
There were a couple of other older kids at this school a have memories of, the Evans & Anderson kids. These two would go around practicing there WWF moves randomly on kids that fell into there lair. Anderson would pin them down, & Evans would do the Summer Slam! I think they just enjoyed inflicting pain. These guys, along with the Parkes kid become part of one of the most successful reins of Panther power. Anyway, these guys each had an overseas exchange student stay with them for a few months, they were from France, & there English wasn’t that great. Dominic & Alain there names were. Dominic & Alain visited a few years later, & at the get-together, I remember someone asking Dave (Dave didn’t say much & didn’t repeat himself) why they stopped taking the tanks to Wanganui. His reply, “@#@t bloody 3v#n Mooney & #1s rainbow warrior”. I didn’t catch all what he said. Anderson chimed in saying “we used to get too much damage going over there, so stopped going”. We all knew Evan Mooney as the rainbow warrior due to its bright paint job & being a Wanganui Warrior.
Later on there trip, Dominic & Alain spotted what they had thought had cost there loyal friends so much grief, it was while they were strolling along the Auckland harbour, & figured “Awe haw, dis mus bee wut Da-viide wus tucking aboot”. Unfortunately, they got that horribly wrong, & in what they thought was getting even, they ended up getting in a power of 5hit with the cops.
‘Billy the Milky Bar Kid Dorn’, that’s what we called him at school on account that he was the Milky Bar Kid, was another colourful character from our school.
Bill pictured at the beach just after he got the Milky Bar Kid job-
He wasn’t a big bloke, which is why he managed to keep the Milky Bar job until he was 23 years old when his voice broke. At that stage he was in the third form, which is when most of us Olde School kids think about leaving school. The money they gave him from that job wasn’t quite enough to be able to buy his parents a new Morris 1100 what he really wanted, so he settled on buying them a paint job for there poor clapped out olde car.
He left school to drive a tractor on his parents farm, which is where he learnt his skills to drive his stockcar. This is when he become known as Billy the Kid.
A few years later, Bill received a royalty cheque from the Milky Bar people, & with that he purchased his second stockcar (he’d already been racing for several years by now) for the outrageous record breaking price of $6500!
A student teacher we had, Mr Easton, known more commonly as Smokin Jack, on account of his ability to snap the smokers in the bike sheds was another from our school that you could write a book about. Smokin Jack would become one of the best teachers we had. One time, we were telling him about how we were in the boy scouts & what we got up to, & he said "the girl guides are better, & I know how to get you into the girl guides". He was true to his word, one night he picked us up & took us to meet some of his girl guide friends, & yes we actually got into the girl guides……, just not the way we were expecting.
One of these girl guides Jack really liked, Helen was her name. Helen was actually a student teacher at Prats school. I think he carried a thing for her for a long time.
The car Jack drove was one of those beat up old Alloy bodied 32 Ford Coupes the Americans made when there was a steel shortage. He was so poor that when he built his stockcar he recycled this old alloy body, it looked OK though.
I’m going to skip a few years, & comment on something I was directly involved with, then put this Panther Tail to bed for a wee while – I think I’ll have my hands full for a while.
I can now confirm (I was sworn to 10 years silence) to the conspiracy theorists that Mr Bootes car did not get that high in the air without ‘outside assistance’. My payment for remaining silent was a full set of Pokemon cards, which I recieved from the promoter at the time. If you look close at the photo, you will see a bungy cord attached to the car tied to the roof of the stand.
It was my job to park the car in a non-conspicuous place, get out of my seat, chuck my ‘high-vis’ coat on (I had to make sure I was gonna be safe), & attach the bungy cord as the Nelson car went past. We almost stuffed up cause he nearly went over the fence. The whole idea was to create a spactacular crash to generate gate sales – it worked. I remember we had to take all the un-needed weight out of Craigs car – the back seat, we took all the Amway tapes out of his glove box, we even took the George Michael poster he had attached to the under side of his roof plate, we took everything out we could think of that wasn’t needed. One sour note for me, when I got the Pokamon cards, they were in much worse condition then I expected, which I thought was a little dodgy but that’s another matter.
This tail will continue at a later date……..
