90 years ago, the US was already overrun with 40 million cars (ompare that to the 276 million registered vehicles today). Many of those were on their last leg. Chicago car dealers promoted Used Car Week by stacking jalopies nearly 50 feet high on an island in Lake Michigan, where they torched them. 100,000 folks gathered to watch the flames of 200 cars fill the air.
I don’t know if you’ve ever smelled one of these, but they don’t smell pleasant.
I Don't Get It 
Wow. That is crazy. Those tires would smolder for days and unless the wind was blowing the stink into Canada it would make Chicago an even more unpleasant place to be.
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Smart thinking! I didn’t even think about how long it could last.
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Oh that smell would be horrid. For a while our state was converting old tires into replacement road beds for highway projects . . . that is until the new roads started to smolder every summer from the hot summer sun.
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!!!! Nope.
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I picture hundreds of Fred Sanford’s in every environmental and air quality agency looking at the bonfire and going, “This is the big one! I’m comin’ Elizabeth!”
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You will be happy to know that those of us in my church band still make that reference. And then we stiffly rock back and forth.
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I was concerned that I had picked a reference that would be obtuse. PHEW!
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