Chapter Twenty-Seven: Car Talk

 

Cars, “wheels,” automobiles; owned, borrowed, or just dreamed of, were the unifying element for the crowd that gathered at Joe’s candy store. With our ages ranging from fifteen through to about twenty, in a blue-collar city neighborhood, it’s not difficult to imagine the kinds of cars that were parked along the curb at Joe’s. The newest were high-mileage, well-worn 1941 Fords, Plymouths, ‘39 Chevy’s, an occasional vintage Buick or rusted Pontiac. Difficult to keep running, the cars were money pits that continually challenged the mechanical and economic skills of their teen-aged owners. Harsh necessity often meant risky trips to “Midnight Auto Parts.” 

When a contractor working up the street left his compressor parked on the sidewalk overnight, the casual observation that it rested on two good looking sixteen-inch tires was silently noted by more than one of the youthful motorists at Joe’s. Walking past the work site the next morning, I saw that the compressor was tireless, resting on two cinder blocks.

Rudimentary customizing of these relics mimicked the ascendant California hot-rodding subculture so dear to teenage hearts in the early 1950’s. But no fender skirts from Pep Boys, no amount of gray or red-lead primer, no steel packed dual exhausts could hide the reality that these cars were low-end junkers on their last legs, held together with used parts and piston sealer. But none of that mattered. In Olney, they were hot rods, iconic symbols on wheels, mobile and audible manifestations of teenage autonomy and rebellion. An old car with dual echo cans protruding from under the rear bumper, roaring away from a street corner was an affront to conformity and respectability, a deliberate act calculated to provoke and annoy the adult world. And it certainly gave the cops something to do. 

To have a car, any car, or to have access to a car was the ticket to paradise. Suddenly your options became limitless. Friends, excitement, freedom and maybe even girls might be yours. There were geeky kids, horrendously uncool kids, who gained immediate cachet with the possession of a car. And if the car was really sharp, an aura of renown could attach itself to its otherwise unremarkable owner. One night, late, close to ten on a weeknight, we were visited briefly by the legendary Jojo Migliori, legendary because he drove a glossy magazine quality street rod known of, talked about, but never before seen by most of us. It was a chopped 1939 Ford convertible, bright red and powered by a chrome-laden Oldsmobile engine. Oh boy! Wow! He was dating the sister of a kid on our corner and stopped for just a few minutes, leaving the object of our awe and desire running. It sat right there in front of us on Duncannon Avenue, rumbling and growling, and every one of us knew just how far removed in light years we were from the realization of our dreams. 

My first experience behind the wheel began in a singularly inauspicious way. Going out on to the porch to catch a smoke after supper, I saw Bobby Yanks coming out of his house across the street. It was late March, 1954, a warm, wet Saturday night and just starting to get dark. Bobby had his girlfriend with him, a local stunner named Susan Devine. My feelings of diminishment vis-à-vis Bobby Yanks weren’t helped by the fact that while we were both sixteen, he already had a car and I didn’t. And my sense of my own worth wasn’t enhanced by my suspicions, later confirmed, that he was also regularly getting into the divine Miss Devine’s pants. At the time, I had no imminent prospects of any untimely loss of my virginity. I didn’t even have a girl friend. 

“You doing anything,” Bobby asked me. “Nah,” I said, casually flicking my cigarette butt off into the street, a vain attempt to establish myself as cool in the eyes of the worldly Miss Devine. Bobby said that he could use my help, and went on to explain the situation. Bobby, not me, was the owner of a 1940 Ford convertible with a white top and a V-8 engine that spoke in the coded dreams of teenaged fantasy through a set of sweetly rumbling dual exhausts. He had that car and I didn’t. And then there was business of him and Susan Devine. 

