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Ham's '48 -Once upon a Time ...
Back in the early 1970’s when the truck and I had to work for a living; I had to go between several different facilities on a day-to-day basis. Every facility had a different parking arrangement for hourly, salaried and visitor parking and every category had a specific color and design of sticker so the pecking order was observed.
If you arrived in the middle of a work day, visitor parking was usually full, salaried was full and any empty hourly parking was always way out Beyond Furthest Egypt (BFE). As a result I usually parked wherever I could find a slot and didn’t worry about what sticker went where.
As a result of my flagrant disregard for rules, I got a lot of “Parking Violation Notifications (PVN)” from the Security Office. If you drove a 1963 Chevy, the Security Office had to chase down a license plate through the local police and that took a lot of time. But if you drove a 1948 Jeep Truck they knew it was Beardsley (again) and exactly who needed to be notified of the offense. They would send my boss a notice about the PVN and he would scold me. My attitude was that if I had to go to some other facility to take care of a crisis, I wasn’t going to wander all over the lot forever just to find a parking place – I had work to do.
After several rounds of this, my boss called the Security Office and told them to issue me every parking sticker in the book – he was tired of answering PVN citations. The clerk said that couldn’t be done. My boss then called the Director of Plant Security (a gentleman who had spent 19 months as a German POW and who had a really good sense of what mattered and what didn’t) who said “Give him the stickers”. When the truck retired, it had four or five stickers on the windshield and mirror. But – I still got PVN’s if I parked in a Visitor Space!
In the 35-year barn storage, the decals disintegrated but the one plastic sticker survived (the one that is shaped as a green circle). Recently a retired plant guard found a stash of old parking stickers (decals) and he offered them to us old guys. If I remember correctly, the red decal was a Plant 3 Salaried sticker. I will put these two stickers on the upper left passenger windshield – right behind the mirror. This adds just another period correct touch that Fort Wayne natives will recognize.
Now, if I could just find a 1976 Indiana Safety Inspection sticker ….
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Inspection at Ball-joint Charlie's
Quote:
Originally Posted by
TJones
Kinda like this one Larry?
Yep – it looks a lot like one! Where did you find that one?
(Check out the attachment)
I’ve tried to soak it off, but the glue is really good and all that happens is that I nibble just a little more off the edge every time I try.
The inspection program went away in the late ‘70’s because there was no evidence that it was doing any good and it had become an income stream for less than scrupulous mechanics – and people got fed up with it.
A good example of that was the Shell station at the corner of New Haven Avenue and Bueter Road in Fort Wayne. His specialty was finding bad ball joints. He could convince the factory ladies from Magnavox, Phelps-Dodge and Harvester that the front wheel was going to fall off their car before they got it back home.
Back then we had a well known upholstery shop in town called “Seat Cover Charlie”. The Shell station became “Ball-joint Charlie”. But, one year I let things get close to expiring and I left the truck up there since it was literally a three minute walk from the door at work.
I stopped by about 6:00 after work and there sat the truck with a red rejection sticker on the windshield. If I recall, once rejected you had 10 days to get it cleared – the red sticker was a “fine me” notice.
I could probably have found several things that might have deserved a red sticker and not been surprised – muffler, brakes, wiper blades, one tire or even the horn button that was just a wire sticking out of the center of the steering column. SO, I ask what he found.
I almost had to laugh when he said “Your ball joints are shot. On a truck that old they really are dangerous and need to be replaced” - but I managed to keep a straight face.
“How bad are they?” asks I.
“Really bad, and you never know when they are going to let loose.” says he.
I play dumb – something I do well; “Well what can happen?”
He gave me the standard line that bad ball joints would cause me to swerve out of control into the path of a bus full of Nuns holding orphans in their laps. I looked appropriately shocked and then I asked him; “Is there anything else wrong?”
“Naw. that’s all.”
“OK then, scrape that red sticker off, put an OK sticker on.”
“I can’t do that, the truck is unsafe.” (It might have been – but it wasn’t because of ball joints).
Sez I; “Either scrape off the red sticker – or we’ll just call a cop right now. That truck doesn’t have ball joints – it has bushings and kingpins in the front end”.
The look was priceless – Ball-joint Charlie had been caught at his own game. He scraped off the sticker and put on a new OK sticker (probably a 73 or 74).
I got in the truck to leave and he said “Whoa, you owe me $5.00 for the Inspection.”
I replied to the effect “I don’t owe you zip for the kind of inspection you did.”
His parting remark was, somewhat cleaned up, “Don’t ever set foot on my property again you !@@#*&%%!.” At least we agreed on that.
Oh, the stories you can tell when you’ve driven the same truck for most of your life …..
