Over the course of restoring an old car you often find little fragments of this and that carelessly dropped and forgotten by the many people who have been in the car over the years. These fragments are a fascinating addition to the tapestry which is the history of the car.
Under the front seat is often quite a treasure trove and my 1958 Mercury is no exception. When I removed the front seat to fix the power adjusting mechanism I found the following items:
- Two television valves (tubes)
- One dessert spoon !
- Half of a 1959-1960 registration label
- Two ball-point pens
- Two tickets from the Twin Drive In Theater, Amarillo, Texas
- El Roi-Tan cigar wrapper
- Good For Chewing chewing tobacco wrapper
- Matchbox from Western Auto, Friona, Texas
- Wrigley's chewing gum wrapper
- Jack Daniel's bottle label
- Hamm's beer bottle opener
- Sharpening stone
- Dubble Bubble bubble gum wrapper
- Miscellaneous screws and batteries
- The skeleton of a mouse !
The television valves (tubes) we found were a 3GK5 and a 2CY5. How did they get under the seat ? I guess we will never know.
The drive-in tickets were from the Twin Drive In Theatre in Amarillo, Texas. According to my Internet research the Twin Drive In was one of a number of drive in theatres in Amarillo, the others being the Sunset, the Palo Duro, the Trail, the Skyway and the Tascosa, the latter having reopened in 1999. The Twin opened in 1952 and closed in 1985 and was located on the Canyon Highway. It's now the Wal-Mart Super Center on Canyon Drive. Entertainment preferences have certainly changed...Following are two pictures of the Twin Drive In where my Mercury was driven to a movie back in the day.
Interestingly the first time I put the address of the former Twin Drive In into Google Satellite View it brought back an image of a large field with two curious sets of concentric arcs. This could be nothing other than the site of the old drive in. The concentric arcs would be the raised mounds that the front wheels of the car were driven onto to point the windscreen to the movie screen. The trees had grown compared to the old aerial photo (above) but the site of the candy bar was cleary visible. As of June 2010 Google Satellite View shows the same location obliterated forever by the dreary Walmart Super Centre and its equally depressing carpark.
Finding the torn section of the old rego label was pretty neat. It's a shame it's only half the label but it's neat nonetheless. It's a 1959-1960 label so the car was only a year old. Discernible on the back of the label is that the model is '1958', the license plate number began with 'BW' and the engine number begins with '570'.
Here is a scan of a Dubble Bubble bubble gum wrapper featuring a comic joke, a fortune and the opportunity to purchase a personalised rubber stamp kit. The joke is a typical Christmas bonbon-type joke:
What time is like a Chinese tooth-ache ? - Tooth-Hurty (2:30). Rather politically incorrect today but reflective of a time when people weren't quite so serious and boring. Your Dubble Bubble Fortune is this:
By being on the conservative side with money, property and associations, you will receive help from unusual sources. Apparently Dubble Bubble was released in 1937 and is still being produced today, although not to the original recipe.
Also under the front seat I found a matchbox from Western Auto in Friona, Texas. Western Auto was an auto parts store that began in 1909 as a mail-order business, opening its first retail store in 1921. Home to brand names such as Davis Tires and Wizard tools, it grew to more than 5,000 stores as the popularity of motor cars grew, but today has largely disappeared. Friona is located about 70 miles south-west of Amarillo and lends evidence to the general locality of the car's original home.
This montage shows various wrapper fragments found under the seat. They give some insight into the habits of the car's original owner. We already believe he was a smoker and the chewing tobacco, cigar wrapper and chewing gum wrappers reinforce this. It also looks like he enjoyed Jack Daniel's Tennesse Whiskey from the bottle label fragment. The chewing tobacco label says
Yours for Good Chewing. The product was made by the Liggett and Myers Tobacco Company. The cigar wrapper is for an El Roi-Tan cigar with the added line:
The cigar that breathes. The irony there is beyond words.
One of the two pens has embossed on the side:
Crowe-Gulde Cement Co Amarillo-Canyon-Hereford. Was this perhaps where the car's owner worked ?
