photo #5442188

Back about a hundred years ago, when Grandpa and Grandma bought a house in the town once known in F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" as "the valley of ashes" (Corona, Queens, NY), the property included a large enough back yard that in it, Grandpa could build a huge, 4-car garage. This structure was a dimly lit lair which, in the present day, might be called a "man-cave." Nothing against the ladies, mind you, but this place reeked of oil, kerosene, grease and wet-rotted wood, and there were even a few (gasp!) girly pin-ups. Oh yes, this was most definitely the exclusive domain of the XY chromosome..Upon a battered old desk in one corner sat an equally battered kerosene tail-lamp from some nameless horseless carriage and an old cathedral radio which worked astonishingly well. Instead of playing dramas like "The Lone Ranger," "The Shadow" and "War of the Worlds," it very incongruously played, "At the Hop," "Earth Angel" and "Jailhouse Rock." Nevertheless, the décor was a bedraggled mix of Industrial Revolution and "Early Depression," and the countless license plates nailed to the bare-wood walls testified of the establishment's advanced age..One of the neatest things about the garage was the grease pit in the floor. Grandpa, Dad and I would remove our watches and rings, lift out the protective wooden planks and descend into that dank, damp pit—the holy of holies—where beer-swilling, sweat-stinking MEN farted shamelessly, said very bad words and got black grime irrevocably implanted beneath their fingernails as they worked on oil-dripping, rust-flaking geriatric automobiles. Suffice it to say, we didn't eat quiche..Anyway, since the tarnish-tinged teens of the Brass-Era, the rumbleseat roadsters of the Roaring-Twenties, on up through the towering tailfins of the fabulous-fifties, that pit was used quite a lot and all kinds of car repairs got done down there, including welding. We didn't worry about poisonous or flammable vapors and we certainly spilled a few pints of gasoline, but nothing bad ever happened. I dunno; maybe it wasn't actually dangerous or maybe we were simply lucky enough to get away with it. I recall discussing the subject of safety only once and only very briefly: That was the time I asked Grandpa why he had built that concrete pit instead of installing some kind of lift. His reply was, "Did you ever hear of a car crushing a man because it fell off the ground?"