When I was going to high school, some years back, I had, as most kids do, several idols.

Perhaps the first of my idols was Moose.  Moose was a huge muscular guy with incredible physical coordination.  Moose, unlike the athletic stereotype, didn't move his lips when he read.  This last was mainly because Moose didn’t read.  As I later learned, Moose proved to be functionally illiterate, again mainly because he was borderline mentally retarded.  That particular idol turned out to have feet of clay all the way up to his head.

My next idol was Stretch, a tall, lean black guy who was the best basketball player in school.  Stretch didn’t so much run the court as fly it!  He had moves, balance and power.  Stretch was intelligent, but a victim of his environment.  Instead of taking care to finish high school, grab a full college scholarship and then move on to the pros to earn big money with his talents, Stretch knocked up his girlfriend and then wound up working in a lumber yard, at near minimum wage, so that he might feed his family.  That particular idol turned out to have feet of clay all the way up to his crotch.

Then, with a bit of learning, I discovered the Frenchman, Francois Villon.  However, I later learned that ‘The Devils Game’ was probably apocryphal.  That particular idol then vanished like the snows of yesteryear.

Then there was Ray.  Ray was a guy who was a couple of years ahead of me in school.  Ray majored in auto shop.  However, despite the vocational student stereotype, Ray was no dummy.  Ray used the auto shop thing as a springboard to a job as an automatic transmission repair guy.   He quickly became the best automatic transmission repair guy in town.  Ray, as a high school student, was making more money working part time than many adults in town, adults who were working full time.  Although I didn’t know it at the time, Ray had developed a truly brilliant plan.

Ray purchases an older coupe and then somehow talks the auto shop teacher into making Ray's car the auto shop class project for the year.  Ray provides the parts and materials and the auto shop class provides the supervised labor and support tools.  As his senior year begins to draw to a close, Ray has a car that's not only completely rebuilt but upgraded with many nifty modern features and a chopped top, for style.  To set everything off, Ray and the rest of the auto shop troglodytes have endowed Ray's machine with a high gloss, hand rubbed paint job that turns heads as Ray cruises around town.