Junkyard Men

Somewhere in the countryside, in the 1950's and 60's, men would gather stuff from all over the place, haul it home in the back of a pick-up truck, and unload it in their backyards until it overflowed to their back-fifty.

Wives would grind their teeth, until the day a knock at the door brought a sale of a piece of junk and an empty space on the lawn and some bills and change for her cookie jar. Their husbands were now in business.

Bedsteads, nuts and bolts, rusty lawn mower blades, ice skates, baby rattles, strips of leather, lath, tin, and horse collars made great piles of treasures covered in dollar signs.

Junkyards had everything you could ever need and want. They were unsightly and mysterious, a labyrinth of trash and treasures.

The auto parts junkyard was a goldmine and a haven for men and their sons, because who didn't drive an old car that broke down sooner or later.

If your bumper fell off, the junkyard would sell you another one. Batteries, oil pans, belts, and rocker panels. What you needed, they had.

Junkyard men were a business unto themselves, but they lacked the good reputation of a man who worked away from home. Some people even considered them to be lazy. If they were lazy, how did all that junk get on their acreage in the first place? And who was clothing their kids and putting food on the table?

Driving by these properties was a distraction, even when they were set back from the road, because they basically were an eyesore.

Sooner or later, the town council would come out and order them to build a fence so the good people didn't have to look at all that junk from the road.

The junkyard men would end up hammering a huge, hand-painted sign into the ground out by the road, because before the fence, the unsightly sight of their junkyard was all the advertising they'd needed.

Some old guys who failed to retire would scour open dumpsites for dishes and toilets and dressers, pots and pans and rags, just about everything a person needed to set up housekeeping, then they'd sell the junk as is, chipped, rusty, creaky, and half-gone, and make a decent living doing it.

No junkyard man every needed a security system, because he had a mongrel dog, ugly, fangy, and dirty - a dog that did what he had to do to get that big old bone at the end of the day. A true and loyal partner.

I remember my Dad going to a junkyard for a car part he couldn't find anywhere, and coming home with a gleam in his eyes. He'd never seen anything like that place, he said, then spent the next hour telling us about all the stuff the man had on his three acres of dirt.

Dad admired that man, and he never could figure out where on earth the guy had found all that stuff.

Oh, yes - he also came home with the car part he had so desperately needed.