I was proud of the street I lived on. It was a main through fare. The city bus route had three different stops on it. It was the dividing line between two school districts. The kids that lived across the street went to a different Jr High School than we did. If you continued driving west on our street for a few blocks you were soon in the country. At the beginning of the street sat a Service Station across from our neighborhood grocery store.
Service Stations in the sixties were places of amazing activity for teenage boys. This was a place where everything automobile happened. There were gas pumps manned by attendants that filled your gas tank, checked your oil level and washed your windows while you were waiting in your car. Inside the building were service bays where repairs were done or tires were fixed. Patching tires was a hold over habit from the forties when rubber was rationed for the war effort. Many tires at the time were not sealed on the rim as they are today. The air was held in a rubber balloon inside the tire and was subject to patching when something punctured the outside casing. When tire manufacturing became more commercially acceptable as to price, Service Stations became the local dealers. This was where a lot of young men got part time jobs after school. It was a good place to work and in the slow time they could work on their jalopies.
There were still not a great deal of used cars available in our town in the early sixties, so young guys built their own. Out at the edge of most towns were these magnificent piles of steel and iron known as junk yards. They had parts of old cars everywhere. Most of this junk was from the 1920’s and 1930’s and parts were no longer available. During World War II automobile manufacturing plants were converted to making stuff for the War. No automobiles were manufactured in the US from 1942 until 1946 for public consumption. So by the time everyone got a chance to buy a new car it was well into the fifties before there was any availability. In the mean time, folks just kept patching up the older cars. When they quit running, there wasn’t much left of them so it was off to the junk yard for the final resting place. This virtually eliminated any cheap used cars for 16 year old kids with very little or no capitol.
Necessity, being the Mother of Invention gave these young men an idea. Why not take the pieces of several cars and modify them to make these old pieces of junk run again? Thus the Jalopy was born. No one is quite sure where the term originates but there were sure a lot of them around when I was growing up. Virtually every backyard or garage on my street had one under construction. The mechanics at Service Stations became the experts at these conversions. Many of these men had learned how to make things last while service in the Army. Safety laws pertaining to home made motor vehicles were non-existent. From these crude inventions came the next logical step, Hot-Rods. Big engines and tires with light weight bodies and no restrictions gave birth to drag racing. From there it was just a matter of time before local ordinances started to pop up. However, for a while in that brief shining moment known as the early sixties, Jalopies ruled the school yards and country roads. Cars made from Junk that no one wanted. Leave it up to American teenage ingenuity to spawn a whole new cottage industry.