By George Evans Taylor Jr.
Reference the Western Auto Sales Contract shown here.
Sometime ago my wife was looking through the old cedar chest that I gave her before we married. In it she found an old �Conditional Sales Contract� and handed it to me. It brought back memories of Malvern and prompted me to pen this article.
On August 27th, 1955 we purchased our first powered lawnmower. The �we� was my wife, Betty Sue (Tillery) Taylor and I. At the time we lived at 905 Lowden Street in North Malvern but still needed to cut heavy weeds and grass at our little rent house in the Cooper community.
I purchased the lawn mower from Fred Spence at the Spence boys� Western Auto Store. The store was then located on the North West corner of the intersection of Main Street and Page Avenue (US Highway 67) in Malvern Arkansas. I had purchased car parts, hardware etc. from Fred there for many years. Even though I was only twenty-four years old he knew me and my credit record and let me have it with only $15 down with the remainder due in thirty days, without carrying charges! The mower price was tagged at $59.99. At the time Betty and I were both working at the International Shoe Company�s local Textile Mill and thought we could pay for it without a problem. And we did. Notice the tax on the statement, it calculates to be 2 cents on the dollar.
The mower was a Power Products rotary blade type. It was the first I had seen as they were just being introduced for home use. It had one of those small, noisy, high revving two cycle gasoline/oil mixture burning engines. Man would it cut the grass and very tall weeds!
The biggest maintenance problem was removing the carbon from the exhaust ports of the engine casting. When it needed cleaning it let me know by being hard to start and there was not much power nor would it rev up. After removing the muffler it was very easy to clean the ports using a pocket knife. The mower lasted for many years.
By George Taylor December 18th, 2004
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