Where the Rubber Meets the Road

I was born a couple years after peak tail fin. Oh, those 59 Cadillacs! You’d see them on the road quite often for many years, all the way up until gas prices shot through the roof, and nobody wanted to fill those big tanks any more. Style hadn’t died yet, but it was on its way out, a traffic fatality brought on by a lethal combination of safety regulations, cheaper materials, and apathy. Except for a dwindling number of hold-outs, cars are no longer rolling art objects. But like the horses they replaced, our vehicles still need to get shoe’d now and then. And when they do, we’ve got tire shops scattered around town, sometimes where we least expect them. They used to wrap tires in paper and stack them so the whitewalls didn’t get dirty. Nobody but specialty shops carry whitewalls or redwalls any more. Used to be you could get fat whitewalls or skinny whitewalls, even super thin double or triple whitewalls. They’ve been gone so long, they’ll never come back. Now they just stack those blackwall tires straight up to the sky like skyscrapers. But boy do they smell good. Especially when it’s both tires and gasoline, and a 59 Cadillac stretching out on a two-lane highway just past the edge of the horizon.