An Old Guy's Random Rememberings #21

MEAT SAWS AND TEENAGE BOYS

2/7/99

Yesterday Frank was giving me some Harbor Freight sale catalogs. I had mentioned that my wife gets several catalogs in the mail each day, but they only have clothing and furniture, nothing interesting like power saws and routers, and Frank, being the caring guy that he is, wanted me to have some catalogues too.

Frank mentioned that he had recently bought a meat saw from Harbor Freight at a very reasonable price. I told him that bought my meat saw in the late seventies when the regular price was about the same as what he had paid.

This morning it occurred to me that I had bought my saw at Davis Hardware in North Austin, back when it was located in a building which is now a huge Blockbuster store. I don’t think that Davis Hardware exists any more.

In the late ‘40s my cousin Charlie from Dallas and I would spend the summers thus:

A couple of weeks in Dallas at Charlie’s house, a couple of weeks in Bay City at my house, and a week or so in Austin at Aunt Pearl’s house.

Whenever we were in Austin, each morning we would take the bus downtown and “hang”. At that time, Davis Hardware and Academy Surplus were next door to each other on Congress Avenue. Talk about heaven!! We would spend a couple of hours in each, then would make our way up to The Capitol and hang out there for a while, then to the university area, stopping and checking out every motorcycle shop we could find along the way. Finally, as suppertime approached, we’d make it back to Aunt Pearl’s house, which was a block from Robert Mueller Airport.

Kids are rarely allowed to roam free now as in those days. I think that’s too bad,