Old Man Dewey

Old Man Dewey

Al “Sugar Bear” McKay was a mechanic at the Seattle Fire Garage when I was in the Machine Shop there, and I got to know him in the normal course of work.  He was the motorcycle specialist for Seattle Police Department, assigned to keep the fleet of Harley Davidsons running through the hazards of police work, and he pretty much knew those old Shovelheads inside and out.  He taught me how to assemble transmissions, which he could do blindfolded, and lots of other things over the years.  But he also turned out to be good for a story every now and then, one of which I will relate to you now.

Al started out working for Dewey’s Cycle as the equivalent of a lot boy, running parts on his Cushman scooter (and popping wheelies in the front and out the back when the old man was not looking), general cleanup and whatever else needed doing at the time.  This was probably in the late ‘60s, early ‘70s, Al is no longer around to get it any closer than that.

Now, old man Dewey shared a personality trait with many of his competitors and compadres in the motorcycle business in Seattle at the time, like Pat Patereau at Pat’s Top Hat Cycle, in that he tended to be a bit cranky at times, especially when asked for the hundredth time if that Triumph part was ever going to be off Back Order or some such foolishness.  He didn’t necessarily get along with everyone, and didn’t seem to mind much.  It’s an understandable attitude that would be reasonable in a man who spent his entire life in the motorcycle business, with a focus on European brands, only to see everything upended by the relentless onslaught of faster, more dependable and cheaper Japanese bikes, to the point where the idea that a guy could sell the business and retire someday just fell right off the table.  Guys tended to work till they couldn’t work no more, because that was all they had anyway, which explains why we look up to them today.  We just learned when to tiptoe at the time.

I had my old ’60 Thunderbird at Dewey’s once, for example, for a top end job, and the project was hung up because intake valves were suddenly unobtanium in the early ‘70s as Triumph went through one of their many crises at the factory level and couldn’t keep up with parts demand.  One day, as I was walking around the corner from Dewey’s shop on Capitol Hill after checking in for the third time about my bike, and hearing the same story, I got interrupted by one of the mechanics, who popped out of the side door and said, “Hey!”  I stopped to listen.  “That’s your bike waiting on valves, right”, he asked?  “Yeah, they’re still on back order.”  I replied.  “Well, here’s the deal”, he said.  “You can get those valves any time you want from Carmen Tom at Tom’s Cycle down on Empire Way.  The Old Man hates Carmen for some reason, and won’t let us deal with him for anything.  All you gotta do is go down there and buy the valves and bring them back, and I’ll have your bike back on the road tomorrow.  Just don’t say a word about who told you, or my ass is grass!”  “Thanks, Man, I’ll go do that right now!” I replied, and off I went, and that’s how it worked out in that case.

But the story that still makes me shake my head is the one Sugar Bear told me one time.  It seems Dewey’s had also been an Indian dealer back in the day before that company bit the bullet in 1953, and as of sometime in the ‘60s, was still sitting on a pretty good pile of NOS Indian parts in the back room.  As the story goes, a guy came in and made what Dewey considered an insultingly low offer for all the leftover Indian parts, after which the old man ran the guy out of the shop and requested that he never darken his door further.  On the way back to his office he grabbed Al and took him back to the Indian parts section and said, “I want you to take everything that says Indian on it off these shelves and take them out back and throw them in the dumpster!”

So that’s what Al did, supposedly.  I remember when I heard the story many years later, I speculated that a person in the know could have possibly wandered by that dumpster later in the day, after the old man went home, and rescued those bits of unobtanium, but Al didn’t know if that happened or not.

Like so many other urban legends, we’ll probably never know, unless somebody comes up with the rest of the story.  :-{)}

urban legends

We've all heard them:  stories of improbable deals, incredible finds, lucky strikes or big scores.  How often have we actually come close enough to one of them to actually be in a position to do something about it?  How about now?  Let me tell you the story…

I did a bad thing yesterday.  I went to a house in Newcastle and bought two Honda Shadows.  Yeah, I know, that’s ridiculous.  The very idea that a dyed-in-the-wool old Harley guy like me would actually go out and buy not one, but two Hondas at the same time is hard to fathom.  But it happened, and that’s another story for another time.  It’s what I found when I went to pick them up that is the stuff of legend.

See, there is this guy, we’ll call him Larry, because that’s his name.  Larry was renting a room from a friend of his named Hugh.  As things happen, Hugh died suddenly just last month.  I don’t know anything about the family situation, other than that Larry got a sudden eviction notice just last week that forced him to be gone by this weekend.  That’s what caused him to place the ad in Craigslist with the two Hondas at the improbably low price that resulted in me showing up at Hugh’s house yesterday morning.  After an intense dickering session that mostly consisted of me walking around in circles trying to convince myself I really wanted to do this, the deal was struck, and I began to load two motorcycles into the back of my pickup along with the usual pile of stuff that accumulates when you own a motorcycle.  As the project continued, I noticed more and more just what was in that double garage besides my two new bikes.

Hugh, it turns out, was a car guy.  When I looked up the address on Zillow and accessed the street view option from Google Earth, the street view of Hugh’s house, taken whenever, shows a top fuel dragster under a tarp in the driveway, so he was a real car guy.  By the time I showed up, the dragster was long gone, of course, but I saw why it had been relegated to storage in the driveway.

