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.





If you like pictures of old-time Phoenix, please become a member of History Adventuring on Patreon. I share a LOT of cool old photos there, copyright-free, with no advertising. If you like Phoenix history and would like to help support my efforts to preserve and share precious digital historic images, please consider becoming a patron. Thank you!

Become a Patron!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why cars in the future won't need stop signs, red lights, or stripes on the road

Image
Time-travel with me into the future. Where we're going, we'll still need roads, but our cars won't need the kind of stuff that human drivers need, like stop signs, or stuff painted on the road. And if you're already panicking that computers will take over, don't worry, they already have. The fact that you're reading this right now combines so much amazing computing power that it would have been unthinkable to anyone in the 1960s, or '70s, when I was a kid. Speaking of being in the geriatric age group, if you're like me or older, you took a lot of pride in knowing the rules of the road, such as what to do at a stop sign if four cars approach at the same time, the difference between a "yield" sign and a "merge" sign, or maybe how to parallel park. But calm down there old-timer, that type of knowledge will just be as quaint as how to use a horse and buggy is nowadays. Sorry! The best way to picture how traffic will flow in the future is ...
Read more

Watching a neighborhood grow and change in Phoenix, Arizona

Image
I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the...
Read more

Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?

Image
As someone who has been interested in history since I was a little kid, I've always asked the most childish questions, and quite often never got an answer. As a kid, I was told to run along and play, and don't bother the grownups, so I set my questions aside to work on when I myself became a grownup. But some questions I really haven't found a satisfactory answer for, and get thrown away as I find myself learning the more important stuff. I now understand the grownups, but the kid in me still has childish questions like "Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?" The first question to ask is whether a particular style (whether hair, clothing, etc.) was in style at the time. The moustache was, and you can Google a photo of Charlie Chaplin, who wore the same style of moustache at the time, and quite stylishly. The wide lapels were in style in the 1930s, as was were the tall shirt collars and small ties. But the haircut wasn't - it's just awful. Me...
Read more