All Posts – Page 49 – I Remember JFK: A Baby Boomer's Pleasant Reminiscing Spot

When Cars Were BIG

It was a curious situation in the days of our youth. Roads, as a rule, were narrower than today, particularly the state two-lane highways that connected small towns. Yet the cars that traveled them were HUGE compared to today’s models.

Yet, our parents maneuvered those massive hulks around the tight curves without a second thought. And the interiors of those automobiles contained enough cubic feet of space to allow a kid tremendous freedom to move around inside on long trips.

Automobiles started out small. The Model T and Model A were basically compact cars. But as the years wore on, BIG became the trend. By the late 1930’s, cars typically weighed over 3000 pounds. They were made of thick steel that took some serious force to dent, as well.

The cars that we rode around in circa 1966 had spacious bench seats, frequently covered with clear plastic. Riding up front and sitting between your parents was no challenge at all. There was plenty of room. By the previously mentioned year, there were likely seat belts that were shoved, unused, between the seat cushions. So your freedom of movement was completely unhindered. In fact, I remember repeatedly jumping from the front seat to the back while speeding down the Interstate at 70 mph.

The back seat was large enough for seven-year-old-me to stretch out and have a couple of inches of space between my body and the armrests. It was a sweet feeling to fall asleep and wake up to find that were were a hundred and fifty miles closer to our destination.

1950 Pontiac, with a glove compartment big enough to hold a twelve-pack!

The trunks were huge, as well. There was plenty of room for a full-sized 15″ spare tire to reside beneath the trunk’s floor, and enough cubic footage was left for several full-sized suitcases to be stacked on top.

There was a tremendous amount of steel, plastic, rubber, and glass in each self-contained boat that traversed the roads of that era. They were even bigger in the 50’s. I recently sat in a 1953 Pontiac Coupe, and was astonished at the sheer size of the thing. The glove compartment alone was big enough to hold a twelve-pack. The back seat was as big as a twin bed. And, no doubt, it had probably been used for that very purpose a time or two over the last fifty years ;-).

Of course, the large size of the cars extended all the way to the rear deck, my preferred residing spot on those road trips of the Johnson era.

Cars generally stayed big through the 70’s, but began shrinking by the end of the decade. Today, it’s difficult to find a new vehicle that matches the wheelbase and weight of a typical 60’s car. In fact, I happily drive a Toyota Tercel the 25 miles I commute to work, enjoying the 35+ miles per gallon it provides. It weighs about half as much as that 54 Pontiac. My “full-size” car is a Toyota Camry that’s about the size of a 67 Chevelle, considered a small car in its time.

But we who remember JFK also recall a time when big cars were the norm, and our fathers managed to motor them down some pretty narrow highways at high rates of speed.

When Cars Had Hood Ornaments

We Boomers saw the decline, fall, and disappearance of many things during our lifetimes. One of these once-familiar sights that has become much more rare is the hood ornament.

Once upon a time, hood ornaments graced the exposed radiator caps of cars built in the 30’s and 40’s. They were often exquisite art deco creations, and are, of course, avidly sought after by collectors.

But as radiator caps disappeared, hood ornaments continued to hold a proud position on the cars our parents drove. And we kids of the 50’s and 60’s were used to seeing twenty-year-old automobiles, complete with hood ornaments that defined the era.

For example, flying ladies typified the 30’s and 40’s. Airplanes began to appear in the 40’s, to be displaced by jets in the 50’s.

As the 60’s debuted and wore on, hood ornaments began to vanish from mainstream automobiles. Where once every model of car seemed to be graced by one, now they were by and large becoming status symbols of cars with a reputation for luxury.

The 1958 Chevy Bel-Air, beginning to show the longer, sleeker lines that would typify the 60’s, was released with a hood ornament conspicuously absent. It was a sign of things to come.

By the time I was around and beginning to remember things, my father’s Plymouth had nothing but smooth metal on its hood. Ornaments were found on those funny looking fat cars from the 50’s.