The first thing that leaped out at me was the two street rods.  Both appear to be fiberglass bodied ’32 Ford roadster types with the full fenders and running boards and an open hood showing the large V-8 engine and headers.  That was the red one, nearest the doorway.  The black one in the background was facing the other way, so I couldn't see if it had an engine under the hood.  The red rod was half covered in empty cardboard boxes, old blankets, and junk.  Sitting on the rear was a brand new fancy aluminum spacer for a large four barrel carb, along with a couple of gaskets, obviously brand new, just sittin’ there.  Down on the floor alongside was a brand new very large aluminum distributor for some big block engine, just sittin’ there.  A little ways from that was a new crankshaft wrapped in plastic, just sittin’ there on the floor.  Over on the bench I saw what appeared to be a complete rocker arm setup for a big block Ford, just kinda piled haphazardly on top of a bunch of stuff on the bench.

In between the back of the car and that workbench was a pile of what appeared to be brand new name brand hot rod components that was probably 12 feet long and about 8 feet wide and floor to ceiling high.  Most of it was in boxes, some with tantalizing hand-written labels like “Corvette fans”, others closed and packed.  On the wall opposite the pile was a typical car guy setup:  three rollaway toolboxes jammed full of every kind of mechanic’s tool you could imagine.  On the floor on the other side of the red rod was a new looking cherry picker engine hoist, just sittin’ there.  I saw at least one air compressor.  Everywhere I looked was more cool stuff, but I had to get out of there, so I left.

When I walk out into my own garage I see what happens when a man, over many years, has a hobby or an interest and spends time and money on that interest and accumulates the tools of the trade needed to work that hobby, and the spare parts that go along with it.  As an Ebay guy, I stand in a room like that one in Newcastle and look around, and all I see is inventory, bright flashing dollar signs popping out of boxes and dripping from the ceiling.  In the end, all of our toys become someone else’s inventory.  You go to the swap meet, and that’s what you’re looking at spread out all over those tables and on the floor:  a man’s life, reduced to inventory.  Hopefully, when we’re gone, and our inventory has been dissipated out into the community, we can only hope two things.  One is that some of those cool things that we thought highly enough of to collect and hold on to will wind up in the hands of someone who will actually put them to use as they were intended, if not just for the pleasure of owning them as well.  The other thing is that we will be remembered for more than just our possessions, for while our possessions do describe us, they take as much meaning from our ownership and use of them as we do from them, and when they are dispersed that meaning drops off and they become simple things again, a hammer, rather than my hammer or his hammer.  It is only in the memory of people that things become permanently connected to a person, like Eric Clapton’s guitar, or that very cool old National Steel banjo that is displayed behind glass at the first restaurant you come to on the way down into Naches on Highway 410 to Yakama.  That’s why tools I have inherited from my father are more valuable to me than tools I bought myself.

So here is the essence of this Urban Legend:  In a double car garage in a house in Newcastle at this very moment, a man’s life is about to become inventory for someone.  The difficulty lies in the fact that we don’t know who to ask.  The two tenants were on their way out the door, and did not have any contact information to whom could be placed an inquiry about all the stuff in the garage.  Hugh apparently lived alone, and they did not know of any immediate family in the area.

I’m not a car guy, so I wouldn’t know where to start on this pile, but I do get the strong feeling that this is indeed a legendary pile, that is about to change hands one way or the other, and I don’t have any way to find an opening, other than to park out front and wait for someone to show up.  Tomorrow would be a very good day to do just that, but I won’t be there.  I do, however, have one thing you will usually never hear as part of an Urban Legend.  I have the address of the house in Newcastle on my phone.  Obviously, I would not publish that kind of information, but if any of you car guys see this and get fired up by the idea, get in touch with me.  What would be really cool is to hear the rest of the story some day, about the guy who saw an opportunity dangling in front of him and went for it.  But mostly I just want to know what all was in that pile… :-{)}

A Tree Grows...

If you travel southbound on Interstate 5 through Seattle there is an exit from the right lane at the south end of the Duwamish valley that crosses back over the freeway and joins Martin Luther King, Jr. Way as it cuts across the Skyway hill into Renton.  The exit lane becomes the left lane of the overpass, and curves into its junction with MLK on an arc from east to south, leaving a narrow median strip on the left shoulder that disappears as the two roads merge.

Almost every day, for twenty seven years, we traveled that road, singly or in carpool combinations that included my wife and I.  And almost every one of those days, on the southbound trip, I would be eating the apple from my lunchbox as a snack on the road home.  And almost every time, I would open the driver’s window as we passed that narrow strip of land at 50 miles an hour, and throw out the apple core, aiming for the vegetation beyond the railing.  My wife would criticize me for littering, and I would respond that apple cores are organic, and I was feeding the critters that undoubtedly lived there.  Each day they would huddle by the rail and wait for the manna to fall from heaven, I theorized.  This went on for years.

One day, about spring of 2008 or so, my gardener wife spotted a new plant growing in the median strip.  Sure enough, it was an apple tree!  Over the next several years we watched it struggle to survive in an environment heavy on fumes and road dirt, and grow large enough to bear fruit.  I kept waiting for it to be whacked by a mower, but to date that has not happened.  It’s still there, you can see it on your left as you cross over the freeway, or as you drive north on MLK from Renton in the left lane, if you know where to look.

One of these days, maybe, I’m gonna stop by and pick an apple off my tree.  I’m not sure how to do that without getting run over, but it’s a thought.  Another thought that occurs to me is that, if you do something good for the environment every day, even the smallest thing, even if there are no obvious short term results, your actions in the long run can surprise you.  I suspect there’s a moral to this story, but I’ll let you supply your own.  :-{)}

Edit:  The tree in the story lasted until sometime in January of 2016, when a county road crew came along with a brushwhacker mounted on the side of a tractor and wiped out everything on that little spit of land.  As luck would have it, the above story was published in the ARSCE newsletter the following week.  :-{)}