In the olden days they were called go-carts, and they had lawn mower motors.

The reason I know that is because when I was 19 years old my first husband and I each had one.

He apparently brought them home from work at the TV station so either they magically appeared, or Foreman Scotty, or someone else, gave them to him. Surely he didn’t use my hard-earned money to buy them.

But I digress. Apparently, they weren’t street-legal back then either (or I assume they aren’t now). We rode them at an old, or abandoned, flight strip. It was somewhere North of 36th and Lincoln Blvd. in Oklahoma City. Maybe it was way out in the country before there was ever a Broadway Extension back then, and definitely before Edmond was a city where people wanted to live.

I’m unsure if I was able to start my go-cart by myself, or not. But I know the brakes either always didn’t work, or my foot didn’t always hit it just right.

I do recall that the gocarts (that they now spell and refer to them as gokarts) took gasoline, and that it was much cheaper in the 1960s. I even bought gas for five cents a gallon during a gas war in OKC back in the sixties.

But I digress. Oh yes, gasoline. We always seemed to have enough gas for the go-carts, and one day I found out he’d been syphoning it out of our car. That was when some nice guy pushed my car about a block on N.E. 36th St.

Luckily, there was a gas station at that very corner. But, unfortunately, that guy had pushed me with his car. So, both of my tail lights were broken.

Looking back, I guess I’m lucky that was the only damage.

And again, I digress. Yes, driving a go-cart was fun up until the time that the brakes didn’t work, and I ran off the cement onto some grass, and then into a barbed wire fence with a NO TRESPASSING sign.

I think I was so grateful that my eyeglasses didn’t break that the scrapes on my arm didn’t hurt, until we got home. That’s also when … And again, I digress, but wonder if I’d mentioned he was my first husband?

So just in case you’re wondering, this column is about go-carts because I’m working on a story about the Go-Kart races Saturday evening in Hennessey.