 Bobby’s ‘40 Ford convertible was a work in progress. The car had seen some hard use in its fourteen years before coming into Bobby’s hands. He had already replaced the transmission, the cloth top and sundry engine components. I was aware that he was in the market for a used Oldsmobile V-8 and also that he was searching for body parts to replace a couple of rusted fenders and a left rear quarter panel. The source for most of these parts was known to every car freak for miles around, Hershkovitz’s junkyard on Rising Sun Avenue south of the Boulevard.

I’d been to Hershkovitz’s a couple of times, accompanying some of the local motoring world’s low-end members. The place was a classic junkyard in the context of a pre-environmental public consciousness. Dirty, greasy and chaotic with car wrecks piled upon car wrecks. In pursuit of window cranks for a ‘41 Buick or a water pump for a ‘39 Plymouth, we scaled the teetering piles of junked cars while around us burning tires and who knows what else sent columns of dirty smoke into the air. You were on your own in Hershkovitz’s.

Hershkovitz himself was an edgy but cheery fat guy in greasy coveralls. Dirty hands and a dirty face, an unlit but chewed-down cigar always in his mouth, he’d bark out seemingly arbitrary prices on the parts retrieved by his scavenger customers. Richie Eberts, who had nurtured more than one old, piece of crap car back to life, claimed that Hershkovitz always came within ten percent of the book value of any used part.

Somebody told Bobby Yanks that Hershkovitz had an engineless ‘40 Ford convertible on the property. When Bobby offered fifty bucks for the hulk, Hershkovitz squirmed and with evident reluctance told Bobby he couldn’t sell it because the car was a stolen car that the police had towed in and left at his gate. He said that he didn’t have a title and that the car wasn’t even on his property, but was sitting on the shoulder of the street, outside his fence. Not long after, it came out why Hershkovitz had uncharacteristically deferred the offer of a quick fifty-bucks. He, along with a couple of well-known Sixth and Pike Street wiseguys made the newspapers, arrested in a federal organized crime probe. Bobby Yanks’s father said that Hershkovitz probably was afraid to spit on the ground, let alone sell an untitled car.   

 With the unsettling Susan Devine in the middle between Bobby and I, we drove down Rising Sun Avenue to the darkened junkyard. Bobby backed up to the derelict Ford while I did my best “c’mon back, c’mon back, hold it” routine. Bobby produced a coil of clothesline and began tying the back bumper of his car to the front of the other car. I stood focusing on Susan Devine, listening to the mellow rumble singing from the big echo cans below the rear bumper of Bobby’s car.

The car being towed had no brakes. Bobby had theorized, not altogether incorrectly, that if the two cars were lashed tightly together, he could pull the other car without it crashing into the back his car. My job was to sit in the dead car, steering it in the turns and keeping   the wheels otherwise straight. Accepted wisdom held that if the front wheels turned sideways, the drag would rip the rear end out of the towing car. 

No big deal. There wasn’t much traffic early on a Saturday evening, and all I had to do was keep the steering wheel in line with Bobby in front of me. We almost made it. Just three blocks short of the garage that Bobby rented on the Fourth Street lots, the edges of the bumpers finally cut through the last of the clothesline. I began rolling free along Fourth Street, no engine, no brakes, no lights, nothing but a steering wheel. Bobby had been doing under twenty, and I managed to coast to a stop against the curb, just short of the Duncannon Avenue intersection. 

Bobby backed up once more to the clunker, but the remains of the rope were useless. As we stood pondering what to do, a car approached slowly flooding us in the glare of its high beams. Bobby and I at once recognized the clacking tappets of the Ford overhead valve V-8 as trouble. It was a cop car, a police patrol car out of the Thirty-fifth District. 

Cops then still rode two to a car. The driver stayed behind the wheel, keeping us fixed in his high beams. The other cop, unlit flashlight in hand, approached us with a “what the fuck’s going on here,” followed immediately with an “excuse me, Miss.” I went into a defensive panic. It wasn’t me. I didn’t steal anything. I don’t even know how to drive. But somehow without knowing the statutes, I had a fair understanding of the legal concepts of complicity, of accessories before and after the fact. “Shit!”

