Lang's box of memories.

Just loving your stories, vehicles & adventures Lang. You sure have been a busy fellow.
Which oil rig mob did you work for?

As they have been saying "keep 'em coming"
cheers
Pierre

Western Geophysical

Morris wrote:

Lang, as you would know, a salesman would never say it was no good. It needs a tuneup, maybe, or i it was really bad, needs work.

Not always. My old Dad when he owned the Holden Dealership in Southport in the 60's decided to get rid of the poorer cars in his used car lot. His advertisements attracted buyers from 100 miles away and the whole lot were sold by the end of the weekend

I never kept a copy but from memory it went something like this"

1953 Ford Prefect. Just the thing for those with a death-wish.
1948 Ford Pilot. Possibly the worst car we have seen in 20 years of business.
1950 Holden. Perfect for getting rid of mother-in-law. Send her off in this and she will never be seen again.
1957 Ford Consul. Could possibly make the two mile trip from Southport to Surfers Paradise. Make alternate plans for the return trip.
1952 Vanguard. New brake shoes, unfortunately they are still in the boot.
1954 Chevrolet. Driven by a liitle old lady on Sundays - to the race track for her son.
and so on for about 20 cars.

Lang

This is Moran Motors about a year before the old man bought it in 1958. Most of these staff stayed with him for years.


This is the "small" used car yard at Main Beach. He also had yards in the main street in Southport, Brisbane and Tweed Heads.

Looking at that Main Beach car yard reminds me of the power pole to the left.Nothing ventured, nothing gained, Dad painted the pole white, affixed his car yard sign to it and had an electrician attach the overhead light (using the car yard power). I remember him discussing it in later life and he said it was there for nearly 3 years before he sold the yard and SEQEB never questioned it. Would not happen today.

Note the big high TV aerials on the houses trying to make the black and white tv sets less snowy receiving signals from Brisbane 100km away.

This is the same block today. The power pole would have been about the big palm tree in the centre on the skyline in front of the high-rise. This road was the old Pacific Highway back in the day before they built the new bridge and cut Main Beach off from Highway One
.

And this is going backwards to 1950. Only 10 years before the car yard photo.

.

The car yard and above highrise were on the highway straight ahead off the bridge about where the grassy square is in the middle of the photo. Left branch to yacht club and surf club (and also Seaworld today)

Aerial shot today. The old bridge hit the shore where the footpath meets the bike track near the pine trees. Dad;s car yard is where the lower darker top highrise is in the "second" row From the 1950 photo you can see where they dredged the sand up along the shore to give a deeper harbour and build up for the yacht club and pine tree park.

Probably not relevant but photos in the box and my sister did feature in the Great Stan Jones Grand Prix debacle as told above when she was 8.

When she was 16 she was a bit of an ace at school so they let her go off every Wednesday afternoon to participate in Keith Williams Surfers Paradise Ski Gardens show. She did the weekends as well. After leaving school she decided this was her vocation and shifted to the show at Caribbean Lake near Scoresby in Victoria. While still 17 she got picked up by the famous Cypress Ski Gardens in Florida and moved to USA for a number of years doing a solo "water ballet" act.

Just found these photos of her in Victoria. More interesting is the photo taken just a few years back when she was taken to USA for a commemorative signing of a special edition of Sports Illustrated for the something anniversary of her appearance on the cover. Any major sports person would kill to be on that cover. Anyhow she got married had kids and is now just an old grandparent (pretty well preserved) like the rest of us.

Just remembered one of the old man's less than fantastic sales ideas (he was always thinking).

I built my sister a big aviary about 3 metres square in the back yard and she was given two pairs of budgerigars. Of course young teenage girls have no attention span and as the budgies started to multiply it fell as usual to poor old mum to feed and water them (I think horse girls mothers know all about this).

By the time the cage was stuffed with maybe 100 budgies their gene pool had deteriorated so far there were feathereless cripples staggering around, wounded combat veterans from dominant maters and several had developed a taste for fresh eggs. Strangely their squeaky chirping had also mutated and every sound possible eminated from the aviary. I swear there was one who sounded like a Kookaburra.

