[Editor’s Note: Jim Van Orden, Richardson, Texas, who brought us the story of Arlington FryBarger’s Pan-American Highway trip a couple months ago, recently reached into his bag of memories for this account of the junkyards he frequented as a New Jersey youth.]

Junkyards were my heaven as a boy.

Practically nothing else sparked my imagination or entertained me more than 1950s junkyards. I loved their smells: old oil and grease, gasoline, putrid water and anti-freeze…mixed with rusting metal and rotting fabrics from seats, headliners, carpets and floor mats etched lasting memories.

Vehicles of every description stacked like 10-foot monoliths in long rows, teetering threateningly, demanded attention and study. Non-stop conversations ran through my brain: “Is that a 1941 Caddy at the top of that heap?”…“Wonder who owned that ’39 Lincoln Continental?”

Heaps of extra-old abandoned autos from the perspective of a classic auto veteran.