Custom-o-rama-late 50s?
As you head north on Rte 94 out of Aledo, Illinois, you pass Henderson’s junkyard on the east side of the road. Bud Henderson was the local Ford and Mercury dealer. His advertising slogan was “Let’s Talk Turkey!” At some point, probably the early 1960s, he decided to start a junkyard.
Buicks, Fords and ?
The junkyard wasn’t like modern “salvage yards”, where makes are generally grouped together. Junkyards today generally rotate their stock on a regular basis and crush hulks that have had most of their goodness sucked out. Once you were at Henderson’s, you were going to be there for a long time. These photos were taken in 1978 and most of what you see had very little value left. Who needs a six-volt generator from a 1950 Buick?
I see a Studebaker and a lot of rust
But the junkyard did have its merits. When one of my uncle’s cars (always Chryslers) needed something like a generator, he would send me out to Henderson’s to extricate the part from whatever ’58 through ’60 hulk presented itself. I was always told to tell Rusty, or whatever the slack-jawed greaser who oversaw the place was named, that if the part worked, I would come back and pay him for it. You could do that in a town of 3000.
Pontiac, Chrysler, Chevy, Dodge
Henderson even had some extremely rusty cars from the 20s in here. They slowly were returning to their roots.
No wheels, no tires
I see a Hudson and a Pontiac, and trees
Henderson’s was also a source for rear leaf springs that my 1960 Plymouth chewed up on a regular basis. Dirt cheap.
Back to the future
Henderson’s didn’t have a sign or billboard to let the buying pubic know what was up. Just this very curious custom car that was probably built in the mid or late 50s. I went on to Google Satellite today to see if anything remained of the junkyard and it apparently is still there but devoted to equally junky earth moving equipment. If there are any cars left, they have been overtaken by the vegetation.
Thanks for the pictures! There is no doubt a fascinating story behind that place and some of the vehicles in there too, there always is. It’s really a shame that in another generation or two, there will be virtually no places like this left for our kids to marvel at. At least half of the junkyards in the greater Seattle area have disappeared over the past 20 years.
Just one mile and a half from me is a shuttered tractor trailer repair facility that overnight became the staging and storage area for thousands of cars flooded and ruined in Hurricane Sandy. In a story in Philly.Com, the mayor and town manager of Mansfield, NJ complained that the owners of the facility never came to them asking permission to use the area for this purpose. They warned of pending doom to the groundwater supply as thousands of cars could potentially leak their crankcases, radiators and fuel tanks onto the ground. They warned that nearby homeowners could be in jeopardy. Never mind that this was a commercial zoned enterprise prior to it’s closing. Never mind that adjacent to the property is NJ Interstate 295 lies on one side and the huge Burlington County Landfill on the other of this property. That for me, is the difference between the good folks in the Midwest and the NIMBY crybabies here in my Soviet Socialist State of New Jersey. In the pictures taken by Kevin, I wonder how in the world could the folks have tolerated those old cars out there like that? And to think of those cows nearby, innocently munching on the grass that surely must have been so contaminated with heavy metals and oils (insert sarcasm smiliey here!)
Great shots of an era that is becoming a bygone memory in my home state. Oh, in that local newspaper article, a photo of the scrapped cars (waiting to be re-titled and released to the public, by the way) shows a lovely first gen Corvair Monza Convertible, maroon in color, sitting in the foreground. That for me is the greatest classic car crime of Sandy; the failure of folks to allow an unknown number classics to be destroyed in the flood waters while enough warning was posted to get out….
The other crime waiting to unfold is the release of thousands of flood damaged cars, with the cars and their parts potentially going to an unknowing public…..
Enclosed is a link to the article and a shot of that lonely Monza: http://articles.philly.com/2013-02-07/news/36952171_1_vanco-vehicles-car-carriers
It is a shame these old salvage yards are quickly disappearing. The cars in these yards are sisters to cars people are still using for fun and these are the only source for factory sheet metal, trim, etc. Fast-forward twenty years or so and the guy fixing up the ’00 Impala won’t be able to find anything as its sisters would sit in the bone yard for 90 days and get crushed.
The first article I sent Paul (never able to be published due to my ultra-low quality pictures) was about an auction I attended in 2005. A man had been acquiring and holding on to complete cars for 40 years. He had stuff dating back to 1918. The reason he was able to be so successful (his wife told me when I went to visit them prior to the auction she quit counting at 1500 cars) was he lived in a profoundly rural area.