Buick, for one, continued to put ornaments on many of its models. So did Cadillac. The writing was on the wall: hood ornaments were no longer for the general masses. Now, they would have a home on more prestigious automobiles.

Somewhere along the line, litigation reared its hideous head. Pedestrians who were hit by cars with hood ornaments were badly injured. The few hood-mounted sculptures installed at the factory were either removed by automakers, or

spring-loaded.

It seems to me that if a pedestrian is hit by a car, the issue of whether or not a hood ornament is present is among the more minor worries that he has. But lawyers have gotten wealthy by exploiting the damage specifically done by the device, so things have changed as a response.

But hood ornaments have never disappeared. Of course, the Beemers, Mecedes’, and Rolls Royces of the world are still adorned, but more mundane vehicles also might spot the occasional piece of metallic art, thanks to aftermarket producers.

J.C. Whitney in particular has a large variety of affordable hood ornaments. For the more luxury-minded, you can get an ornament from mascots unlimited, the same folks who supply decorations to the automobiles that British royalty motor around in on the wrong side of the road.

But try as you might, you just can’t return to the days when cars were huge, boxy, and sported sleek, jet-shaped hood ornaments.

When Cars Had Fins

I was born in 1959, when fins were at their peak. From the massive vertical fins of the 59 Plymouth to the low sleek ones on the 59 Chevy, fins were everywhere in this era.

The thing about fins was that they were actually more common in my childhood years of the mid to late 60’s than the late 50’s. That’s because there were lots of late 40’s-early 50’s vintage cars on the road in 1959 whose rounded shapes were in direct contrast to the knife-edged fins that ran on either side of the trunk.

The 1960’s models saw fins shrink, but they were still there. So fins could be seen all over the highways when my mind started permanently filing things away in my memory banks about the time the Beatles stopped touring.

The Plymouth Fury was introduced in 1956. Not only did it come with some beautiful fins, it also hit 149 miles an hour at Daytona! This was one mean way to get around town.

Soon, fins were seen on Caddys, Fords, Chevies, Pontiacs, and everyone else who survived the automobile industry’s reduction years of the 50’s. The rounded look was gone, not to return until the 90’s.

My dad was partial to Plymouths. Their fins were gone by the time I started remembering individual cars about 1966. But I’m sure he must have owned finned vehicles before that. Later in life, he invested in a 1961 Caddy convertible that sat in the garage. That big monster had some nicely subdued fins. I can’t remember when he sold it, it must have happened after I left home.

Why were fins all the rage in the late 50’s-early 60’s? It was our parents’ rebellion against growing older. The WWII generation was now approaching their thirties and forties, and we all know what that does to you. So a sleeker, jet-age car did much to stave off the thought that you were getting to the age that you remembered your parents being!

The senior statesmen amongst us Baby Boomers may well have owned the beautifully finned cars in their youth. After all, a 56 Fury was quite affordable by the time 1964 had rolled around. And if the engine was in decent shape, it was also still extremely fast!

Of course, I was just a kid. My first car, a 1966 Falcon, was far from a finned speed machine. And practically everything I owned after that was either made in Japan or Germany. So, sadly, the finned era passed my by.

But if you remember JFK, I’ll bet you also remember outrageously huge cars festooned with fins that made them look more like space ships that mere mundane automobiles.

When Unleaded Gas Appeared

Leaded gasoline was born in 1921. GM researchers had been testing fuel blends since 1916, trying to stop engine knock. The problem was early, non-uniform detonation of fuels in the engine cylinder. Left unchecked, it could quickly ruin an engine.

So lead was added to the mixture at the refinery, knock problem solved.

Lead poisoning has been known to medical science since 100 BCE, when Greek writings described it.

Somehow, the harmful effects of spewing lead vapor into the atmosphere eluded the GM engineers. So leaded gasoline became the standard, and untold billions of gallons were burned over the years.

