Humor by John Christmann
A Car In Every Garage
Over the weekend I cleaned out my garage. This monumental task, which I reluctantly undertake whenever I start to crash into the bicycles, requires moving everything out of the garage and then carefully repacking it better than I did the year before.
This year my need to free up garage space was made even more critical when I woke up to find I owned a bankrupt car company. That’s a lot of Chevrolets to make room for.
It could be worse I suppose. As a taxpayer I could also own a bankrupt country. In that case I would also have to clear out my freezer to make room for Iceland.
Like a lot of people, I tend to hang on to things longer than I should; things which I convince myself I might still use someday, things that can be repaired on my workbench but probably never will, things that have lost their value but still work. Like golf clubs, for example.
When I am uncertain of their future, I store them in my garage. There are a lot of things with an uncertain future in there, including it would seem, my piece of Detroit.
When I was a kid my Dad stored a train whistle in his garage. This was a real whistle from a real steam engine; an iron cylinder that weighed about 150 pounds. It had a long handle that swiveled to release high pressure steam through the apertures that created the ear splitting whistle.
I wanted to toot it, but my Dad didn’t have the ten-ton locomotive that went with it. I guess that was in someone else’s garage.
He moved the whistle around every couple of years or so when more stuff appeared in the garage and he needed to make room for our Chevy Impala. I asked my Dad why he kept it. “How often do you come across a steam whistle?” he replied mysteriously. He finally got rid of it after my mom asked the same question and he couldn’t come up with a better answer.
It turns out that for reasons known only to my Dad, he had salvaged the heavy train whistle from his own father’s garage. When my grandfather died, other assets of questionable value were split up and distributed among the garages of the family shareholders.
I don’t know what happened to my grandfather’s Oldsmobile. It was not parked in his garage. There was no room.
I am not that different. Not too long ago I salvaged a cuckoo clock from my Dad’s garage. It is a simply carved wooden chalet with heavy metal weights shaped like pine cones that power the finely engineered gears and levers which make the clock hands turn and a bird emerge from behind closed doors every hour and coo. Unfortunately the bellows that make the nostalgic sound are gone. The bird can’t whistle.
My father saved it for years, but in the end decided he no longer had the desire or the components to repair it. Besides, he needed to make room for his Dodge pickup truck, the truck that he purchased so he could haul stuff to the dump, stuff like a useless train whistle and an old cuckoo clock.
I really had no use for the industrious time piece, but I couldn’t bear the thought of sending it to the dump—they just don’t make things like this anymore. And even though it might never whistle, with a little attention it could still keep time. But this is not what I told my family when I brought it home. “How often do you come across a hand carved cuckoo clock?” I said as I promptly stored it in our garage.
I have other things in my garage too. Including an Olds. Not a car, a trombone; one that I have kept since I was a kid. My son unearthed the dusty case when we moved the cuckoo clock to make room for our minivan.
He wanted to blow it, so I opened the felt-lined enclosure. It was musty inside. The mouth piece was tarnished, the brass dull and dented, and the slide posts scratched and dry. But it still worked. Like a train whistle or a cuckoo clock, all it needed was a little fresh air to make it sing.
He told me that someday he would like to restore it. He probably will; he is inventive and good with his hands, like my father. I can see him one day restacking the beat up trombone case in his garage so that he has more room to tinker on the wind-powered electric car he is building. He will tell his bewildered family, “how often do you come across a perfectly good Olds trombone?”
As it turns out, maybe not that often. Listen to this.
In 1908, the year General Motors incorporated and acquired Oldsmobile, Frank Ellsworth Olds, a part-time musician and full-time machinist for the Locomobile Company—an automobile manufacturer that would ultimately be acquired by General Motors—started producing brass trombones from a shed behind his house.
Several years later, after his melodious brass horns caught on, Old’s turned his shed into a garage, which he cleaned out each year to make room for his new Cadillacs.
Olds instruments were highly regarded among professional musicians for their quality. But over time, as more and more instruments were sold to parents like mine who didn’t want to pay a premium for a tone that would never be coaxed from grade school beginners, the quality of the instruments declined and so did the Olds reputation.
Eventually the company was put up for sale. But there were no buyers, and so the Olds Company and its manufacturing facility were liquidated in what can only be described as a public garage sale. To this day there are work benches scattered throughout California that contain soldering guns and metal working equipment from the liquidated Olds manufacturing plant.
“How often do you come across a brass trombone tooling machine?” fathers tell their families as they shuffle things about to make room for their Chevy Suburbans.
It is interesting to note that this was about the same time that another father in California moved his Chevy out of the garage so his son could use a few soldering guns to produce something called an Apple Computer.
I have a Macintosh computer in my garage too. I also have a rotary Bell telephone, a Royal typewriter, and a Lionel steam engine. They all work, but I don’t know what to do with them. I don’t know what I am going to do with a cuckoo clock or a bankrupt car company either.
But here is something I do know. If I owned a classic 1957 Chevy Bel Air convertible I would keep it forever. And on a fine spring weekend in June, instead of cleaning out the relics in my garage, I would drive it around town and feel the wind in my hair.
© 2009 Dadinthebox.com