Another One Gone

I drove through Jeffers Gardens this afternoon and was surprised to see the clean-up going on around the Junk Yard. Being of little mechanical ability it wasn't a place I frequented, though I had been in the dirty little office once with I can't recall whom; either it was my brother or my father-in-law.

There were three junk yard around my home town, though every service station mucked about in small time junkery behind their shops, real junk yards always seemed to have eight foot wooden or metal fences around them. I suppose the fences were meant to make things a little more sightly, but it was still easy to seemthrough ot over them.

I remember the one in Suffern, NY, the town to our North. It was on a back street in a quasi residential neighborhood. I remember they had a wooden cart and they used draft horses to make their rounds picking up scrap. There was a row of tin cans strung together over the cart and the cans would ring out as the cart came down the road. I'm suret that junk yard is now long gone and is now a housing development.

Then in Ramsey, the town to the South the was a guy named Sam Edwards. He and his wife, Connie lived in a small building that was attached to his junk yard office and shop. There was a tall wooden fence surrounding the two acres of heaped cars in their yard. Sam sold the land when I was in my early teens. A bank was built where his junk yard was.

The final junker I remember was always know as John the Tramp. He had a small junk yard behind his service station. It too had a big fence around it. I recall seeing all the oil stained dirt everywhere in his yard. As I recall the town make him get rid of the junk yard and he did and sold his business as well and started another junk yard about 20 miles to the North. The last I heard his son had taken over the business and I don't know the status at present.

Junk yards are full of memories of vehicles that people would probably prefer to forget. There is a vast hopelessness in Junk yards, yet if you are looking for that special part that is no longer produced, a junk yard simply becomes a destination of hope.