Somewhere I bumped into a link for all 137 years of back issues of Popular Science. The browser system is pretty lame yet, they claim they are going to fix it. But, they all seem to be there if you can find them in the mess. Google cooperated to bring the back issues for free.

http://www.popsci.com/archives

I put this in a follow-up posting, in case this URL is one of those which dumps postings with more than one link.

While looking at the Popular Science archives, I bumped into the tales of Gus and The Model Garage. That has been a long time, and I had forgotten them. Gus is the master mechanic who solves all sorts of car problems. The series was allegedly based on a real garage somewhere in NY state.

I Googled and found a URL which provides all the Gus tales on one convenient URL, from 1925 till 1969.

If anyone is interested:

http://www.gus-stories.org/

Good memory, thanks for sharing.

I am somewhat aggressively reading through. I am up to 1940, heh, heh.

Interesting how things were. People bought 50 gallon drums of oil for their car well into the 30's, according to tales told there. And, to go a hundred miles in the 20's without a flat is considered good. The tires were almost like bicycle tires.

And, in the late 20's and early 30's, there were people who put kerosene in their radiators in the winter. Or alcohol and had to top it off as it boiled out. For a while, Gus recommended a mixture of glycerine, but then glycol takes over.

Daily in many cases people needed to top off the oil or water.

And, Gus teaches them to take off the muffler once in a while to knock out the crud.

In the 1940 issue I just read he states they have learned that some motors produce varnish and get all clogged up, and they really don't yet know what causes it, except it is believed it is the oil some use.

Boy, my Toyota would have been famous back then!

To be honest, I get a bit sentimental mushy over articles like this due to the simpler times that people lived in and where sincere customer service actually existed all over the place. Granted, there are weasels and headaches everywhere and in every generation but my feeling it was not as bad then as now.

Everything has gotten bigger and more complicated and buck passing by a computer on the phone has become the norm.

In the auto world, many of the small town dealerships have had to close up shop and that's pretty sad in my opinion. In a small town (2k people) that is school affiliated with the town I live in there used to be 2 new car dealers in that town (Ford and Pontiac/GMC) about 15 years ago until they had to close.
Now everything is becoming mega-dealers who carry a dozen franchises and they're such a bureaucracy there is no sincere personal relationships with the customers.

I worked for just such a large dealer in OK City and it was absolutely horrible. It was also the last car dealer I ever worked for. After leaving there I sat around for a full week and decided that was it and went to work for myself.
(An example of how lousy this situation was. An elderly lady had to schedule a simple oil change for her new Mazda almost 2 weeks in advance. Two stinking weeks! She was there promptly at 8 in the morning, the oil change was done by 9, and the bureaucratic paper shuffling kept her in the waiting room until 2 that afternoon. Even the owner of this mega-dealer stated one time that "the service dept. is nothing but a pain in my xxx. If I could, I'd bulldoze it down and park cars there". Yet on TV he advertises "service after the sale".)

That was a lot of reading. All of them interesting. I am trying to find what happened to terminate it. My guess is it simply that the writer of a feature for 44 years passed on to that great garage in the sky. I found three deaths on SSDI of Martin Bunn. The only one not in diapers in 1925 was born 1894 in Texas, and Texas was his last residence in 1964. I feel to write in depth about a man who ran a garage near NYC the writer had to have lived in or near NYC?

I will try to look in the PS magazines, but the current index is not issue friendly.

Feb 1967 commented on two-foot driving of an automatic. Bunn/Gus basically said pretty much what I've always said, you have to be careful not to push the throttle and the brake at the same time, and that there are definitely advantages to two-foot driving, if you only drive automatics. The story involved a kid who drove two-foot, and his father was blaming him for damages to the car.

In my case, I drive two-foot because of statistically large feet which tend to get tangled on modern small pedals. You think floor mats can cause problems!