Before and After

Just to give you an idea of how bad these magazines really are after forty and fifty years in the workshop at my mother's old house - take a look at the covers above. Even the original scan does not do full justice to the waterstains and wavey remains of these magazines. I have to use both hands to press them against the glass to get them flat enough to be useful. An attempt to scan the Corvair article inside was an exercise in frustration. Short of taking out the pages, there is no way to scan them and get them to lay flat. And the way they smell.....the basement was wet. Not damp. Frequently, there were inches of water on the floor because my mother, as years went by, did not bother using a sump pump because of the sheer amount of junk that filled every inch of floor in usually soaking wet cardboard boxes. Let me delicately say that after weeks of cleaning things out, the contents that were left filled an entire garbage truck - not a container, but an entire truck with compactor. And there was another container worth of trash that didn't fit in the truck.

These old magazines were saved the last night I visited the house to patrol the remains for anything I might have missed from my father's workshop, untouched since the early 1980's when my parents divorced. They were propped up in wooden crates my father had made to fit them - and, unfortunately, most of them were too damaged to salvage - on shelves he had made to store his books. I plan on slowly scanning the covers, and whatever interests me from the inside, and then deciding what to do with them, since they stink, are brittle andd falling apart, and really aren't of interest to my family or my kids. So, meanwhile, I'm keeping myself occupied and remembering the cars of my childhood.

(And just in case you missed the apparent theme of "cars with bad brakes" in the past two posts, it was not intentional. And the brakes on the Mercedes did get fixed. At some point, my father horsetraded "The Garbage Truck" for a '66 Corvair Monza that he had for a long time - for him, anyway - until someone made him an offer for it and he transformed it into a big green Plymouth Fury III. That's another story.)