The Rolling Stones were blaring their inability to get satisfaction out of the radio on the dash of the ’54 Merc as we blasted down the highway past the paper mill.

The 4-barrel carburetor had just been ‘adjusted’ with a piece of wire we snipped out of my buddy Dave’s fence.

Even though the monstrously heavy boat of a Mercury had a V-8 it only delivered 161HP so you had to let it wind up for miles before you could break over the 100MPH line on the speedometer.

The last year of our high school Dave and I had played together on the football team – his Dad was a coach – and now our time was spent cruising.

But the stigma of driving around in an old Merc left much to be desired so one day Dave, a wild hair at work, latched on to the idea that he needed a project - a proper car project – like a rebuild of an older classic into a hot rod.

Now this was 1966 and that 1939 Plymouth Road King for sale across town caught Dave’s eye.

It was love at first sight.

It ran pretty well but with that rank old horsehair stuffing in the bench seats I was sure Dave would not be getting any satisfaction back there when the restoration was complete.

That is, if he was, I didn’t want to see her…

We drove the Plymouth up to his home on the hill, the fine residential area overlooking town and put her in his garage.

Dave’s first order of business was to ‘tune her up’.

Of course, she already ran well enough but that seems to be what a man does when he is starting a major hot rod project.

So, we stripped out the plugs, re-gapped them, put in new points and a new condenser in the rotor distributor cap and proceeded to install the wires to the plugs.

At this point every kid born in the early to mid-20th century had the flathead 6 firing order memorized: 1-5-3-6-2-4

Well, every kid but us.

So, we finished her up – it was about 9PM on a cold winter’s night – and we took off out of his garage for a test drive around the block.

What a sight!

The thing backfired like a cannon shot, belching fire and flame out the exhaust pipe as we jerked and twitched down the road.

After returning home and straightening out the firing sequence our next project was to rebuild the old exhaust system.

The metal used in the original car had badly corroded and was covered with rust flakes and corrosion dust.

Laying underneath that thing with this stuff dropping into my eyes, mouth and nose was an introduction to hot rodding that left me with an unforgettable memory.

Especially when I asked Dave for the socket set that covered the U-bolt nuts holding the remnant of the exhaust system in place.

“Uh, I can’t afford those expensive tools. Here, use this crescent wrench”, Dave says and hands me an adjustable wrench that looked like it had been forged in the Civil War.

So I proceeded to bark every knuckle on each hand until I bled – mixing the reddish brown corrosion with my blood as I worked my way down the exhaust pipe.

When the project was over, I swore I was through hot rodding forever.

And I had a distinct hatred for any and all crescent wrenches.

A year and a half later I had completed 6 months of the US Navy's Polaris Electronics “A” School at Dam Neck, Virginia and was thrilled to have learned all about the mysteries of the electron. I was headed for the Submarine Force as a Missile Technician on a Polaris submarine.

I had just entered Polaris Missile “C” School and we were being introduced to the utterly fascinating world of missile flight control, guidance systems, thrust vector control, fire control, hydraulics and even pneumatics!

I loved all of it.

We had learned basic electronics but now we got to see how it all fit together in the real, practical world – and at the expense and by the hands of the best and brightest scientists and engineers in the world!

Why, the original Polaris guidance system had been designed by staff at MIT and here we were learning all about its inner workings.

What an honor and a privilege to be part of such an amazing array of science and electronics!

So, we finally got to the point where we were learning how to maintain the A-2 missiles using all manner of tools.

We were introduced to the US Navy’s favorite trick of designing their own tools for operations and procedures where Snap-On didn’t have a product.

So “Special Tool – XXX” became part of our lexicon and we learned what they were all for.

One day as I was lusting after the toolbox, rooting around in it just looking, I asked the Chief,

“Hey Chief – I don’t see any crescent wrenches in here – do we have any?”

The Chief went off like a bottle-rocket,

‘Sailor, we don’t have crescent wrenches in the Missile Compartment! We use the right tool and only the right tool for the job –THERE ARE NO GODDAMNED CRESCENT WRENCHES!”

Ah, a man after my own heart.

I tucked that piece of wisdom away for future use.

Now, truth is, I own a few today, but I am genuinely loathed to use them.

They round off the heads of bolts and destroy things faster than any other tool I own.

I am still haunted by that old salty Chief.

And today, another missile technician from another branch of the service is also haunted by using the wrong wrench for missile maintenance.

On September 19, 1980, at 0300 local time, an Air Force missile tech was performing routine maintenance on a Titan II missile in its silo in Arkansas. (This is unclassified and in the public domain).

Instead of using the USAF prescribed wrench for the task he substituted a socket and ratchet wrench (previously but no longer allowed) which came apart as he worked on the missile.

The socket fell down between the missile and the tube but was not caught by the rubber boot safety barrier that should have been in place per SOP down below for just such an accident. They never installed the rubber boot.

The socket penetrated the missile, an explosion then occurred that launched the 740-ton silo cover into the air and sent the 9-MT warhead sailing hundreds of feet away from the silo…

So, there you have it – the crescent wrench, a most versatile yet dangerous tool…