It was not the time of year to go swimming because the weather and water were both too cold. But inside the truck cab, with the glasses up, it was hot. So I put Anita up in the seat with all her clothes off and she was comfortable right away. Her clothes dried out before we got home and we put them back on her. I sort of hoped that Ima wouldn't have to know about the accident, but do you think Anita could keep it secret? Goodness no! She had to go and tell Ima the whole story, in her own small way.
I worked off-and-on for Calvin Carriker all the years we lived at Royston. Along with his farming he also operated a grocery store, a filling station, and the post office. Ed Lewis worked full time for Calvin for years, and at one time was driving a stripped down Model T Ford, and there was something wrong with the T which Ed had not been able to remedy. At slow speed it skipped on one cylinder; at high speed it ran okay. When I speak of high and low speeds, I'm speaking in the neighborhood of, "Under ten miles an hour it skipped and over fifteen it didn't."
One day after a rain, Calvin asked me why didn't I help Ed, and the two of us get the old car to running better, since it was too wet to work in the field. I asked Ed what all he had done to the motor, and after he told me, I told him it had a broken piston. But Ed said he had looked at the pistons when he had the head off grinding the valves, and the pistons were okay.
I told him, "Okay, let's run through it once more. You have put in new plugs, timer, manifold, gaskets, and ground the valves. You have replaced everything that could cause it to skip on one cylinder except a bad piston."
Then Calvin said to me, "Why don't you take the piston out while
Ed gets a piston from somewhere?"
Looking at the pistons from the top, Ed couldn't see the broken piston, but when we took it out, we found it broken on one side all the way from the bottom up to the top ring groove. We replaced that one bad piston and the old car ran okay.
There were other troubles with automobiles in those days. Today some of us older people are inclined to talk about the good old days and tell of how we were born during the horse-and-buggy days and how we lived through the Model T era, the Great Depression of the 1930s and into the Jet Age. However, most of us have failed to inform the younger generations about the "broken-fender" age and the "drain-your-car-every-night" era. These two periods overlapped to a considerable degree and ran concurrently much of the time.
That was when car fenders were bolted to the running board at one end and the other end of the fender was allowed to vibrate and flop up and down—especially on rough roads, and there were no smooth ones. The constant flopping caused the fenders to begin to break directly above each wheel. This called for a welding job to repair the break. Then a few weeks later the fender was beginning to break again in the same place. And this called for yet another repair job, and this went on and on throughout the entire life of the car. It happened to all cars alike—the Essex, the Nash, the Whippet, and even the Hupmobile.
This broken-fender age lasted from about 1928 until the late 1950s, and for me it extended into the 1960s because the only cars I could afford were old and well used and the fenders had been repaired by any number of other previous owners.
Why didn't fenders break before 1928? A number of reasons. They were much smaller and lighter, and therefore they didn't flop and bend and break. Furthermore, cars were slower, and many of them didn't last long enough to run far enough to break their fenders. The fenders outlasted many of the motors