Oh, by the way, his cattle grazed in the midst of the cars; they were some of the best looking cattle around.
Already happened here I have a once popular car and it took ages to find another to wreck for parts, When I was a kid there were Hillmans everywhere now none anywhere too many are now rebar
For many years, the majority of farms in southwestern Wisconsin had a miniature version of the old car junkyard in a back pasture somewhere. When your car shuffled off the mortal coil, you hooked it up to a tractor and dragged it out to the boneyard, where it shared space with it’s predecessors and maybe some old piece of horse-drawn farm equipment. I knew a guy who had about a dozen Volkswagen Beetles in various states of (dis)repair scattered around his farm, along with a Nash Metropolitan and a whole horde of Hodaka dirt bikes (Combat Wombat, anyone?)
Our family junkpile held an Electra 225 that my Dad grenaded while drag racing, an old Ford pick-up and some kind of old coupe from the forties that had rusted away to the point of being unidentifiable along with an old manure spreader, a hay rake and some other farm implements.
Contrary to what the enviro-tools might think, these automotive necropolises became ecosystems in their own rights. Rabbit hunting is always really good around a pile of old cars, birds pull stuffing from eroded seats for nest lining material and I’ve even seen grouse perched on the seemingly mile-long hood of the old 225 and enjoying the sunshine.
When my grandmother sold the farm the buyer had The Dump (as we called it) cleaned out. Our family’s gently rusting automotive heritage got loaded up and shipped off to whatever Gehenna awaits old cars that have outlived their odometers.
Richard,
I actually worked with a company whose director of purchasing was Richard Head. If you called and asked for “Dick” his secretary would say, “He prefers Richard”. I would have preferred John, or George, or even Julio.
Maybe even Sue.
The flipside of these “ecosystems” is when the family junk pile gets out of control. While it can be wonderful to find that last missing part for your ’63 Studebaker GT Hawk, hoarding is another matter: http://tetanusburger.blogspot.com. (And, lest you think me heartless for old iron, I have a large soft spot for Saabs, as well as Studebakers.)
Wow.
Almost eighty cars in one private junkyard? That seems a bit…neurotic. Our family didn’t have the money to own that many cars, so we would have had to use The Dump for a thousand years for it to get that bad.
Here’s a shot of my “yard” in its heyday via Google Maps. I circled my vehicles. The rest belongs to the property owner. The arrow points to my white cargo van which survived & sits 600 miles away in my driveway..
OK, Junqueboi wins. I’m not sure what or why, but anyone whose private collection of cars can be recorded by Google Earth deserves to win something, maybe some private time in a padded room.
You’d be surprised how easy it is to accumulate vehicles. It only took probably seven years and a tow truck to accumulate over 200 cars in my “ex-junkyard” while working an unrelated full-time job.
Calling in the mobile crusher was one of the toughest decisions I made but it had to be done since I moved out of state. 90 cars bit the dust in one weekend and about half of them still ran. From an enthusiast’s point of view it was sickening…but in retrospect, they were actually quite a good investment and I was amazed how much money they brought.
In retrospect, I was a fool to accumulate it all on land I didn’t even own but it is what it is. I couldn’t bear to crush all of them and currently there are still over 50 cars still down there in a custody battle between their owner(me) and the property owner.
This is a shot of the pile about halfway through. Many vehicles were driven to the death pile and a borrowed backhoe moved the rest there. Ugh.
Sixth picture down, that white four door sedan is a sharknose Graham.
He is correct in the Hudson label. Remember the Graham had those unique headlights that contributed to its earned moniker. Plus, if memory serves, the Graham’s nose was slightly shorter. Where else on the net would we even have this discussion? Too cool.
My first thought when I saw the custom car at the top was…it’s the Homer!!!. It reminds me of the car that Homer Simpson’s half-brother Herb built and named for him (with Homer’s design input, naturally) and which caused his company to go under.
I think that custom might have been based on a pickup chassis–look at the angle of the steering column and that gigantic steering wheel!
You inspire me, Kevin. I might just have to drive down to Aledo and see what’s left–I am only about a half-hour away.
I think I spotted LeCorbusier’s car in that amalgam:
My grandfather originally built the red car. His name was frank young. The cars name was the glamor buggy. It was fashioned after flash Gordon’s sled. He fell on hard times in the sixties and sold it.
The red car on the car hauler in front of the yard.
Hi Kevin- can you tell us anything more about the car your grandfather built? Do you have any pics or details of the construction? Please share! Thank you!