ROAD HAZARD HEAVEN
For the past
11 years, Universal Tire’s Jerry Lokey has been collecting bizarre stuff embedded in
truck tires: knives, tent stakes, railroad spikes, a Leatherman® tool, a bullet
—even part of a piston.
One recent visitor to Lokey’s shrine said it “looks
like the makeshift weapons you see in prison movies.”
Lokey, Universal Tire’s warranty manager in Nashville, has
been with the company 35 years— so he’s well-acquainted with these tire-killers.
“Our shops all over Tennessee and southern Kentucky send them here,” he says.
“The hardest one to remove was a crawler track link from the tread of a construction
vehicle, but the most famous is the bullet.”
Because Jerry sees only the wounded tires, he doesn’t have a
clue how the items got there. So we decided to speculate:
Screwdrivers—dropped by Tim Allen during the filming of Home Improvement?
Saw blade—used in a death-defying illusion by magician David Copperfield?
Knives—from a touring company of West Side Story?
Trailer latch—only survivor of a demolition staged for Independence Day?
The unfired bullet—misplaced by Officer Barney Fife, Mayberry, NC.?
We’ll probably never find out where these things really came
from, but one thing’s for sure—the fastest way to total a truck tire is to drive
across Jerry’s board.
Do you have a bizarre
story to tell? FAX us, at (615) 256-0082 and tell our editors about it. If your weird tale
is chosen for a future installment of What In The World?, we’ll send you $50 cash.
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