That process began to be reversed in 1975, when new vehicles were mandated to burn gasoline that didn’t contain lead. That year, unleaded gasoline showed up at the neighborhood gas station.

If you put leaded gas into a car that had a catalytic converter (which all unleaded vehicles possessed), it would quickly be rendered ineffective. You would be spraying pure pollutants into the atmosphere. That was bad.

So unleaded cars came with narrowed-down filler necks. Likewise, unleaded gas nozzles were narrower than their leaded-dispensing counterparts. So, the theory was, you would never put leaded gas into your vehicle by mistake.

Wrong.

First of all, a populace that didn’t like the idea of paying more for a fuel that had an ingredient LEFT OUT, and they rebelled. The most obvious solution was to rout out the restricted filler neck with a chisel or the like. Ugly, but effective. You could quickly bid adieu to your catalytic converter with a couple of fill ups of leaded gas.

Another device that was sold in numbers of thousands was a little neck-down sleeve that would fit onto the end of a leaded gas nozzle. It would allow the leaded fuel to be dispensed into an unleaded tank.

Either way, a very large number of cars that would ostensibly burn cleaner were not given the chance, because of unleaded fuel’s two or three cents-per-gallon higher cost.

Hey, don’t blame ME. I had a 1973 Toyota Celica in those days. The manufacturer actually recommended burning unleaded, so I did!

However, the bypassers soon noted degraded performance of mileage and power from their doctored vehicles, so within a couple more years, everyone was burning unleaded as directed.

Leaded gas finally pretty much disappeared from the US market in 1986. It was still available for a time for off-road use, but low demand caused it to vanish. A 1994 study showed that US blood-lead levels declined by 78 percent from 1978 to 1991.

Today, the familiar “Contains lead” signs are collectors’ items. So are the neck-down “emergency” fill up aids. But we, and our kids and grandkids, have one less thing to worry about as our bodies walk around with much less lead in them than before.

The Plymouth Superbird

The year was 1970. The place was sleepy Bentonville, Arkansas, population 5,000 or so. I must have been sitting in our 1965 Chevy pickup which my father had purchased shortly after moving us from our house on a city block in Miami, Oklahoma to a 250-acre farm located 15 miles from Bentonville.

Ten years old, I had recently started paying attention to fast cars, thanks to getting into the brand-new phenomenon known as Mattel Hot Wheels. Thus, I was able to spot and differentiate the subtle differences between a Camaro and a Firebird, or the more obvious ones between a Barracuda and a Cougar.

But that day, so long ago, my ten-year-old jaw dropped. There, cruising up highway 71 in front of a big empty field that would one day hold a Wal-Mart Supercenter, was an unearthly-looking wonderful lime-green Plymouth Superbird.

There were a plethora of fast cars produced during Detroit’s muscle car era. Many of them concealed their horsepower under the ruse of a standard-looking vehicle, the better to avoid frequent stops by the law. But then there was the Superbird: a hedonistic thumb to the nose at conventionality. What an amazing machine for a ten-year-old kid to see tooling through the streets of a small town.

The Superbird came about because of Richard Petty and NASCAR. In 1970, NASCAR vehicles were basically souped-up versions of cars you could buy from your local dealers. Petty had begun driving a Road Runner with a streamlined nose and a big spoiler that aided greatly in keeping the rear wheels on the pavement.

NASCAR’s rule was that at least one car be built for each manufacturer’s dealership. That meant that 1,920 Superbirds were created in 1970. And one resident of little Bentonville, Arkansas purchased one. I saw that car many times over the next year or so. Seriously cool stuff.

Petty tore up the track with the Superbird, so much so that NASCAR changed their rules. Aerodynamically enhanced cars like the Superbird would have to run on smaller engines than Petty’s 426 Hemi he used in 1970. They just weren’t fair to the other boxier cars.

1970 was the only year that the Superbird was built. It was available in three different engine configurations: a 440 with a four-barrel carb, the same engine with three two-barrel carbs, or the ultimate: the same 426 Hemi that Petty raced.

