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Sunday, June 21, 2009

Racing Down Mulligan's Hill

Mulligan's Hill is off Main Street, beyond Maryland Avenue. It is steep, and the perfect place to drive a home-made "set of wheels". When Summer came, we were always on the lookout for some wheels. preferably in pairs, wood of any kind, rope, nuts and bolts, nails, and the like. We built gravity powered cars out of anything that we could find, and they were a strange looking lot.

You would build a car, and pull it by the rope to the top of the hill, jump on and go rolling away, just for a few seconds. And if the car did not break apart, or the wheels fly off, do it all over and over again.

This was all part of the local "wheels scene" hand-made cars, 2-wheeled scooters, bikes, large 3-wheeled bikes, small tri-cycles, little red wagons, roller skates, anything that would get you up and down the seven hills of the old town.
Posted by at 5:57 PM
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3 comments:

  1. Boy do I remember...seeing I grew up on "top of the hill"...I could open a museum of handmade contraptions that were thrown together for the quick thrill...some made it down...most didn't.
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  2. And I grew up at the bottom of the hill. Many summer days were spent looking for parts for the latest go cart jalopy to attempt a speed record. We usually ended up with a bad case of road rash with gravel implants when it broke up from the stress of the crazy G forces. That's what it seemed like anyway. We moved there in 1970. It was called Millican Hill Lane then. I never heard it called "Mulligans" until we visited a couple years ago & saw it on a street sign.
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  3. And I grew up at the bottom of that hill. Many summer days were spent searching for parts for our latest go cart jalopy for an attempt at a new speed record. We usually ended up with a bad case of road rash with gravel implants when it broke up from the stress of the crazy G forces. That's what we thought anyway. We moved there in '70. It was called Millican Hill Lane then. We had a front row seat to the destruction of Hurricane Agnes in '72 & saw the river come up to the RR tracks. Something I'll never forget.
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