History Anyone Else Hang Out in Junk Yards as a Kid?

It's sad, most kids today will never have the enjoyment of walking through a good yard. Insurance regs, zoning regs, environmental regs, and just the total lack of decent yards anymore have killed it. Closest things are the pull a part style yards, but they seldom have anything over 10-15 years old, and they are so sterile it's not the same. Those of us that enjoy doing our own work have a harder time to find good used parts than we did years ago. Even decent parts cars are hard to find. I looked for over a year for a tailgate for my OT 99 F150 flareside pickup before I found one two miles from me. None of the yards had one, they had plenty of wide bed gates, but the narrow bed gates were either gone or damaged like mine.

Heck, even the closest NAPA store to me closed down! It's for sale, buildings and merchandise and franchise, wish I could buy it. But I guess us do it yourself guys are about gone. People buy something now, it tears up, it goes to a shop or they trade it for something else, nobody fixes anything any more.

 

“I'm glad I'm not the only one who thought junk yards were magical. My Dad always drove cheap transportation cars and he usually shopped the bone yards for whatever he needed to keep them going. Growing up near LAX we mostly went east to Gardena (Broadway, Main St and Figueroa) to junk yard row.”

Hello,

Living in the Westside of Long Beach, with its access to the industrial tracts with a short bicycle ride away, gave us an outlet other than just playgrounds. Along Anaheim Street leading to Terminal Island/SanPedro and Santa Fe Avenue leading to the industrial harbor portion of Long Beach was just a place to go and be amazed. We knew the kids whose dads owned the scrap yards and it was a shoo-in. We just could not go to the area where the gas torch cutters were being used.

One of the larger yards had a car crusher and that was pretty amazing. But, it was the amount of cars that were brought into the yards every day. Of course, one of the games was to see which car was going to be our first high school car. That was fun and took most of the day walking around. When the wrecked car game was getting a little tiring, we just walked across the street to the Coca Cola Bottling Plant and they gave us free Cokes, just for stopping to see the machines at work in the long rolling tracks.

Jnaki

It was handy to have all of those scrapyards close by. But, the air quality, along with the daily dose of fiberglass spray fumes from the boat building industry did wonders to our afternoon senses. The consistent West Winds from the ocean and harbor areas blew right over this industrial area and gave the local homeowners a whiff of some “bad” stuff.

In high school, we knew the son of a scrap metal yard just down the street. That is where we got our steel plates for our 1940 Willys 671 SBC coupe build. The flat plates were cut down to size to fit in the trunk of the Impala as a courtesy service from my high school friend, at no charge. Talk about a lowered 58 Impala going back home a few blocks. Actually, it was slightly lowered in the back and had a very light steering effect.

It was as low as the dark colored 58 Impala on the far right of the Lion’s Drag Racing start line photo. Those steel plates were heavy which helped support the trunk area of the 671/SBC Willys Coupe and gave us enough weight to get into the C/Gas competition group.

 

You bet, Jack's, Scudder's, Wally's, all the good yards. Saw this calendar years ago and framed it up.
Great memories of me and the brother's.