I told him, "Okay, let's run through it once more. You have put in new plugs, timer, manifold, gaskets, and ground the valves. You have replaced everything that could cause it to skip on one cylinder except a bad piston." Then Calvin said to me, "Why don't you take the piston out while Ed gets a piston from somewhere?" Looking at the pistons from the top, Ed couldn't see the broken piston, but when we took it out, we found it broken on one side all the way from the bottom up to the top ring groove. We replaced that one bad piston and the old car ran okay. There were other troubles with automobiles in those days. Today some of us older people are inclined to talk about the good old days and tell of how we were born during the horse-and-buggy days and how we lived through the Model T era, the Great Depression of the 1930s and into the Jet Age. However, most of us have failed to inform the younger generations about the "broken-fender" age and the "drain-your-car-every-night" era. These two periods overlapped to a considerable degree and ran concurrently much of the time. That was when car fenders were bolted to the running board at one end and the other end of the fender was allowed to vibrate and flop up and down--especially on rough roads, and there were no smooth ones. The constant flopping caused the fenders to begin to break directly above each wheel. This called for a welding job to repair the break. Then a few weeks later the fender was beginning to break again in the same place. And this called for yet another repair job, and this went on and on throughout the entire life of the car. It happened to all cars alike--the Essex, the Nash, the Whippet, and even the Hupmobile. This broken-fender age lasted from about 1928 until the late 1950s, and for me it extended into the 1960s because the only cars I could afford were old and well used and the fenders had been repaired by any number of other previous owners. Why didn't fenders break before 1928? A number of reasons. They were much smaller and lighter, and therefore they didn't flop and bend and break. Furthermore, cars were slower, and many of them didn't last long enough to run far enough to break their fenders. The fenders outlasted many of the motors Now, concerning the drain-your-car-every-cold-night age. Wood alcohol was about the only antifreeze we had, and it would boil away easily. Also it would evaporate and it was expensive, Furthermore, after making a long drive or pulling a heavy load, you never knew whether you still had enough alcohol to protect your motor from a freeze-up. Nor did we have efficient weather forecasts telling us just how cold it was going to get before morning. Therefore, most of us didn't use alcohol. We just used water and drained it out in cold weather.