“So, my dad is super into muscle car culture.  I’m talking like after market cars, American muscle, noisy cars, the whole deal.  Back before I was born, my dad went to this autoshow with this muscle car he’d spent the last three years of his life fixing up, and he was super proud of it and was really excited to show it off.  It’s tradition when leaving a car show for people to do burnouts as they drive away, just because it’s rebellious or whatever.  So what happened was, my dad was lined up with about ten other cars all about to do simultaneous burnouts, but all of a sudden a cop rolled up behind them.  Nothing was illegal about the car show, but doing a burnout is illegal unless it’s on a closed road with police permission, which this wasn’t.  So, all the other cars stay put and don’t burnout because of the cop, and since the cop knows that burnouts are likely to be taking place, he lingers.  But because my dad was so excited about his car and couldn’t let anything stop him from showing it off, he brings the rev up, dumps the clutch, and smokes his tires right in front of the cop.  Since my dad’s not a felon, though, he just does the burnout, drives like 100 meters and then pulls over so the cop can pull him over.  So the cop rolls up to my dad with his lights flashing and approaches my dad.  So it turns out the cop is actually just super into car shows and really wanted to see what was going on at the show, so the cop doesn’t give my dad a ticket and actually applauds him for making such a bold move.  The only reason the cop pulled my dad over was just so all the other cars wouldn’t start doing burnouts too.  So after that my Dad became a local car show legend, and to this day his name lives in infamy among all car enthusiasts in the Boston area.”

ANALYSIS:

I found this legend extremely interesting because it’s impossible to tell how much of it is true and how much of it is fabricated.  Because the informant didn’t witness the event firsthand and has only heard the story from the father, it’s extremely plausible that the father embellished on the story to make himself look cooler.  And because of the inherent nature of local legends, there’s no way of knowing just how much of the story is true or not.  All we can do is take the story for what it is: a story.