I'm very fortunate that my father was a very patient and understanding man, otherwise I probably wouldn't be around to write this over 40 years later.
Our family loved snapping turtle -- still does.
I guess I was about 17 when I was out in my dad's relatively new car (6 months old, maybe??). My buddy and I spotted a huge snapper. We threw it in the trunk of the car -- upside down so it couldn't crawl around.
Well, the turtle had a rather loose bladder and really marinated the trunk. The smell never left the car.
That poor car.
To make matters worse, that was the second car I'd "seasoned" for my poor dad. My cousin and I caught and sold night crawlers for spending money, and we always had washtubs and buckets full of them around in our basements and garages. When I was about 12 or 13, my dad took me to one of my favorite walleye spots. When we got back home, I was so excited by my catches of big walleyes, I forgot about the bucket of night crawlers in the trunk of my dad's car. It was mid-July. My dad walked to work most days, so we mainly just used the car on weekends. The next Sunday, on our way to church, the garage door opening was a real epiphany. My bucket of worms had turned into a bucket of stink -- one that never quite left that beautiful black 1957 Ford Fairlane with the gold trim.
