By Gregory Clark, June 19, 1926.

Friday, 3 P.M. – This being the second pause in our journey, and Willie having definitely disappeared over the horizon in search of a mechanic, Madge and I find nothing better to do than keep a diary of this motor trip. The first ten miles of a trip exhausts all topics of conversation. Madge and I are tired of exclaiming every time we see a sow with a litter of piglets. So now we will keep a diary.

Madge and Willie invited me to accompany them on a week-end tour of Northwestern Ontario. Because I had once bought a second-hand car, Willie thought I would be valuable member of the tour.

Our first pause occurred just outside the city limits. Bowling along in that high spirit in which all motor trips begin, we were suddenly conscious of a decided thudding feeling which caused all the second-hand windows of the second-hand sedan to clatter. Willie glanced around in dismay.

“It’s that tire!”

“What tire?” we cried.

“That tire I have been suspicious of!”

We drew in to the roadside, where the off-sounding tire was discovered to be flat.

“I think there is only one thing in the world more horrid to look at,” said Madge, “than a flat tire.”

“What’s that?” we asked her, rolling up our sleeves and commencing to unload all the stuff out of the back to get at the tools.

“Two flat tires,” said Madge.

After removing everything from the car in order to get at the tools, we then had to move the car about to get the flat tire over a solid bit of turf so the jack would stand up. It was only a matter of minutes until we had the spare on and the soft one on the rear.

“Leave the tools out where they will be handy,” said Madge.

“No, no!” exclaimed Willie. “That would be courting trouble.”

We concealed them all under the back seat and repacked everything on top again.

This pause, the second, some thirty miles forward on our tour of northwestern Ontario, is due to some mysterious trouble which Willie says is either in the carburetor or the main bearing. The trouble manifests itself in the engine simply moving. Willie and I have examined everything in between the front bumper and the rear bumper and are at a loss. So he has gone looking for a mechanic while I stay to guard Madge and the car. I am now going to unload cargo so that tools may be got at.

3.45 p.m. Willie returns with a young farm lad in blue overalls and red hair.

“He isn’t a mechanic, but he drives a tractor made by the same people who made this car,” explains Willie. The young man looks earnest, and selects a hammer from the tools I have spread out on the grass.

“Does she cough at all?” asks the young man.

“No. She won’t answer the starter,” we say.

“You got gas, have you?”

“Oodles.”

“Well, let me look at her.”

Autocratic Big Cars

He bends lankily into the engine, rattles this and pulls that and hits the cylinder casing two whacks with the hammer.

“What’s that for?” asks Madge, as he swipes the rusty iron with the hammer.

“Oh, I always hit my tractor like that and I don’t know what it does, but it helps.”

“I think it’s in the carburetor,” says Willie sternly.

“Try her now,” says the young man.

Willie steps on her and way she goes, with a loud belch of blue and dirty smoke out of her exhaust.

“Something lodged in her windpipe!” yelled the young man, above the roar. So we put all the stuff back, the tools under the seat again and drive the young man back to his tractor.

4.15 p.m. Willie cries: “Look at that litter,” at some immense sow and her family.

4.16. Madge screams: “Lilacs! Oh, don’t you love lilacs! I’d love to live in the country just for the lilacs.”

“There’s pigs in the country, too,” I cry above the rush of the car. Madge favors me with the look of a wounded maiden.

4.25. Going up a slight incline, car labors heavily.  Wille mutters, but we can’t hear what he says.

5.05. Pass a large car.

5.06. Large car passes us.

5.07. Pass a large car.

5.08. Large car passes us.

5.09. Pass a large car. “Eight cylinders!” yells Willie, as we sail by.

5.10. Large car passes us, slows up and stops obliquely across the narrow highway. We stop. A savage looking young man steps out and walks back.

“What are you trying to do?” he demands.

“How do you mean?” asks Willie.

“Tearing past me like that and then slowing down in front of me?”

“Slowing down? I wasn’t slowing down.”

“Listen, fella, said the golfy locking young man, “anything that passes me has got to get its dust out of my face darn quick or it doesn’t stay past me. I am going to hit forty miles an hour all day. Are you?”

