Lingafelter’s Tire Shop in 1921
My uncle by marriage, Eldon Leroy “Bud” Lingafelter, owned and operated Lingafelter’s Tire Shop in Aledo, Illinois, a small burg (pop. 3700) in western Illinois, about 15 miles east of the mighty Mississippi river. The tire shop was started by Bud’s father, Roy.The quality of this photograph, taken in 1921, indicates that a pro took the photo, probably Ernest T. Carlson who owned the Carlson Studio in Aledo.
Of interest in this photo is the manual jack on the left, and the lack of any power machinery for mounting new tires.
When I worked in the shop on my worn out cars in the mid ‘60s, the equipment was different, but the two windows on the north wall and the skylight were still there.
Lingafelter’s Tire Shop in 1939
My uncle, on the right, was a staunch Chrysler man. He is sitting on the bumper of his 1938 DeSoto. At one time The Gillette Safety Tire Company was one of the world’s largest supplier of OEM tires, and produced tires under the Gillette, Ward, Atlas, U.S. Rubber and U.S. Royal brands. In 1940, U.S. Rubber bought all outstanding shares of Gillette stock. Gillette tires are still manufactured to this day, probably by Michelin, who purchased U.S. Rubber/Uniroyal. He later sold Seiberling (Frank Seiberling co-founder of Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company in 1898, and later the Seiberling Rubber Company in 1921)) and after that Hercules which continues to produce tires to this day.
Uncle Bud was a fantastic mechanic and gave me a foundation for working on cars, as well as my first set of tools that I still have and use to this day. I can remember him laughing as I swore up a storm while underneath my 1960 Plymouth 318 trying to change its Y-pipe, a real bitch of a job. Lots of bloody scrapes and other lesions later, the pipe was exchanged. Luckily I will never have to do that job again.
1953 Jeep Pickup
In the mid ‘60s Bud outfitted his 1953 Jeep pickup with a Plymouth 318 and painted it School Bus yellow. He asked me to letter it as required by law. I went to the local five and dime, bought a crappy craft paint brush and a bottle of model car black enamel. Somehow the result wasn’t half bad. I was probably 15 years old at the time and didn’t know about One Shot enamels and camel hair brushes. But being dumb and young, I got the job done. Oh, and since we were so close to the Big Muddy, I chose Riverboat as my type style.
Lingafelter Tire Shop 1985
But time moves on. The Aledo National Bank bought my uncle’s shop and the Dodge dealer next door for its new banking complex. Uncle Bud then leased a space on Rte. 17 within walking distance from his house that had been a former Olds dealership. He didn’t do much tire business by then, about 1985, but I don’t think he really cared. The few times that I visited the “new” shop it was populated with old fogies drinking coffee and listening to the stock reports on Bud’s radio. Bud died in 1987.
Many times while working on my own cars I think, how would Uncle Bud have done this? I miss you Bud.
I enjoyed the story and the pictures. My very first job as a mechanic was at a Rent-a-Wreck franchise that was headquarted in what had been an old tire shop. It looked much the same inside, and I still had the old manual equipment to change tires with. A real bitch with radials though. Way down in the basement there were still some old tires wrapped in protective paper, and I found an old embossed metal/porcelain “goodyear tires” sign in the gap between that building and the one next door. It wasn’t a great place to work in retrospect, but I learned a lot of things about a lot of things in that old tire shop. Thanks for posting this.
Re-vulcanize these tires, post haste!
Cool story and pictures. The Willy’s pickup is awesome, especially with a Chrysler V8!!
Great story and old photos. My first professional mechanic gig was at a pseudo tire store in an old Toyota dealership. The boss kept a fair amount of new tires in stock but the bulk of our business was general repairs. None the less I mounted and balanced at least a set or two of tires per week. We had a bubble balancer and I got pretty good at it. When I started working at a service station, coincidentally one that was built for the owner of the tire store, one of the first things I did was put the tires from my car on the newly calibrated fancy balancer. All 4 showed up as perfectly balanced.
That Jeep is sweeet!
Thanks for posting this, it is a great story. I miss old-time shops like this. By the time I was dealing with car repairs in the 1970s, some of these old shops were still operating. That was usually my (teenage) method of telling whether a shop was any good – was it from the 1930s and with still a couple of guys from that era still working.
There was a place on old Route 30 east of Fort Wayne, nearly to the Ohio line, called the Zulu Garage. Those old guys could fix anything. My Dad used to take cars there to those old grease-covered guys who knew him by name. A new highway got built nearby and they lost their gas business, and closed by the early 80s.
Great story. Makes me wish I had an Uncle Bud.
