"Padiddle drivers of America"; and "beater" (= jalopy)

[Laurence Horn]

At 10:56 PM -0500 3/15/03, Alice Faber wrote:
>Gerald Cohen wrote:
>>
>>    Note also "beater" (= jalopy) in the last two sentences--a term I
>>don't find
>>in either HDAS or Jonathon Green's dictionary of slang. Do these two
>>terms deserve recognition as standard slang items, or is their use
>>too limited for this?
>>
>
>Well, "padiddle"'s been around for years. When I was in high school
>in the late 60s, there was a complicated game involving padiddles.
>OK, maybe it wasn't all that complicated. But, if you were in a car
>with other kids and noticed a car with one headlight out, you yelled
>out "padiddle". The first person to do so got to hit somebody else.
>Until this piece, I've only ever encountered the word in the context
>of this game.
>
As we've discussed earlier, there are many variants of the game, one
involving getting to kiss rather than to hit as a reward for spotting
the one-eyed padiddle first.

larry