The mystified effect that the car had on me wasn’t shared by the general public. It was considered ugly and overly extreme by the masses. The aerodynamic enhancements were of no use during quarter-mile runs. In fact, their added weight caused Superbirds to get smoked by conventional Road Runners on the strip.

But the nosecone and spoiler weren’t meant for pedestrian short drag races. At 90 MPH, they cut drag, and also kept the car solidly attached to the road. At 150 MPH, it would have been difficult to control the machine without them.

Yes, the car would easily hit 150 MPH right off of the dealer’s lot. Its estimated stock maximum speed was 180. Holy crap.

This was the Detroit of the freewheeling days before energy crises, oil embargoes, and gas that cost more than 40 cents a gallon.

The price of the car was a reasonable $4,000. That compared favorably to other hot muscle cars of the era. But the public just couldn’t get past the look. Thus, many sat unsold, and were even converted to more conventional-looking Road Runners in order to get them off the lots.

The result is that today, original Superbirds can easily fetch high six-figure prices. Less than a thousand Hemi-equipped models were sold, obviously they reign as king. But any Superbird is worth gold.

So that anonymous Superbird owner I spotted so many years ago and I have something in common: we both appreciate the unconventional.

The Full-Service Gas Station

I grew up with dad preferring an Apco gas station in my hometown. He would pull in, the attendant would greet him by name, fill the car, wipe the windshield, check the tire pressures, and hand me a sucker. It was a little ritual I always looked forward to.

In 1973, a bunch of angry Arabs thought they would teach the US a lesson and cut off their oil. A lot of good effects actually came from that. It became imperative that vehicles get better gas mileage. It also made us conscious of alternative energy sources (although we have since slipped back into unconsciousness).

However, it unfortunately sounded the death knell for service stations, as they used to be known.

Gas station owners quickly saw the benefit of discounting gasoline with the option of self-service. After all, we were paying the shocking price of around fifty cents a gallon for gas! We happily would pump our own gasoline to save a quarter on the fill up.

It was a common sight in the later 70’s to see stations with self-service and full-service islands. However, even these began to dwindle, and nowadays it’s rare to have an attendant offer to fill your vehicle (except for Oregon and New Jersey, where it’s actually mandated by law).

I was flustered recently by the experience of a full-service station. I pulled into a Sinclair station in Springdale, Arkansas and stepped out to fill up. An attendant walked over and said “I’ll handle that, sir.” I actually forgot what I was supposed to do. I stood off to the side foolishly, and finally remembered that I needed to just sit in the driver’s seat and relax.

So if you want to experience full-service fill ups, look around. There are still a few out there. Just remember how to act once you pull in.

The Ford Mustang Appears

Automobile styling changed radically during the twenty years that followed WWII’s end. Cars were big rolling boxes in 1945. By 1965, they had gotten smaller, sleeker, and faster. And one design in particular proved itself to be timeless, selling in huge numbers over thirty years after its introduction.

The Ford Mustang was the result of an in-house design contest sponsored by division manager Lee Iacoca. The winning design was the work of David Ash and John Oros.

The Mustang itself was released against a wave of opposition within Ford’s ranks. Squabbling and in-fighting almost doomed what is arguably the most successful model of car ever released.

In 1961, engineers Herb Misch and Roy Lunn designed a two seat mid-engine convertible that weighed a mere 1500 pounds and got 30 miles to the gallon while posting a respectable 10 second zero-to-sixty time.

Sports car fans both outside and inside Ford’s organization eagerly licked their chops at the idea of such a European-thinking design rolling out of Ford’s factories. But Lee Iaccoca saw a money pit instead.

But he did see the need of a compact, sporty, albeit FOUR seat car. So he took the design of Ash and Oros and built it on existing tooling. The Mustang that was released had a reworked Falcon frame. The suspension and drivetrain came from altered parts from both the Falcon and Fairlane. But there’s no doubt that NOBODY would mix up the small, clean, slick style of the Mustang with its ancestors.

