Three Petraks,one trade.
I'm Jo. My grandfather built tires, my father put them on, and I run the two bays he opened on Kenmore in 1979. Dad read this last Saturday with the crayon from his shirt pocket, and I left his marks in.
Dad's note: ✓ W.P.
Stan built them.
Stan Petrak, tire builder, East Akron, 1951 to 1982
Grandpa built tires on a drum like this one in East Akron for thirty-one years. He came home with carbon black in the creases of his hands.
First the plies: rubbered cord cut on the bias, four of them, each one laid crossways over the last.
Then a steel bead at each edge, with the plies turned up around it. The beads are what hold a tire on the wheel.
Then the white for the whitewall, under a black strip that kept it clean until the strip was ground off after the press.
The tread went on top, and all of it was rolled down tight so no air stayed inside.
It came off the drum looking like a barrel. The press gave it its shape, its tread pattern and its letters.
Grandpa had a saying he used every time he walked past Dad's tire rack:
“Rubber gets old on the shelf, whether anybody drives on it or not.”
Dad's note: RULE 1.He had another one from the plant: a tire that comes back comes back to the man who built it.
Dad's note: RULE 2.When cars went to radials, the passenger lines in Akron closed one after another, and by 1982 they were gone. Grandpa retired that year. He never sold a tire in his life, but he could read one better than anybody I've met.
By then Dad was mounting tires made somewhere else.
Walt put them on.
Walt Petrak, Kenmore Boulevard, 1979 to 2016
Dad had been mounting tires at a filling station since high school. In the spring of 1979 he rented two bays in this building and opened on Monday, April 2.
At the filling station he'd watched the gun run lug nuts all the way down and stretch the studs. In his own bays the gun stopped at snug, and he finished every nut by hand with a cross wrench.
Dad's note: RULE 3.That week he painted the sign on the brick himself, on a ladder, freehand off a chalk line, and the four rules beside it.
Petrak Tire Co.
1418 Kenmore Blvd · Akron, Ohio · Phone 555-0179
No. 79-0001
- Date
- 4/2/79
- Name
- Hudak
- Vehicle
- '74 wagon
- Miles
- 61,230
Tread depth, in 32nds
LF 7
RF 8
LR 6
RR 6
Swap, on own wheels4.00
TaxNone
Total$4.00
Nuts tightened byW.P.
He painted “Read the date on the tire” that first week, and most of his customers didn't know there was one. In 1979 it was three digits, the week and then the last digit of the year. Tires made before 1971 don't have one at all.
Jo tells you thetruth about them.
Jo Petrak, running the shop since 2016
I started in these bays on Saturdays when I was fourteen, sweeping up and sorting loose lug nuts into coffee cans by thread. I wrote the sizes on the cans in tire crayon. Two of them are still on the shelf by the tire machine.
By twenty I could mount and balance a set faster than Dad, and he said so to anyone who asked.
He taught me the four rules before he taught me to run the balancer. The one he watched me hardest on was the last one. If your tires had another winter in them, I said so, even in a month when the shop could have used the sale.
Dad's note: RULE 4.When he decided to step back, he didn't make a speech.
How the sign changed
Petrak Tire Co. & Daughter
We closed at one. He said he was touching up the sign and sent me home.
He'd hung a drop cloth over the bottom half of it all week. I asked once.
He called the house at six and told me to come look.
He'd mixed the yellow himself on the bench, a little at a time, holding a lug nut I'd striped next to the stir stick until he couldn't tell the two yellows apart.
- Read the date on the tire.
- Check your own work.
- Tighten every nut by hand.
- If they don't need it, say so.
Two are Grandpa's and two are Dad's. Nobody has painted over them.
Saturdays now
Dad still stops in on Saturdays. His cross wrench rides in the trunk of his car all week, and he hangs it back on its hook behind the counter when he comes in. He walks the rack first and reads the date on every tire in it. At one he takes the wrench home.
The rules didn't change. I'm the one who checks them now.
— Jo Petrak
Dad's note: a check mark.