My Dad was in the Army and we spent some time overseas. My grandparents would always send us the latest Sears catalog. Especially at Christmas times we would cut out the pages with the stuff we wanted for Christmas. After our last overseas assignment when we got back in the U.S. one of our first places to visit was the local Sears store. I went directly to the bicycle department where I took all my savings (not much to spend it on in Eritrea) and bought the fanciest bike I had seen in the catalog. As far as automotive stuff. My dad bought "reconstituted" oil for the '40 Plymouth he used or his daily driver (this was 1961). This oil was in glass bottles. As for Sears automotive stuff, remember that they sold cars. I remember the Sears Allstate car. As I remember it was basically a Henry Jay with no trunk lid. We also got all of the stuff for our go-kart, including engines among the our other go-kart needs.
They also sold Cushman motorcycles. From what I read they started off selling left over last year's models. But you could put it on a credit card and drive it home with no money. It soon put Cushman out of business. There's a house about 5 miles from here that was bought in a Sears catalog.
The ones we installed at the Sears Auto Center I worked were a medium blue metallic with red rocker covers no matter the make.
Man is my face red. I used to drool over the panties and lingerie sections. There were scooters and go karts in there too? Just kidding. I would have done anything for something with a gas engine besides a lawn mower. It's hard to imagine how far out of reach $129.00 was then.
gloster meteor. Brits used for home island defense. the pilots ran down v-1 buzz bombs with them. they would put a wing under the bomb's wing and roll hard, or upset the airflow to tip the bomb. that scrambled the gyro and caused it to crash. with 1800 lbs of explosives in nose, it was better to do this, then wade in with cannons.
alco PA. considered the best looking of the 1st gen "car body" diesels. (the design was similar to pass car bodies). A real pita to work on, esp with the wonky alco diesels. many roads retrofitted their Alco's with EMD 567, or scrapped when patience wore out.
prob a 4-8-2 mohawk. the goofy panels on front are smoke deflectors, or elephant ears. note the curve at the top of them. at speed, they were designed to help lift smoke up over boiler and out of the crew's eyes. Awesome run of photos for the last 10-20 pages. i haven't been doing likes, because i like pretty much everything on here.
Ahh yes, the Sears catalogue and christmas brings back memories ... Like the ones of never getting anything out of it no matter how I tried. If it wasn't for outside snow balls, mud, sand and used wooden popsicle sticks to run down the gutters when it rained ... I wouldn't of had any toys. Up until the age of 10 I use to have to run behind my friends that were lucky enough to have bicycles where ever they went if I wanted to go with them as they were usually nice enough not to go too fast. Took a beating out my worn out black Keds ... In the summer had to entertain myself on the curb until my neighborhood buddies got back from summer camp cause I couldn't ever afford to go .... yeah the memories.
The Jalopy Journal
