Slim solved this problem the second day when he put a long piece of
gas-pipe on the heel-and-toe and shrank it considerably. The second
day, too, we had two men working upstairs. The third day we had a
gadget made so that we could roll a car's front wheel on it and then
pull the car anywhere. That was when we began to get our breath. The
other way had been tough. I don't know how Slim stood it at all; if I
hadn't worked in the wheat-fields all summer I would have fallen from
exhaustion.
We had two of those gadgets made and then we tilted the reducing stall
a little. We'd block the wheels with a two-by-four after we had a car
inside, then reduce it, take out the block, let the car roll onto the
gadget and haul it away. We arranged them on the concrete floor in rows
about four feet apart. When somebody came back to get their car out
we had to pinch-bar the car back up on the gadget and wheel it to the
stall.
* * * * *
The second week we had two stalls, one reducing and one expanding,
and Slim was talking of having a new sloping floor put in to help in
handling. By that time we were handling two thousand cars a day; you
can do your own arithmetic.
On the last day of the month, LaBombard came in to collect his next
month's rent. He was all eyes and he said he didn't see how we could do
it. "You took in twenty-two hundred cars yesterday and this building
won't hold over six hundred," he said, his eyes darting all around.
"You must have a fast turnover."
Slim kidded him. "We put 'em on the roof," he said, and paid him and
pushed him out. I didn't like the look in that man's eyes as he left.
"Well," said Slim exuberantly to me, "we're sitting on thirty thousand
dollars. Think you can get through college on that?"
"I hope I can take time off to get a haircut," I said fervently. It
was embarrassing to have people look at me and suddenly snicker and
turn away to hide their faces. The trouble was, we didn't dare turn the
reducing over to anybody else, and so we both worked like robots.
* * * * *
By the beginning of the second month we had a moving ramp. The boys
upstairs put the car on the ramp, the car came downstairs and went
through the reducer, came out on the other side and onto a platform.
We had a tow-truck that just backed up, reached down a steel platform
under the front axle, and walked away. It was funny to see that two-ton
truck hauling a toy car across the floor.
Yes, we had a deal. Late at night, after we'd closed up and had time
for some coffee, Slim would talk about how we were going to build a
chain of parking ramps across the country.
"We'll make billions," he said, his deep eyes shining with a far-away
fanaticism that only Slim Coleman can exhibit, "and we'll be known as
the saviors of civilization. We'll call ourselves Parking Unlimited."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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