Working at the Phoenix Auto Supply in the 1940s, Phoenix, Arizona


Today I'd like to time-travel back to Phoenix in the 1940s, and work at the Phoenix Auto Supply machine shop. And yes, this is just a journey of imagination, I wasn't alive in the 1940s, and I sure wouldn't know the first thing about working in a machine shop. But I thought it would be fun to look around.


For this story, I'm a young veteran of World War II. I'm working on something, not exactly sure what I'm doing - if you know can you tell me? Maybe I'm adjusting some muffler bearings? That's you in the background. At least you get to sit down! Maybe you're the boss?


By the way, the Phoenix Auto Supply was at 3rd Avenue and Van Buren, not far from the place called "the Van Buren" is today. You can read the numbers backwards in the window there. The building across the street, with the bicycles, is Firestone. Gas is seventeen cents a gallon. Not bad!


This building is long-gone, and is just a parking lot now, but imagine how cool it would be to look at what would be on those shelves, a lot of NOS parts!

Sorry, I tend to wander off. That's always been a failing of mine, I wander away, but it seems to me that this was supposed to be about a young man working in the machine shop area of the Phoenix Auto Supply in the 1940s. Here, I'll zoom in some more on the workbench.


I really have no idea what he's working on, but look at those cool old tools! I've never worked in a place like this, but I've hung around them a lot, and I can imagine the feeling of it, the sounds, and the smells, which brings back fond memories of the cars I've owned, which always broke down. My best guess about a place like this is that they took cores and rebuilt them. I wonder if they do that anymore?

It really is hard to imagine myself as someone like this - he'd be as tough as nails, and would do this kind of work all day, with no air conditioning just maybe a swamp cooler, and probably never checking Google to see how to do stuff.





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