Some high-ranking powers within Ford opposed the car. But Iaccoca prevailed. And 22,000 models were sold the day it was released in 1964 (but it was a 1965 model). Within two years, a million Mustangs were on the road. The silence of the opposers was deafening.

Soon, Mustangs were seen all over television, too, and not just in Ford commercials. For instance, what Baby Boomer doesn’t remember the “Like father, like son” antismoking commercial? The car also frequently showed up in movies and TV series of the decade.

In 1965, Ford cut a deal with former Formula One driver-turned-designer Carrol Shelby to produce the Shelby Mustang, a heavily customized, expensive vehicle that was a smash hit. The engine was a modified Windsor 289, and a few models had trunk-mounted batteries. They are highly prized collectibles today.

Shelby continued customizing Mustangs until the 1970 model year. Ford and Shelby cut a deal with Hertz to produce a gold-striped Shelby that customers could rent, and that would be sold to the public after retirement. They too were a success for all involved. The only problem was that a few enterprising customers would rent the car for a weekend and spend the time in their garages swapping the Shelby motor for a standard 289. So if you get a chance to buy one, caveat emptor.

Mustangs endured bad design changes, continuing to sell well even during the Mustang II era, when purists say the car hit its artistic nadir. But sales slowed through the 80’s, and there was talk of redesigning the car as a front-wheel drive. The Mustang faithful wrote letters of protest in droves, and the redesign became the Ford Probe instead.

Today’s Mustang looks a lot like its 60’s ancestors. Even Carrol Shelby is back to customizing them, and Hertz is also renting their own models! So, in the automotive sense, in the case of a great design, what goes around sometimes does indeed come around.

The CB Radio Craze

Burt Reynolds and Richard Nixon might seem like unlikely partners, but together they teamed up to start a craze. An unknown songwriter named Bill Fries was also a major contributor, as were a couple of country boys named Bo and Luke.

Nixon did his part by enacting into law the nationwide 55 MPH speed limit, putting the federal government in the business of determining how fast you could drive on highways, a job that belonged to individual states before Tricky Dick signed the papers. His other bone-headed proclamation, year-round DST, was mercifully gone within a year.

Arguably, driving 55 saved gasoline. It also wasted our lifetimes, turning eight hour trips into ten hours. Many say it saved lives. That is a dubious argument at best, as the evidence points as much to improved safety features in cars as much as the reduced speed limits.

Truckers were livid. Their livelihoods depended on getting their loads to various destinations in a timely matter, and the nationwide speed limit put a serious damper on that. By and large, non-professional drivers grew to resent the law as well. The interstate highways were designed to be safely traveled at speeds of 70 MPH and faster, and tooling along at 55 just didn’t seem right in many ways.

So, the nation rebelled. And their main weapon in the non-violent coup was the CB radio.

Citizen’s band radios were originally intended for public and small business communication. It took an FCC license to legally operate them. The 1960’s saw them used by contractors, taxi drivers, and especially truck drivers. They developed their own slang, as well as a protocol that was to be followed at all costs.

The aforementioned speed limit in 1974 brought them to the forefront in the trucking industry. Fellow drivers warned each other of speed traps over the airwaves.

That’s where Burt Reynolds, “C.W. McCall,” and the Duke boys stepped in. As tales of the trucker’s circumvention of the cops and their radar guns began to circulate, a pop culture formed around their communication medium, the CB radio.

Burt, of course, was the star of 1977’s Smokey and the Bandit, a movie which was a huge hit, and which featured use of CB’s throughout its length. The Dukes of Hazzard also used the device to foil Boss Hogg. And Jim Fries noticed the character of C.W. McCall, created to sell baked goods in the Omaha, Nebraska area, and took his persona in performing one of the biggest hits of the 70’s, Convoy.

