Used & Vintage Parts…Cruising The Main Drag…Custom Bent Headers & Exhaust…Straight-Cut Chromed Tips…Turn-Downs & Accents Extra…The Old Lady’s Cherry Bombs…Denk’s Deathtrap…Is That a Six-Pack?…Her Majesty’s Rolling Smokeshow…One Quarter Mile for Pink Slips…Hey, That’s Not a Christmas Tree…A Burger Basket at the Drive-In…Big Rigs on Main Street…Trailer Queens & Tire Warmers…The Legend of Old River Road
Flimmdenko’s Speed Shop was just outside of town on the road that runs up the river. The trucker squeezing his rig through the last intersection thought it sounded funny when he read the sign aloud. But it didn’t if you were from here. Only one-and-a-quarter mile’ down the road, down the river, from the speed shop was Flimmdenko’s Fuelerie (with—-count ‘em!—-a baker’s** dozen pumps and room to maneuver), just out the other side of town, same road. It was Main Street in between the two. That’s what the river road tends to do meandering alongside the water from town to town briefly becoming Main Street on its way through each and on sunny days for special occasions hosting parades with marching bands & firetrucks & bells & sirens & whistles & tractors pulling wagons or floats & flying candy & hotrods & bicycles regaled with clothespins, playing cards, tassels and crepe-paper streamers. Sometimes old man Flimmdenko played trombone in the Lion’s Club brass band. And that one time The Mrs. had a six-foot-tall teddy bear tossing lollipops and Tootsie Rolls from the rumble seat of her dad’s shined-up hotrod. There was also a Flimmdenko’s Grocery and a Flimmdenko’s Coffee Shop in town. Flimmdenko, the old man, started here a young man as a plumber. (The Mrs. had been doing books, mail, orders, advertising and everything else since before she was a Ms.; Her dad was a farmer and a mechanic so she and her mom ran the family repair shop when she was a kid, mostly bikes and tractors.) He and The Mrs. owned most of the town when he passed. Flimmdenko’s Inn was a nice, quiet, inadequately lit place to have a pint with friends until it burnt down.
Mrs. Flimmdenko, the old man’s old lady, Beatrice (“Bea” or “Triss” if you knew her), got away with calling the gas station a Fuelerie, but only because the old man was away when she placed the order for the big sign out front. There was a buy-four-letters-&-get-up-to-four-letters-free*** promo at the time. But there was also compromise. The Mrs. wanted to have the accent over the last “i” but even the sign guy knew that the accent would be too tall an order to fill and that he was already gambling with Mr. Flimmdenko’s good business relationship by filling it as per the old lady’s specifications with a neon “Fuelerie” set twenty to thirty feet above the street. It would have used the same amount of letters if the big sign had read Flimmdenko’s Fuel Stop. But Fuelerie it was because Mrs. Flimmdenko said she wished to also sell coffee and baked goods there and the old man wouldn’t let her call the coffee shop a bistro.
*an excerpt from “The Cat Lady’s Chrysler” (building a quaint little town)
**if you include the lone Kerosene pump
***conditions apply//Limited time offer//See Guy and/or Gracie at G&G’s Sign Shoppe for details