Art’s Mobile

Here’s brother Dave sporting some new threads.

artsmobileWhy he is standing in front of the gas pumps of Art’s Mobile, I don’t know.  I do know he worked there for a while.  But that still doesn’t explain why he was wearing new threads in front of a gas station.

If I knew cars better, I might be able to date the picture a bit.  I reckon though that it was taken most likely in the early to mid seventies.

I have cropped and blown up the picture a bit to try to get some of the background detail in focus.  Unfortunately I didn’t really succeed, but this is the only picture I have of old Casa De Oro.

Actually this is late old Casa De Oro.  The one hour Martinizing wasn’t there when we first arrived in the late 1950s.  But if you look closely up in the left hand corner of the picture you can see the sign for the Club 94.  It reads “Club 94.”

It wasn’t a club by any stretch but a pretty down and dirty bar.  A stifling, windowless room whose sole purpose was to sell booze.  It had no atmosphere at all unless one counts the blood stains on the floor.

I might be hallucinating, but down the road to the right a stretch I think I see the Taco Barrel.  Originally, it was a Root Beer Barrel—a barrel shaped building of metal construction painted to look like a Hires Root Beer Barrel.  It changed hands a number of times.  I remember it best as the Taco Barrel.

David—or was it Dan—or maybe it was both of them—bought some Tacos there or different occasions and got pretty sick.

No, wait.  I think they bought “tacquitoes,” I think they were called, like 10 for a a dollar.

One Reply to “Art’s Mobile”

  1. I think this is the day of or around Dave’s graduation from MVHS which would put it as 71? I graduated in 78 and Dave has 7 years on me. I think that is correct. I recall it was Dave who got sick from eating at The Barrel, if it was from over eating cheap rolled tacos or from the “C” that it had in it’s window as a health rating we can only guess. Looking at this I am reminded of the documentary on Crumb, who paid a photographer to drive around the urban industrial areas and take shots of the material that engenders “blight” of the feeling of it, the wires and poles and crap that your brain just forgets to see after a while cause it is always there and never changes. Crumb captured this in his comix, and who ever took this photo did too.

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