I am not that mechanically inclined-what does “vulcanize” a tire mean?
Good article, btw
In tire repair, Vulcanization is a process of using uncured rubber to repair damage with the application of heat. The heat, and possibly sulfer or other elements, cures and hardens the newly added rubber. This is technique is commonly used on tractor and off-road equipment tires.
I worked at tow small gas stations with full service bays during high school, and learned how to change, fix and balance tires early on. One day I showed up to work, and the boss showed me a black tire mark on the ceiling: another worker had forgot to remove the locking hub on the tire changer when he inflated the tire. It finally let go, and the tire shot straight up, with the guy riding it about half way up before falling off. He was worse for wear, and he learned a lesson of the power of compressed air.
Like Jim, I used to make a point to find old time shops when I needed repairs when traveling.
I never worked at a tire shop, but my service station guy would let me use his equipment to mount and bubble-balance tires, and I got halfways good at it. This ended up saving me a good deal of time and money over the years.
Nowadays, probably due mostly to liability insurance, tire shop guys practically go into convulsions at the thought of a customer even entering the workspace.
I never did it my self, but there was a guy named Mack at a shop in Fort Wayne who was an artist on a bubble balancer. My 71 Scamp was one of those cars that was fussy about wheel balance. When Mack got done, the car was smooth as glass. I once went to a chain store for an early “computer balance” and the car vibrated like hell when they got done. I went back to Mack and it was smooth again. He was always careful to put half the weight on the front side of the wheel and half the weight on the back side.
There was one other place that could make the Scamper drive properly, a shop in Muncie Indiana that used an old fashioned wheel-on-the-car spin balancer.
“…a shop in Muncie Indiana that used an old fashioned wheel-on-the-car spin balancer.”
That’s what my Uncle used, and it seemed to do the trick. When my uncle sold a customer new tires, he wouldn’t balance them, but told them to come back in a couple of weeks, after the plies had gotten to know each other a bit better, and he would balance them then.
This reminds me of reading about a guy who found a place that would shave tires. Whenever he bought new tires, he drove about 60 miles to a place that would shave them. His theory was that no mass produced wheel or tire is perfectly round, and shaving them (on the wheel) will get you there. He swore by it. I have never tried to find such a place, but have never heard of it anywhere else. I have, however, had tire guys turn a hard-to-balance tire 180 degrees on a wheel in an attempt to eliminate “high spots”.
Tirerack shaves tires but not on the wheel, they do it for people who are autocrossing to take the squirm out or for modern AWD and elelctronc 4wd vehicles when one tire is damaged but the rest are too good to toss but have worn more than 2/32″.
Nowadays on new OE tires that mark the “high spot” and on OE wheels they mark the low spot. Here is some good reading on the subject of match mounting. Either for high vs low spots or heavy vs light spots. http://www.tirerack.com/tires/tiretech/techpage.jsp?techid=17¤tpage=11
One of the things that GM claimed about the original Cadillac Cimmaron was that all 4 tires got “trued” or shaved on the rim before they got put on the car.
Great idea, but what did you do when you installed a replacement set of tires?
Tube type tires were not that difficult to change without power equipment. The rims didnt have the safety “hump” that tubeless rims have. Ive changed pre ’68 VW tires with just motorcycle tire irons.
Aledo, Il. Rhubarb capital of Illinois. Not only is it 15 miles east of the Mighty Miss. it is also 15 miles south of it. I’ll have to go visit next summer. When I worked at a Texaco station in the mid 60s I changed and repaired a lot of tires on a manual machine, we had a bubble balancer too.
Nice article, Kevin. Aledo is not far from me, and a good friend works at the Mercer-Carnegie Library there. I haven’t been there in years, but remember they had a Ford-Mercury dealership. It closed a few years back, but another friend’s father (she lives in Joy, which makes Aledo look like New York City) used to order his Town Cars from there (probably late ’70s to late ’80s), even though they didn’t sell Lincolns.
Kevin, that’s a nice family story. I think most every town in America had a shop like your Uncle Bud’s, I remember at least 2 in my own hometown. They are gone now and with it too went a big piece of what made my hometown so special and personal……..great job on that lettering; no need to be so harsh on yourself!!!
Nice story. 38 Desoto? My Dad’s first car was a 38 Desoto.
Behold JackD in the Desoto around 1957, so this was a very old car already when this photo was taken.
Hello – I downloaded two of you pictures to be used on the New Boston Illinois Historical Society Facebook Page. I restored them a bit and added some text & a frame. I have attached them for you.
Thomas Melcher
Asheboro, NC
Here is the second image