LEGENDARY COMMENTS BY GEORGE CHEVALLIER 5-21-16

Tires

Tires are something most people take for granted these days, but that wasn’t always the case. The first tires were solid rubber and very uncomfortable, but a dream compared to the iron rimmed wagon wheels they were used to riding on. Very shortly after cars came out they invented pneumatic tires. The only problem with them was they kept going flat. Cars were even sold with a tire repair kit. I heard one old-timer tell about the time he drove to Snow Hill and back to Salisbury one Sunday and changed seventeen flat tires. Cars today come with a tire jack to change to the spare tire that comes with the car. How many of them are kept in pristine condition in the trunk because they never get used? In the 1950’s, changing a tire was mandatory car knowledge for anyone driving a car. Tires in the 1950’s got maybe 10,000 miles, a far cry from the 80,000 the ones get today. Another thing you never see anymore is a retread. I used to get retreads put on a tire for $7.00 at General Tire on South Salisbury Boulevard. The only problem there was if the tire had a puncture in it, they wouldn’t retread it. Of course, if you got a puncture in a tubeless tire, you simply put a tube in it and were go to go. Some tires now are puncture proof and seal a puncture immediately. You can also get a can of that stuff that you shoot into the tire and then inflate it successfully. A lot of people just forget about ever getting another tire or getting the puncture fixed. I used to get punctures all the time down at Nanticoke from the nails they used to repair pallets. Usually, someone would tell me a tire was going flat and I had time to get it to the local gas station where they would put a plug in it. The plug was usually there when I finally got new tires.

I remember when I was growing up that if you “squealed” your tires, someone would ask you if you owned stock in Goodyear. The quality of the tires along with the way some kids drove would usually limit the life of the tires to about six months. When we finally got new tires, the old ones might have been bald, but the wide white walls were just like new, due to the Saturday afternoon scrubbing they received every week.

How you drive will usually determine if you get a flat or not. My father always told me to drive away from the curb because that is where all the junk goes that will give you a flat tire. I went with a girl once whose father told her to drive away from the center line to avoid a head-on collision and that made sense. It would even cause you to drive closer to the curb. Yes, she had a lot of flats.

So, we can drive on our radial tires and not have to worry about something that was a constant worry to our parents and grandparents.