Oct. 20, 2003 - 16:15 MDT

THE WONDERING JEW

Separates

So much of the time my entries deal with the past. Not necessarily with the bad in the past but pleasant memories. This entry is somewhat of a mixed bag.

It starts out, "When I was a kid," and goes from there.

When I was a kid autos were quite different from those now. Bumpers were pretty well one piece of springy steel bolted fore and aft on the car. Not nearly as expensive as those of today and easily replaceable by Average Joes like me.

Lights were separate units bolted one way or another to the car also easily replaced by the shade tree mechanic, bulbs could be bought at Western Auto or Monkey Warts. The tail lights also carried the license plate and also the inspection tag.

Spare tires were usually mounted in a front wheel well or on a carrier at the back of the car.

Windshields were usually simple flat pieces of glass which could also be replaced in a home garage.

Back then my memory tells me that most autos had cloth tops, stiffened with black top dressing which could also be bought at any auto supply store.

Trunks ? Well, some sedans had a small thing mounted above the back bumper that were trunks by definition I guess. Most cars had a small place in back for tire tools, etc.

Tires back then were the major impediment to easy travel. They had inner tubes which often had to be patched to keep air in instead of out. The patching was an esoteric art mastered by most car owners after a bit of a learning curve. Some cars carried a new inner tube or two as spares, but most all cars carried a tire patching kit. A little marvel in itself. Usually a cardboard tube with a metal bottom and a twist off top which had a grater type thing, inside was a tube of cement and patches. A flat tire took a lot of time and good judgement to get the car back on the road again. A reasonably flat, level place out of the line of traffic had to be found to coast the car into. Then a person had to make sure that the surface was hard enough to keep the jack from pressing down into the ground rather than lift the car. The well to do folk had hydraulic jacks but most of us had those finicky screw jacks that took forever to lift the car. The wheel would be dismounted, if the lug nut wrench could be found. Then was the operation of using a tire tool to pry one side of the tire casing loose from the rim so that the inner tube could be extracted and the inner part of the tire could be checked. Dads old 25 Studebaker had split rims and they were hummers to work with. Comes the time to cure the ailment then. The puncture or multiple holes had to be found, the area around the hole roughed up with the grater thing which also cleaned up the area a bit by the process. The cement judiciously applied and a lit match touched to it. Then the little fire on the cement would be blown out and the patch carefully applied. Sometimes that patching took several tries, once in a while a hitched ride to and from a filling station to buy a new kit was required. I remember getting home long after my bedtime now and then due to flat tires on the road.

So much of a car back then was replaceable with parts bought from an auto supply store.

I guess I should have Googled it beforehand in order to get the name of the first heaters I knew of that were worth a darn. The manifold heater on a Model A Ford as far as I was concerned was a heater in name only. Most car's interior heaters were pretty sorry types of things. Then came this great thing, something we could buy and install ourselves. Details are a bit fuzzy here. The unit mounted on the firewall under the dashboard, ran on gasoline I believe and had some kind of ignitor to get the fire going -- whatever -- that hummer could burn one's ankles and heat up the car nicely.

Then came the turn signals. Lights to mount front and back connected to a gadget mounted on the steering wheel column - voila - a sure cure for the frostbitten hand and arm that had to be stuck out of the window to let the snowblinded driver behind you know you were were going to turn. I remember the signals: right turn - arm out, forearm up vertically. Left turn: Arm straight out horizontally. Slow down or stop: Arm out horizontally with forearm hanging down.

For a long time windshield wipers were a constant pain. They operated on vacuum and became faulty quite often necessitating another trip to the auto supply store.

Then as we got "modern" and car styles changed came the Bumper Jack. It eliminated getting down on one's knees to work the jack. Now though, it is back to the scissors jack type - not much room for a bumper jack nor is there much of a place on today's cars to use one. It is hard to keep up with the changes over the years but that is a rough idea of how it was. Most items on a car could be replaced by the ordinary guy who had ordinary tools. Most items were Separates . . . . . . . . . .

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