“Yes,” says Willie. “But go on.”

5.13. Large car disappears in the distance in a cloud of dust that settles before we reach it.

“These big cars make me sick,” says Madge.

5.16. Car develops a peculiar erratic motion.

5.17. Car stops. Traffic being thicker, Willie runs wheel off on to the turf. We can hear engine gurgling. With glove on. I unscrew radiator cap. It blows off violently and we never see it again. It may have come down.

“Shall I shift the cargo?” asks Madge.

“This is not a job for tools,” says Willie. “I think we have burnt out a bearing.

Cars go whizzing by. We dispose ourselves on the grass.

“Pick out,” say I, “the rockiest looking flivver that goes by. The man driving such a flivver generally knows all about flivvers. He has to to make his go.”

A very rusty one comes panting along. Its rear end sagging, steam blowing from its radiator. The driver, a man with a rakish mustache and firm grip on the wheel, slows when he sees us and regards us with an expectant eye.

“Need help?” he shouts, eagerly, stopping.

“Thanks, we do,” said Willie. Sorry to bother you”

“It’s no bother. Glad to help. Boiling, eh?”

“She’s hot, all right.”

Automaniac Helps Out

He lifts the hood and stares shrewdly at the engine, sniffs, listens, touches the cylinders.

“An engine,” he remarks, “should be hot to perform its best. But not this hot.”

“Yes, she’s hot all right.”

We gather around. Madge is piling out the cargo to get at the tools.

“Well, let’s see about the spark,” says the mustache. “Mixture too thin, maybe, or maybe too thick. Step on her, will you?”

Willie steps on her. She snorts and gaggles and coughs and has a series of hemorrhages. The Samaritan turns the mixture down, and the engine stops. When it gets going again he turns the mixture up, and the engine stops.

“H’m!” says he. “You’ve got plenty of oil, have you?”

“Oh, yes.”

“You haven’t got too much, have you?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Well, we’ll have to see what’s wrong with this thing.”

And suddenly the shabby Samaritan becomes furiously busy. He seizes tools right and left and begins turning, unscrewing, removing, lifting, setting aside. His hands become plastered with grease and oil. He stands on top of the engine and crawls underneath the car. In his eye is a joyous light. His teeth are bared in an ecstasy of effort. He removes, if I remember my automotive geography, the exhaust pipe and gets at the cylinder heads. From his own car he fetches weird and huge tools of all sorts. He disconnects the line and disassembles the carburetor. Parts of our car are strewn all over the running boards and on the grass.

Idraw Willie aside. “I think we are in the hands of an automaniac. This fellow is one of those bugs who glory in taking a car to pieces. He may be dangerous. Look at the thing to drives himself.”

“You said to pick the worst looking wreck of a car that passed.”

“But not so bad as his, man!”

“What will we do? We can’t ask him to leave it now. It’s all apart.”

We go back and watch the Samaritan. He is grunting, his teeth bared, wrenching and tearing. He is covered with grime and grease.

“We had no idea you would do all this work. It is too bad to…”

“It’s a pleasure, I assure you,” said he, diving under the car and emerging with a huge, dirty segment of iron. “I think I have the trouble now. Your car will run like a clock from now on, or I am mistaken.”

Slowly, like a man stringing out a pleasant meal as long as possible, he begins to put the car together again. Each nut, each bolt and segment goes back into place with a sigh. Madge has fallen asleep on the grass. Slower and slower goes the business of assembling the car. At last all is in place but one large bolt. He tries it several places. There is no room for it. Not a hole can be found.

“Well, I never saw one of these before,” says the Samaritan, studying it with amazement. “What model is this car?”

“1925,” says Willie.

“Ah, then this is a bolt they don’t use in earlier models. It has got me beat.”

“But my gracious, we’ve got to get it in somewhere,” says Willie, getting angry.

“All right!” cries the Samarian enthusiastically. And he seizes the tools with renewed gusto and starts tearing her down again. Willie and I get down and watch for holes.

