Recycled Audio (Part 1)

One of my favorite places to visit with my dad when I was growing up was Lems Auto Recyclers in nearby Doon, Iowa. Dad would go to Lems if he needed snow tires or if he wanted to replace a broken mirror. 

You would walk into the office, tell the man behind the counter what you were looking for, and then someone else would either go into an adjacent building or out into the yard to see if they had what you wanted. This was before they had computers, so I would have time to wander around the garages and between the rows of wrecked cars. Inside, the garages reeked of cigarette smoke, oil, and gas. The country music leaking out of an old radio was inaudible over the cacophony of clanking metal, power tools, and men swearing. So cool. 

Before I was old enough to drive, I took a few trips to Lems with my friends on our ten-speed bikes. Most of the time you could travel the eight miles and only encounter a few cars.

Allowing kids to run around an auto yard unsupervised would never fly today, but this was the '80s. Times were different. We jumped from car roof to car roof to car roof, and no one said boo.  

I vividly remember sitting in a rolled '70s Monte Carlo SS that had no doors or a hood. There were keys in the ignition, and the dirty 350 engine looked solid. Curious, we moved a car battery from a Ford that had been rear-ended into the Monte Carlo, and the engine slowly turned over until it roared to life. We drove it 50 yards before a guy in a skidloader cut us off. "What in the hell do you think you doing?" he yelled. 

I was sure we had gone too far this time. We nervously jumped out of the Monte, and I explained what we had done. He took a long look at the car and then turned to us with a grin, "I didn't know that motor ran. Hell, the tranny might be good, too. Put it over by the gravel hill, and I get it across the street later to look at it." We drove it over there and that was that.

When I could drive myself to Lems, it was usually to get another tape player for my car. Cassettes ruled at that time, and I had learned that quality contol was pretty low for affordable, aftermarket car audio. It wasn't long before the tape players would either break or start "eating" all of your cassette tapes. It was cheaper to get a used stereo from a wrecked car than it was to get your current player repaired.  

I had figured out that the cheapest tape players were usually the most reliable by the time I was in college. The less functions the stereo had, the less there was to break. A garden-variety Kraco tape player like this one cost about $15 at Lems and would usually last for a year or two.

There was only a fast-forward button. To rewind the tape, you had to eject it, flip it over, insert it, and then press fast-forward. That was a hassle, but it worked. I'm not sure why you would need a "muting" button next to the volume knob, though.

I'm thankful for modern stereos, but I still have a soft spot for for bare-bones equipment that works well.