The Story of the "Purple" Light

When the ambulance/hearse was purchased from the City of Kamiah it still had the red light on top - and it was FUNCTIONAL. Stories about the red light will come later but this is about how the red light became purple. One afternoon as I was driving on the way to a gig we were pulled over by a state patrolman near Jaques Spur. Being a law-abiding person, I rolled down my window and respectively handed my driver's license to the officer. Of course we had no knowledge of why he had pulled us over. The officer pointed to the red light on top and said he had received complaints from people that had been pulled over by us using the red light and a siren. I assured the nice officer that we had no siren, but he insisted on looking under the hood for himself and proceeded to the front. We knew that the hood was sprung and that if you were not careful opening it the hood would spring out and knock you on your butt. As I reached for the door handle the officer told me to stay in the rig and he would look for himself. I tried to warn him, well not too hard. We watched as he pulled the lever - the hood sprung out, hitting him in the chest and knocking him back a couple of feet. He tried to look composed while we tried not to burst out laughing. Looking under the hood, he pointed to something and said, "What's that?" I replied that it was a vacuum whistle (the whistle could be operated to sound like a siren and I had that pretty well mastered). Of course he wanted to hear it, and leaned over the fender about 8 inches from the whistle. To this day I swear the devil made me do it - I grabbed the ring and pulled sending a ear-splitting shriek into the air. The officer jumped, hitting his head on the hood and knocking off his hat onto the dirt. I knew we were dead meat. Mr. Patrolman grabbed his hat, dusted it off and stomped around to my window. Almost throwing my license back at me he roared to get rid of the red light AND the vacuum whistle or the next time he saw us he would confiscate the rig and haul us to jail. The next day Joe and I painted the lens of the light purple but at night it still looked RED! We never did get rid of the vacuum whistle.