When I was a junior in school in late 1975, the CB radio craze hit my little town of Pea Ridge, Arkansas. Lunch hours were spent ratchet jawing with truckers. Nights were spent doing the same. And we all adapted handles. I was Trapper John, BTW.

Longtime CB users were outraged. They had paid good money to get their licenses, and here were a bunch of people using their bandwidth illegally, and completely ignoring their protocol! So many CB’s were sold that the government ended up lifting the license requirement, infuriating the old-timers even more.

Other abusers bought devices known as linear amplifiers to magnify their signals from the legal five watts to a thousand or more. These would interfere with neighbor’s TV reception, and would also bleed over onto other channels within the bandwidth.

However, many amplified home base users were foiled by a simple straight pin thrust through the coaxial cable leading to the antenna. When the mike was keyed, the amp was instantly smoked. Frontier justice at its finest!

In many ways, the original users of the internet were like the early licensed CB users. Posting on USENET required that you know the rules of behavior beforehand. That was brought to a screeching halt by two lawyers from Phoenix. I quote from net historian Brad Templeton:

In April of 1994, the term (spam) was not born, but it did jump a great deal in popularity when two lawyers from Phoenix named Canter and Siegel posted a message advertising their fairly useless services in an upcoming U.S. “green card” lottery. This wasn’t the first such abusive posting, nor the first mass posting to be called a spam, but it was the first deliberate mass posting to commonly get that name. They had posted their message a few times before, but on April 12, they hired a mercenary programmer to write a simple script to post their ad to every single newsgroup (message board) on USENET, the world’s largest online conferencing system. There were several thousand such newsgroups, and each one got the ad.

CB usage faded away, until it was back in the hands of the original folks who found practical value from it. However, protocol has slipped badly. It was once seriously frowned upon to use even mild profanity on the air. Alas, listening to channel 19 these days will make your ears turn blue.

The internet, however, is only growing larger. It is becoming more and more a part of our daily lives, and in fact will likely need to be redesigned as it gets more and more stressed by its daily addition of tens of thousands more users.

Oh well. Even CB radios had to be ramped up from 23 channels to 40.

The Cassette Tape Takes Over from Eight Tracks

Recording tape is barely older than the senior members of the Boomer generation. It was introduced in the 1940’s as an alternative to direct-to-disc recording, which was how records were being produced prior to then.

The idea of putting music (or whatever) on a strip of magnetic tape was quite revolutionary. Recording studios embraced it at once. But tape for the home consumer was a different matter. It had some growing up to do before it would be widely embraced.

Tape came on big reels. It took a long time to rewind or fast-forward, as opposed to quickly moving a tonearm to different tracks on a record.

But the concept of recording tape for the consumer was too good to be ignored. As the 60’s debuted, several tape cartridge systems were under development, including a four-track, continuous-loop cartridge devised by the Lear Company, the Fidelipac system used by radio broadcasters, and the “Casino” cartridge introduced by the RCA company for use in its home audio units.

In 1962, Philips introduced a cartridge which held a tape 1/8″ wide, as opposed to the 1/4″ wide reel-to-reel tape that others were attempting to integrate int a self-contained cartridge.

The 1/8″ tape had crappy audio qualities when first introduced, and sales crawled. But Philips felt like they were on to something. They encouraged other companies to develop the cassette technology, but to observe the standards that they had laid down by licensing its use. The result was a swarm of development on the cassette.

By 1968, nearly a hundred different manufacturers had sold more than 2.4 million cassette players worldwide. The cassette business was worth about $150 million. Thanks to worldwide adherence to the standards established by the Philips company, the compact cassette was the most widely used format for tape recording by 1970.

Ferrichrome cassette introduced in the 70’s

But the sound still sucked. There was a lot of hiss on the slowly-moving narrow tape, and audiophiles either listened to records, or four- and eight-track tapes. Some of them purchased music on reels of tape. For cassettes to take over the world, their fidelity would have to be improved.

