DD Motoring: Scheming off school for Oscars

Super Oscars were the business, the light of the 70s and 80s, I still think I have a pair of ordinary Oscars that I bought second-hand many years ago but I’m still looking for a car or van to put them on. 

These are spotlights I’m talking about, not the Oscars awards that actors get. 

It’s not the same these days. Cars don’t have the same shape or face on the front anymore, the grill between the headlights is changing and disappearing.

I smuggled the first set of spotlights I ever bought across the border from Strabane on a CIE bus. They were for my father’s Hillman Avenger. I wasn’t even the legal age to drive but I wanted or yellow 1300 Avenger with a black vinyl roof to look the part for the day that my 17th birthday would arrive and I would be on the road with a provisional licence.

I bought them and in the market which was always on a Friday, I schemed off school from the tech to make the journey. 

I took my old school bag with me to make it look as if I was just going to school. After buying the ‘greatest spotlights ever’, according to the man with the stall in the car park that sold them to me, I set about taking all the packaging off them and stuffed them into my school bag between the books. 

When for a cuppa tea up to Russell’s bakery cafe upstairs as I was waiting for the bus and could hear the spotlights rattling in my bag so I had to repackage them in the cafe which got a couple of odd and concerned looks in the times that were in it, with wires and relays and flick switches hanging out of my school bag. 

“It’s ok, it’s just a set of spotlights for my father’s car,” I tried to explain to the waiter that gingerly left down a pot of tea and a bacon butty at my table! 

Boarding the Letterkenny bus my heart was pumping as I looked at the camel’s hump as one of two checkpoints that we had to cross on the way home. It was quiet going across the bridge and as we got to the Donegal side the customs man was standing in the middle of the road suited and booted. He waved the bus full of Donegal people to a stop. I had my story ready to tell him that I was buying the spotlights for my father for Christmas if I was going to be the unlucky one that was asked if I had anything to declare. The bus pulled up and the driver started to have a yarn out the window to the customs man. While they were chatting he would take a step back and have a look in through the bus windows at the passengers. I quickly looked away so as not to make eye contact. It seems to have taken forever as the two men yapped away on a Friday afternoon. 

Thankfully the driver waved through the checkpoint and we were on our way home. 

When I got home I realised that I must have thrown any instructions that came with the spotlights out, but that wasn’t going to stop me having a go at fitting my new purchases. 

Drilling down through my father’s good chrome bumper I knew there was no going back now. The lights looked class when we got them screwed into our place now I had to figure out how to wire them. I ran a wire from the battery on both sides and ran a plus back to the dash where I fitted the flick switch and ran it to supply me the spotlights. I wasn’t sure how the relay worked so I didn’t bother about it and after a good bit of swelling wire wrapped them up with scotch tape. The moment of truth came when I tried out the lights and to my amazement they lit up. I pulled the car up to the nearby wall1 and adjusted the lights to what I thought was the right height and as night time fell I took the car on a wee spotlight test along the back lane in Wolfe Tone Place. I just thought it was class driving along the back and hitting the flick switch and the lights line up the lane right over to the end of the housing estate to Frank Cunningham’s shed. 

I thought my father would be over the moon with the new lights too but he never seemed to use them when he was driving. He said he could not find the flick switch too easily when he was driving at night. 

So after a bit of research I found that I could connect the spotlight to the back of the headlights and you could switch them off and on when you dipped the lights. I did this and my father thought it was a great job, until one dark morning he was going to work and he got a burning smell in the dash and when he arrived at the ESB there was smoke coming out round him and when he went to switch off the lights nothing happened the spot light stayed on and the whole dip switch had melted and a couple of his workmates put the fire out and cut the wires on my lovely spotlights. 

When his temper cooled and the fire was forgotten I said that might get a new set of spotlights called Super Oscars made by the famous spotlight maker Cibie, I had planned to put four of them on two up and two down just like the rallying Hillman Avengers running about Letterkenny at the time like James Cullen, Eamon Harvey and Danny Caddye I would get the proper spotlight bracket and get a few jubilee clips and open them out and attach one side to the spotlight and the other side under the bonnet the keep the lights from vibrating and the adjuster would double up as a height adjustment. With a new second hand dip switch fitted to our Avenger I put my plan forward for permission to my father. I made a bad mistake in showing my father Eamon Harvey’s rally car all trigged out from a night navigation rally with the four spotlights fitted. And my father took the longest look at me and looked at his wee Hillman Avenger and said there will be no f…ing Oscars in this house.

At that time I had two of the four spotlights already bought but sold them when my father rubbished my idea. I part exchanged them for a set of twin air horns which I never mentioned to my father that I fitted and he thought it was an ambulance trying to pass him when he went to blow the horn to someone he met along the road. The Oscars never made it onto a car but who knows someday I might find an old classic car that I can fit them to.

Happy Motoring Folks