This Charger is getting something of a reputation as some type of a vortex or black hole that seems to keep pulling in more people and more stories over the years. It’s sort of like the Six Degrees of Separation Theory, only this can be called Six Degrees of Hemispheration. Here’s another one from Richard, Sr., to add to the list:
In the early 1970s Richard Wickberg Sr., was helping out with a youth football camp in Putney, Vermont, his kids were attending. He knew Artie Gigantino, who was assisting at the camp and who would later become a coach with the Rams and the Raiders as well as a TV sports commentator. Wickberg was driving the hemi Charger at the time. He was asked to pick up an NFL player for the camp at Bradley Airport in Hartford, Connecticut. That player was Dick Butkus. Wickberg laughed when he commented that Butkus was “a cheap SOB” and he made Wickberg pay the tab at the diner when they stopped to eat, and didn’t even leave a tip! According to Wickberg, years later the subject of the diner stop came up with Butkus and he didn’t recall Wickberg in particular but he did recall getting picked up from the airport in the red Charger.
At that same football camp there were other NFL players there, among them Ted Hendricks, a.k.a. The Mad Stork and one of the Viking's Purple People Eaters, either Alan Page or Carl Eller (Wickberg couldn’t recall which one it was). During that camp there was some incident involving them all driving out in the Charger to a local farmer’s pond and the farmer’s daughter coming out and being shocked at seeing some 7 foot tall, Sasquatch-looking guy standing on a rock in the middle of their pond, with no bathing suit on. That guy was The Mad Stork.
