Pliars and wire kept old cars moving
October 21, 2008 (Tuesday)
The year was 1952, I think. I was driving south on Highway 75 (Now I-45) just outside Conroe, Texas when the rear spring on my old 1941 Mercury broke. I pulled over to the side of the road, and walked back to a house by the side of the road where an elderly gentleman sat in a rocking chair on his front porch. I explained my problem to him, and he directed me to a building on his property where there was a piece of chain. Although he was no longer able to walk to the car with me, he explained to me how to jack up the car and tie the chain around the spring so that the car could be driven the remaining 30 or 40 miles home.
I have tried to locate that place in my mind and have concluded that it must have been somewhere around today’s intersection of Highway 242 and Interstate 45. It is impossible to imagine the situation I faced 56 years ago, as I exit I-45 and turn left on 242 under the freeway to drive to the Woodlands home of Dianna and Mark and their family.
I replaced that big old horizontally placed rear leaf spring several times during the two years I had the car. The junk yards always had one for me. We did all sorts of things in those days to keep cars running. I remember taking the hood off an old army truck so that my friend could straddle the engine and use the palm of his hand as a substitute choke to keep the carburetor inhaling gas because the fuel line was stopping up. We were using the truck as a bus to take kids to and from Vacation Bible School in a country church in 1950. Those were the days when you always made sure you had some wire and a pair of pliars so you could keep the vehicles rolling.
Nowadays you just make sure you take your credit card, because pliars and wire won’t diagnose the computer problems on your car. It’s hard to imagine, I know, but some day folks will look back to 2008 as “the good old days” as they tell their hard-luck stories to their grandkids.