With Thanks to 12195 Al “Goons” Lounsbury

It was in our second year at RMC, back in 1976, where as a 2nd Year, we did not have many privileges and were restricted to wearing monkey suits, our blue 4’s, any time we were given permission to leave the campus.  Well, that’s no fun and kind of hard to have a good time with a monkey suit on.  So, one night, “Bad” Bob and I decided to escape in our civies to “have some fun, an adventure”.  I had a motorcycle at the time hidden on campus under a third year’s name so we quickly made our way over to where I had kept my bike parked and hopped on board. We then discussed where we should go since we could not be seen locally in town.  Of all places, we decided to go to a small town called Bath, a 30-minute drive to the west of Kingston. We got there and found a pub, or should I say a “local dive”, called “The Penguin” where alcohol and woman existed (I’m told that place is now the Welborne Commons).  Bob and I strolled in, sat down, watched the local scenery, talked and just enjoyed some pints together as normal human beings, something denied us as 2nd Years at RMC.

But alas, all good times do come to an end. We had to return to our 2nd year “prison camp”, early in the morning, probably around 1 am if memory serves me correctly.  We zoomed back into Kingston, and started to head down Princess Street on my motorcycle. From previous experience, we knew the many stop lights on Princess Street were all timed to turn green while travelling at 30 mph.  So, as engineers, we hypothesized that a multiple of that speed should also work; hence we had to test our engineering theory.  We were totally nailing it, except for the final stop light which was a little late in turning green before we went through it.  We blamed that on a software bug in the Kingston traffic light system.

Unfortunately, a cop, sitting in a nearby police cruiser, happened to see us go through the red light and decided to chase us, finally pulling us over just as we got to the RMC Arch.  Now, Bad Bob, just being Bad Bob – immediately hops off my bike, dashes over to the officer and exclaims breathlessly “Officer, arrest this man – he’s trying to kill me!!”  Needless to say, the officer was good-spirited and told us next time to stop for the red light and then to get out of his sight and become the next military officers for this country.  I told Bob to get back on the bike and then we successfully (well almost) sneaked back in since one 4th year “Tim Addison” saw us but he was equally engaged in having a good time and decided to ignore us.