Then, Bobby Yanks proceeded to astound me. In a transition I wouldn’t have guessed possible, his thuggy demeanor, his signature swagger and the physical manifestations of his bad attitude disappeared into a voicing and a manner appropriate to a Boy Scout training film. It was all  “Officer this” and “Officer that.”  The cop surveyed the remnants of the clothesline and commented that that “fucking stuff wouldn’t hold an express wagon.” Another “excuse me, Miss.”

After a few more nervous minutes, the cop said, “you guys wait here. Don’t go anywhere. Ha, ha, ha, that’s a joke.” The police car made a U-turn and disappeared down Fourth Street. I had no doubt as to what we should do. With no “excuse me, Miss,” I said “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”  “Nah, we can’t” Bobby said. “That other cop wrote my number down.”

While we stood around, I gallantly shared my last cigarette with Susan Devine. The cop car was back in less than fifteen minutes, and this time, they both got out of the car, the first guy carrying a coil of heavy-duty cording. “Here. Let’s try this,” he said. In another five minutes, thanks to the outstanding efforts of Philadelphia’s finest, we were once again secured and rolling a stolen car away toward the safety of Bobby’s rental garage.

Within two weeks, Bobby Yanks’s ‘40 Ford was sporting three red-oxide primered, rust-free fenders, a new trunk lid, and a host of other upgraded accessories. A few weeks after that, near midnight one night, Bobby towed the remains of the Moskat Ford, this time with Billy Dougherty at the wheel, from his garage to the railroad embankment at the Sixth Street dead-end.  To further cover his tracks, and in what some saw as a hallmark of his insolence, he doused the car in gasoline and took off, leaving the blaze for the arrival of the fire department. 

Susan Devine broke up with Bobby Yanks later that spring. Rumors began in September when she didn’t show up at Little Flower for her senior year. She and Phil Walls, who worked at the Sunoco Station on Mascher Street, and who drove a brand new 55’ Ford Crestliner, were quickly and quietly married in the Incarnation rectory just before Halloween. Bobby Yanks was a fortunate guy on more than one count. 

 

More than a year would pass after the Bobby Yanks incident before I found myself driving another car. In fact, it wasn’t until my father got his own first car in 1955 that I bothered getting my license. My association with the car culture at Joe’s candy store, and later at Jimmy’s Tomato Pies, was vicarious. I was a running dog of the automotive elite, a hanger on at the mercy of those who had wheels. I tried to balance my dignity against my desire not to be left out. It was embarrassing, but not embarrassing enough to forgo the humiliation of wanting to be one of those invited to get in and go for a ride – to Mayfair, to Lawndale, to Xanadu or Araby. An impromptu excursion in a 1939 Chevrolet four-door sedan might include scoring some beer, or maybe there would be girls who might be enticed into the car. It could have happened. The beer scenario was more likely, particularly in the late years of high school and after. But by then I could occasionally get my father’s new used-car, and I had several close friends who didn’t use car ownership for purposes of social control.  My revenge didn’t come until I had returned from the army and bought a 1953 Oldsmobile Super Eighty-Eight, about as cool a car as a young man of my time and place could possess. But it was too late. I created a few momentary stirs on the parking lots of some all-night diners, but my time was past. I had a grownup job, I was about to get engaged, and in truth I no longer had the needs that had made me want to turn heads among the car freak crowd.

Tags: 1939 chevrolet, 1939 ford convertible, 1940 ford convertible, 1941 ford, 1941 plymouth, 1945-1955, 1954, 1955 ford crestliner, blue collar neighborhood, buick, california hot rods, cars, dual exhausts, duncannon avenue, memoir, midnight auto parts, oldsmobile super eighty-eight, olney, pep boys, philadelphia, philadelphia police, piston sealer, pontiac, rising sun avenue, sixth and pike, thirty-fifth district, v-8