Out on the grass come all the pieces once more, darkness approaching. Thousands of cars have tooted and hooted at us in passing. We find no hole. We hang the bolt in likely looking places, we feel about in dark crannies. But however slowly we assemble again, accompanied by the delicious grunts and sighs of the Samaritan, we have the bolt left over at the end. We sit on the road and stare at it.

“The speedometer reads sixty-seven miles,” calls Marge from above. “And we were going to be in Owen Sound tonight.”

“Well,” says the Samaritan, now almost covered with slime and grit, “try her anyway.”

Willie gets in and starts on the starter. The engine bursts into song, clear, regular, like a young thing fresh from the paint shop.

“Drive her slow to the next garage and they will know where this bolt fits,” says the Samaritan.

He will accept no money. Not even a dollar. We heap thanks upon him. The car has never run like this before, even if a bolt is to spare. We crank his junk heap for him and wave him on his way.

8.55 – We arrive at a garage.

“We took our car apart,” says Willie to the garage man, “and when putting it together wo had this bolt left over.”

“What make is your car?”

“Flivver,” says Willie.

“This is a Rolls-Royce bolt,” says the garage man. “You must have picked it up off the road.”

2.25 a.m. Saturday – I woke up with Willie prodding me.

“Owen Sound,” he says. “Take Madge in and register while I put the car away.”

Saturday, 9am – Away we go on the second lap of our tour of northwestern Ontario.

9.35 – “Look there!” yells Willie. “How’s that for a family?”

Another litter of pigs.

9.40 – Madge screams at a hedge of lilacs. We all look.

9.50 – Flat tire. No pigs or lilacs in sight.

10.20 – “That,” shouts Willie, “is the biggest litter I ever saw in my life. There must be thirteen!”

Another litter of pigs.

10.25 – Sure enough, we pass a farmhouse, almost hidden with lilacs.

“OOOOh!” screams Madge. “There’s where I could spend my old age.”

On the far side of the house appear two sows, each followed by litters of dancing little pigs.

“Aaaah!” cries Willie. “That’s what you call hog raising.”

10.50 – Flat tire. We can hear pigs mooing in the distance and there is the perfume of Iliacs stealing on the air.

11.30 – Hit a bump and crack front springs. We would fix it up with a block of wood if we could find a block of wood. So we go bumpety-bump along, a village showing nine miles ahead on the map.

12.20 – Arrive at village, but no garage, only a gas pump and the man who runs it didn’t know that flivvers had springs. We find a block of wood.

1.40 – Arrive, somewhat shaken, at Wasaga Beach, where the garage has no front springs, but plenty of back springs. The man will do a repair job with a block of wood that will carry us home.

3.20 – We leave for home. Madge says she has seen all of northwestern Ontario. It is a great hog-raising country.

3.22 – Flat tire. Fortunately, we had our spare mended at the Beach.

3.32 – Flat tire again. Have to mend the tube. Not half the fun shifting a spare is.

4.15 – Raining. Flat tire. Block of wood is slipping. Barrie only seven miles way. Madge wonders if any trains to Toronto run soon. Passed several lilac bushes and Madge didn’t look at them.

5.05 – Block of wood slipped. Barrie in sight. Madge can bear trains whistling.

“Look!” yells Willie. “My gracious, there must be fifteen in that litter…”

7.30 – Madge and I are sitting on the Barrie station platform and Willie has gone on with the car.

“Next week-end,” says Bill, in parting, will do the eastern tour. Peterboro, Brockville, Kingston.”

We wave him cheerily on.

Madge and I sit on the station platform.

“There is something,” says Madge, “about a train that thrills me. I can’t see one go by without getting the most homesick feeling of wanting to be on it.”

A freight comes huffing past.

It is all cattle cars.

The cars are filled with pigs.

Editor’s Notes: Cars were fairly unreliable in the early days, but people loved them just the same. It is accurate that people had to have certain mechanical skills to operate a car back then. Flat tires were much more common than now, though not nearly as common in the story.

A Flivver was slang for an old or cheap car. An automanic was as described in the story, a person who loved working on cars.