The Wrecking Yard Story

1961

A True Story

Written 4/2013* 1248 Words*

#172 By Howard Yasgar

This is a short story about two friends that had the opportunity to go into the auto wrecking business and what happened to them.

In 1961 Tommy Letis and I were the best of friends,

I was 22 years old and had just graduated from New Haven College, and Tommy was 25, and he was running his own dump truck business in Foxon Connecticut.

One day Tommy called me, and he said he had heard a rumor that there was a small auto wrecking yard for sale on Middletown Avenue, in North Haven Connecticut.

Tommy and I decided to look at the place.

We found that the wrecking yard was very small, it was set back about 100 feet from the main road, and it was about 300 feet wide and perhaps 2000 feet deep.

There was a metal front gate and inside there was a small wooden shack that they used as an office.

As Tommy and I walked into the yard there were two fellows standing on the tiny office stairs.

They looked like a couple of comic book characters; one was tall and skinny and the other short and fat.

They told us that we needed to talk to their father, as he owned the yard.

Looking at these two characters, it was easy to see why their father wanted to sell the wrecking yard.

The next day Tommy and I met their father, and he said he would sell us the entire wrecking yard for $35,000.00, which was a considerable amount of money at the time.

We said we wanted to buy it, but we needed to have our attorney look things over first.

The owner agreed to wait, because he said he knew the local attorney we were going to use.

Since we were going to buy the place, we asked if we could start operating it.

They said yes, and they said we could start using their “Junk Yard” license plates, which meant we could start buying and scrapping cars.

We immediately went down the street and in another junk yard we found and bought a 1948 Ford cab-over old Coca-Cola truck with an old 1920’s style antique, hand operated winch someone had installed on the back.

We got the truck running and drove it to Tommy’s house where he had a welding machine.

Using pieces of scrap metal out of Tommy’s junk pile, I fabricated a rig so our old Ford truck could now pick up and haul junk cars.

Tommy said he knew a fellow that would cut up the cars for us, so that night we drove to New Haven and hired a guy to cut up cars for us, for $2.00 each.

Next, we hired a fellow named Butch, he was a friend of Tommy’s who was built like a weightlifter, his job would be to tow into the junk yard any cars Tommy and I bought, we had agreed to give Butch $2.50 for each car he picked up and towed into the junkyard for us.

Every day, in the afternoon when Tommy finished work, we drove around all the rural back roads of North Haven Connecticut, we bought all the old cars that were sitting in people’s backyards.

Tommy and I were having a good time buying junk cars, it seemed like everyone in North Haven had an old car in their backyard they wanted to get rid of.

Butch started hauling the cars in and our torch man started cutting them up.

I kept myself busy piling up tires, and batteries, and then cleaning up radiators to sell for copper scrap.

Every night after work Tommy would come to the yard with his ten-wheeler dump truck and we would fill it with scrap steel, which he took to the scrap yard and sold every morning.

Only a few days had passed and already we were rocking and rolling with lots of business.

In only a few days, Tommy and I had bought more cars than Butch could haul in, and our torch man was cutting up at least five cars every day.

We had cash coming in as tommy sold the scrap steel, and I sold the copper radiators, and the batteries and the tires.

But then we had two major problems.

The first problem was the car bodies; they were piling up in the rear of the yard.

Each unburned body would bring $5.00 from the scrap metal yard, and it was hardly worth Tommy’s time to haul them there.

However, the scrap yard told us that if we were able to burn them, they could bring us as much as $10.00 each, but we knew that it was illegal for us to burn cars in North Haven.

The second problem was with the yard wrecking owner; he wanted his $35,000.00

We needed to solve both these problems, so we made an appointment with our attorney.

That evening, before we went home, Tommy and I were in the wrecking yard discussing what we were going to do about unburned car bodies.

I think Tommy and I both had the same idea at the same time.

Tommy was smoking a tiny cigar, and he placed it in one of the cars seats, and we both went home.

That evening Tommy called me; he said all night he could hear the fire engines at the wrecking yard.

In the morning, when I went to the yard, I found all the car bodies were burned perfectly.

As I stood there looking at the burnt cars, I saw a red car pulling up by the front gate, it was the Fire Marshal, and he was motioning me to come over.

He said, “You listen to me Buster, the next time you set a car on fire, I’m putting you and your fucking buddy Tommy in jail”.

Later in the day our attorney called, and we went to see him.

He said, “My advice to you is, don’t buy the wrecking yard, the property has been condemned by the state.

He said that a new highway was going to cut the property in half”

I asked the attorney if the owner of the wrecking yard knew all this when he offered us the yard for $35,000.00.

“Of course, he knew he’s a dishonest guy and he was trying to take advantage of you”.

So ended our 1961 auto wrecking yard venture in North Haven.

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