The Garage

Not just any garage, but the stuff that legends are made of.

For someone like me, having a place to keep stuff is an invitation to collect stuff. Dad had been collecting all his life, and then I joined in. To get an idea of the size of the garage, each of the four stalls had doors made from two 4 by 8 sheets of plywood. The original structure was built of old salt boards, around 1926, before the house was built. These boards came from the old salt works, having been used to build huge vats where salt water was evaporated, leaving behind the salt. Many of the boards still had salt caked on them. You can see it tilting already in this picture.

Over the years, a lot of stuff has been stashed here. Snow blowers, lawn mowers, barbecue grills, a Harley Servicycle, X-ray machine, wine press, tools, and a LOT of stuff that could only be categorized as junk. Then there was my stuff. Thousands of old radio and TV tubes, boxes and boxes of capacitors, resistors, pots, transformers, TV sets, video monitors, power supplies, cables, computer junk - just about everything I could close the doors on.
One day, I managed to collect about 30 old (1950's vintage) sets from a TV dealer who took trade-ins. I took some pictures, but this is the only one I could find:

Probably the biggest haul came when a local radio repair shop went out of business. They had about 50 years of accumulated stuff, and I had just bought my first minivan. Talk about timing. I took about 15 loads of stuff (keep in mind that this was unrepaired, abandoned stuff) in all. I took out the back seats, put some heavy cardboard in the back, and loaded it up - again and again. Here's a typical load:

Along the right wall is tubes, resistors, and capacitors. That's all that would fit. Those boxes are 24 inches deep, all full, and heavy. One box alone is full of one ohm rheoststs.

Here's a wall of (busted) stereos. All of this stuff was for parts only, and I was well fixed up for parts. Unfortunately, I couldn't keep everything.

Enough car radios to reach partway to the moon. The Ford Escort belongs in the non-surviving category. It got pretty badly crunched up by a California driver. I eventually sold it cheep.

Another pile of car stereos and portable radios, with an old garage door opener on the top of the heap. The yardstick shows the pile as about 2 feet deep at one point.

One day, Greg came over while I was in the garage, and he mentioned a Doors song that he wanted to play. There just happened to be a Doors sheet music book in the second stall, hidden behind a picture window and a stack of plywood. I just reached over and pulled the book out. Greg was blown away that I could find anything in that mess.

One particularly snowy winter, the snow banks were so high, we couldn't see if any cars were coming down the street, so I carted some of it into the back yard. It came out of the barrels in huge pillars, so I left a couple rows along the path, and called it Snowhenge. Adds some class to the yard.

Snow was also the demise of the garage. One night, I went out there, and discovered the cracked beams in the ceiling. Needless to say, I didn't stick around, except to take a picture. I did manage to rescue a lot of stuff. Behind the bench was this pile of plywood, leaning towards the metal support pole, which was bent. Between the metal pole and the plywood was another support, also looking ready to go at any second. As it turned out, it took a lot of work to pull the garage down - a four-ton truck just spun it's wheels, and hardly made it move. It took a little persuading to get it down. I have the collapse on video tape. If I can ever figure out how to do .AVI files, I'll put up a video clip.

Here are some pix as it was being torn apart-

All told, after we sold and gave away what we could, the total trash haul was 14.5 tons. The people who tore it down took a lot of salvageable stuff, but the X-ray machine somehow made it to the dump.

Of course, a new garage was needed. This one had a concrete floor, and good wood.

Here's Uncle Tom, Mom, Dad, and Uncle Dick watching the new garage being built.

We decided to route the wires underground, so Kenny, Danny, & Mike spent all day digging this trench in the rocks. Hopefully, a few hundred years from now, someone from another civilization will come across this picture and know exactly where to dig if the wiring needs any work.

Now that I've moved into a house with a one-car garage, I've had to get rid of a lot of stuff, but it still takes a while to wade through it all.

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