That year, top-end cassette machine manufacturer began selling units with Dolby noise reduction. The idea was that high-end sounds would be amplified during recording, then muffled a bit during playback. The tape’s hiss would fade into the background.

It worked fairly well, but not as expected, in many cases. The first automobile cassette players were notoriously weak on high end sounds, and playing the Dolby-encoded tape with the Dolby compensation shut off would make the highs blast forth. The tape hiss would disappear as the highway noise would mask it. But when you listened to cassettes with the engine off, it was obvious that there was a ton of background noise.

But cassettes gradually nudged eight-tracks aside, and by 1980, dominated the market.

Nowadays, I listen to high-fidelity mp3’s on a car stereo that reads memory cards. I put sixteen hours of music on a single gigabyte card. And it sounds perfect.

But I grew up with cassettes loaded with hiss that also played beautifully, as long as you were going at least fifty miles per hour.

The Automotive Store

Time was, usually located on Main Street within walking distance of the Dime Store, there was an establishment that carried generic automotive supplies like oil, gas treatment, tires, freon, anti-freeze, windshield wiper blades, and wheel covers. Additionally, they offered diverse non-automotive items like lawn mowers, gardening equipment, higher-end toys (e.g. Radio Flyer wagons), major appliances, and even firearms!

Every town big enough for at least one traffic light had one, and quite a few burgs that lacked an automated traffic control system still managed to support a Western Auto store, or in the central United Sates, an Otasco.

There were probably other local versions of the ubiquitous retail establishments in other parts of the country, as well, If so, please share your memories of them, readers.

They were located everywhere because they offered what people wanted and needed. After all, our fathers all had cars, and you certainly couldn’t buy anti-freeze at the IGA. And not every town had a Sears or Montgomery-Wards either, so lawnmowers and clothes dryers had to be obtained elsewhere. Thus thrived the automotive store.

They were fun places for the entire family to visit. First of all, they smelled like new tires. What a great ambience that was! Second, they were brightly lit by their fluorescent fixtures, their white vinyl-tiled floors would spread the illumination far and wide, and the staff was always very friendly and patient, even with highly active seven-year-old kids like me running all over the place.

And the amazingly cool stuff they sold! Dad was impressed with the beautiful riding and self-propelled mowers, although it would be many more years before he would spring his hard-earned bucks for such luxury. Mom enjoyed the shiny new refrigerators and washing machines. And then, there were the VERY nice toys that captured the attention of Yours Truly!

Otasco, founded in 1918 by three Jewish Lithuanian immigrant brothers living in Okmulgee, Oklahoma (amazing, huh?), had branch locations all over what was known as the Four State area (Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, and Arkansas) in the 60’s. Miami had one, so did many other small towns in twelve different states. Some even offered groceries among their wares for sale.

Otasco used to send me into a frenzy every winter. They would begin TV commercial campaigns every November complete with a catchy Christmas tune and two or three nice toys. Our parents were then barraged with requests from kids who would see the ads four or five times every Saturday morning. Our poor mothers and fathers!

But the strategy worked. I remember getting a VERY nice fire truck that had been featured in an Otasco Christmas commercial that my parents were told about at least a hundred times.

OTASCO store in Marlow, Oklahoma, 2014, it’s apparently still open!

Automotive stores thrived throughout the 50’s and 60’s, but with the economic downturn of the 70’s, many of them went belly-up. The appearance of discount store chains like K-Mart and Wal-Mart was also a nail in the coffin. K-Mart sold everything and more that Western Auto or Otasco did, only cheaper.

Interestingly, automobile parts stores began spreading like wildfire at about the same time, with AutoZones and NAPA’s coming to occupy many of the now-abandoned downtown buildings once home to the automotive stores that we grew up with. While they don’t sell appliances or lawnmowers, they have taken the concept of automotive supplies to the next level, offering specialized items like emissions control sensors, alternators, and water pumps.

But as sure as 30-cent-a-gallon gasoline is gone forever, so are the automotive stores that were once located on Main Street of practically every small town in America.