"Enough is enough" roared Dad, the bloody birds have to go. I rushed to get my air rifle but my sister's wailing broke our hearts so Dad had an idea!

Next Saturday in the South Coast Bulletin was a big ad. "Every child who brings a container to Moran Motors on Saturday next will get a free budgerigar"

On Friday night, after somebody had got about 30 shoe boxes from the shoe shop in the main street I was given the job of boxing the damn things. The cripples and mental defectives were easy to catch but most of them raised objections. At 15 years old, not having the sense to wear gloves, my hands were soon ripped to shreds by the little bastards. Eventually closing the last box with my blood-stained hands we awaited the morning.

Mum told us the whole idea was ridiculous and there would be few parents who wanted a gratuitous bird brought into the house and we would be lucky to get rid of 10 of them.

Dad asked the reception girl to assist me in issuing the birds to the expected handful of kids next morning.

Next morning as we drove up with thirty boxes in the back seat emitting muffled screams from the kidnapped inmates - disaster!

There must have been 100 kids plus another hundred parents and siblings in a line going down the street and around the corner. They carried all types of "containers" ranging through glass jars, brown paper bags, school cases and knapsacks. And the line was growing.

Always calm in face of adversity, instead of the embarrasment of not being able to meet the market, Dad swung into action.

"The receptionist and my secretary plus two apprentices from the workshop will start handing out birds' He turned to me and said " Go to any budgie breeders in town and buy their whole stock" He got one of his salesmen to ring the Bird Society and within minutes one of the mechanics was driving me with quickly emptied boxes from the spare parts department to buy out the entire avian population of the Gold Coast.

Meanwhile back at the ranch. The learning curve was very steep. The first smiling child approached with his brown paper bag and Karen the 19 year old receptionist plunged her hand into the first box. Terror struck the milling throng as Karen started screaming fit to wake the dead. Within seconds she became hysterical as she withdrew her hand with two budgies beaks sunk deep into the flesh and started running around the showroom. The two culprits saw their chance and let go escaping to the anguished cry of their expectant owner.

The third bird in the box had suffered from an unfortunate genetic disposition and looked more like a plucked quail than a robust budgerigar. As Karen rushed around waving her stricken hand she still had the box in the other. Our gallant, featherless escaper, staggered onto the edge of the open box, tottered for a second then toppled onto the floor.

Ray the ultimate salesman came across to help. Scooping the bird up from the floor he walked over to the first devastated kid and as he stuffed the bloody thing into the kid's paper bag told him how lucky he was to have a baby still with no feathers and in a few weeks he would be able to train it to fly.

The apprentices, being smarter than the average bear ran back to the workshop and returned wearing gloves. Carol, Dad's secretary, had retired to the ladies room with a still semi-hysterical Karen.

Taking Ray's lead the apprentices soon had the line moving. "It hasn't got any feathers" - "Just a baby wait a couple of weeks" "It can't stand up" - "Just tired from a night in the box" and so on.

At least ten of the more agile birds escaped from makeshift containers before they left the building and the boys just smiled at pushy parents or howling kids demanding a replacement and got rid of a few more physically challenged specimens. I arrived back with about 60 more birds seeing no diminishment in the length of the line. Finally, at the end of the day only about 10 kids were turned away.

Dad took their names and next week bought about 30 more healthy birds. Firstly the ones who missed out got a bird and the others were replacements for defective product identified by smarter parents or those who had died of natural or unnatural causes or been torn to shreds by their new cage-mates.

Full front page photo in The Bulletin next Monday of hundreds of happy campers lining up for their free birds from the generous people at Moran Motors. Money can not buy that publicity!

After writing that story I remember another thing.

Just before I left to get the reserve stocks the two 19-20 year old apprentice motor mechanics had the issue line moving. Only to be expected, a kid asked "What is his name?" as the budgerigar was being stuffed into his shoebox or paper bag. One of the boys had a great sense of humour and replied "Thermocouple but you can call him Thermo for short". Everyone waiting of course heard this exchange and there was many a totally perplexed parent who could not fathom why their child had chosen to name their new bird Dyno, Gasket or Uni.