Adaptation for the situation

This post is a tribute to my dad.  He had a lot of horse/common sense about him.  One afternoon about the spring of 1968, I had gone to visit my brother Rodney and his wife who were staying out at the lake quite a distance from town.  I left to go back to Austin to pickup my girlfriend from school in my 58 Chevy.  I was cruising through the hill country and "making time" when the engine made a loud noise and died.  Well, I pushed in the clutch in and let the car coast about a mile and then popped the clutch.  Man, the noise that came out from under that hood.  So I immediately pushed the clutch in again and shifted in the car into neutral.  I won't mention my speed but needless to say I must have coasted another ten miles or so up and down the hills out in the hill country outside of Marble Falls.  I should have stopped at a little country store that I went by while coasting but I was more focused on getting back to my girlfriend.  Well, when I walked back to the store, I called my younger brother to go pickup my girlfriend and for him to tell dad that I was having some car trouble and where I was.  
   About 2.5 hours later my dad show up and we started looking at my sick car.  We tried to start it made a heck of a noise.  Well, my dad said this car is not going anywhere on its own and preceded to dig through the back of his car.  He was looking for his towrope but it was not to be found.  "Some of his boys must have used it."   Anyway, he looked around quickly as it is starting to get dark and in the country it can get very dark.  He found a long piece of barbed wire laying in the ditch next to the road.  With the snip of his side-cutters, we had about 20 feet of "tow wire".  My dad wrapped the wire around his trailer hitch and then around the middle of my chrome bumper.  He then told me that I was to stop both cars with my brakes and we proceded to travel the 20 or so miles back to North Austin.
   Well it turns out that I had stripped off all but seven and half teeth of the timing gear.  The gear was a fiber gear which my dad replaced with a metal gear as we rebuilt the ol' Chevy.