For Boys with Money to Spend, Western Auto Was Like Heaven
Published: Friday, December 5, 2025
On the southern Illinois dairy farm of my youth, we marked seasons by the work more than by the month.
The planting season, for example, usually began in April and often ended when we drilled soybeans into wheat stubble in early July. Harvest season started when silage season ended and, more than once, nudged into butchering season.
The best season for my siblings and me was, no surprise, Christmas. Unlike farming seasons, however, Christmas arrived slowly—well after Thanksgiving—and left quickly. Our Christmas trees rarely saw New Year's.
The short Yule season made its shopping season even shorter, often just a few December Friday nights when our family might go to town for groceries, to the bank, or to pick up repair parts.
On those forays, my oldest brother Rich was entrusted with his younger brothers—David, me and Perry. Our first stop was the bank where each of us withdrew $10 or $15 from our savings accounts for the upcoming binge.
Then, with money in our pockets, we'd scurry the one block to the best store ever invented for a group of flush farm boys with spending on their minds: Western Auto.
To my brothers and me back then, Western Auto was what we hoped heaven might be. It held all the keys to perpetual joy: BBs, baseball bats, fishing tackle, model cars, pocket knives, tents, transistor radios, record albums, bows-and-arrows, slot car racing tracks, bicycle inner tubes, single-shot rifles and shotguns, and ammunition.
It also held the stuff of dreams; items we knew we'd never own. Shiny mini-bikes with Briggs & Stratton engines, 12-inch black-and-white portable televisions, and red-and-silver Western Flyer bicycles with whitewall tires, working headlights and buddy seats.
My older brothers were hypnotized by shelves of dazzling chrome car wheels, chrome valve covers, chrome air cleaners, chrome mirrors and chrome hub caps. Neither had a driver's license, but they rarely left Western Auto without some of that shiny gleam in their eager, teenager eyes.
But we weren't just seasonal shoppers. Two Western Auto stores were within driving distance of our farm, so we'd often patrol their aisles while Dad was buying bolts or spark plugs. In fact, Western Auto, now a rural memory, operated over 5,200 company-owned and "franchise" stores nationwide in its heyday.
And rural America supported it big. What began as an auto parts seller in Kansas City (thus the "western" and "auto" of its name), quickly learned to stock rural necessities like hardware, home goods, gardening tools, and games and toys. Competition and corporate raiding, however, bled it dry in the 1990s.
Before any of that, however, two of the largest items my brothers and sister ever gave my parents for Christmas were tied directly to our local Western Autos.
The first, in the late-1960s, was a black vinyl recliner chair we bought for my father to read his daily after-supper/sleep-inducing newspaper. It cost $85, and we ordered it from the local Western Auto. My father napped in it for 40 years.
The other was sourcing the needed supplies—paint, wheels, tires, lights, a wiring harness and more—to refurbish a used, $50 boat trailer we bought from a local car dealer. Mom and Dad's old trailer chewed through wheel bearings, had taillights that worked until it hit the first pothole, and didn't tilt when launching or loading their tubby, 16-foot fishing boat.
All those shortcomings were solved with Western Auto paint and Western Auto parts. Afterwards the $50 trailer looked like $100 and our parents enjoyed it for many years.
Or many fishing seasons which, as my father often noted, "Started every year on Jan. 1 and ran right through Dec. 31."
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