Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, November 28, 1995 TAG: 9511280037
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MATT CHITTUM STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
With some good wind and the right hubcap, say a '67 Mustang spinner, Gary Long could probably hit the front door of his nearest competitor from the parking lot of his Shenandoah Hubcap Shop at 24th Street and Shenandoah Avenue.
And once he did it, Mike Clingenpeel might be likely to pick up that hubcap, brush it off and sell it to one of his customers at Star City Auto Glass & Custom Wheels.
And if he waited a while, he might even wind up selling it back to Long.
Welcome to the heart of Roanoke's finders-keepers, anything's-fair-game retail wheel cover industry.
This is the place where orphaned - and if the truth be known, probably a few kidnapped - hubcaps go to get found.
At this intersection alone, just another hubcap's toss away from Shaffer's Crossing, there are upwards of 20,000 hubcaps to choose from.
The tale of how this little intersection in Northwest Roanoke got to be hubcap central is one of family, friends and the sickness and struggles of a tired old truck driver who says that, in a way, hubcaps saved his life.
It is a yarn as intricate as the wheel-spokes on a Cadillac Coupe deVille, and about as delicately balanced.
The story begins with the leukemia that doctors found festering inside B.S. Roop 20 years ago.
Roop had spent nearly a lifetime at the big wheel of a big rig. He learned to drive at 11 years old and started driving trucks at 13.
When the cancer showed up the doctors said he couldn't drive anymore. For a while, it looked grim. That was in 1975.
Roop, 50 at the time, said he laid up in his Crowmoor Street house for a while feeling sorry for himself. But life turned around for him when he took two sets of hubcaps, a '69 Ford LTD and a '66 Dodge Coronet, and walked down to the flea market at the old Trail Drive-In on Shenandoah.
He sold those sets for $8 apiece, bought some more and sold them, too. He made $90 in three and a half hours.
``That was some motivation,'' Roop said. ``Now that give me something to go for.''
While he was laid up at the Veteran's Administration hospital in Durham, N.C., getting cancer treatments, he read about hubcaps at night and visited other patients during the day.
``I felt awful for them. They were a whole lot worse off than me. The doctor come to me one time and said, `You're pretty sick, man.' I said, `I ain't sick.' ''
Back in Roanoke, he was on a disability pension and unable to do much work. But after a while, his wife, Mildred, opened up a hubcap shop on Melrose Avenue. Roop just consulted, studying hubcaps and telling his wife, the official owner, how to price them.
It was a real family business, with the Roops' three sons helping out on weekends. But after their son Mike committed suicide in the shop in 1984, B.S. Roop said, they moved the business into the old corner filling station at 24th and Shenandoah.
The Roops covered the building with rows of shiny chrome platters, like seashells on a sand castle. At one point they had 30,000 hubcaps in stock.
No feuding here
Up the road at Star City Auto Glass, Mike Clingenpeel had been installing car windows since the mid-1970s, but that was all he did. Ultimately, it was ill health that got him into the hubcap business, too.
With stitches in his gut from surgery for a stomach infection, he couldn't work in his own windshield shop. So he went to work keeping shop at Shenandoah Hubcap for a year.
Clingenpeel figured he might get a cut of the business after a while, but that didn't happen. So in 1988, he re-opened his auto glass shop.
And he added hubcaps to his repertoire.
But there's no feuding here. Everybody gets along fine, Clingenpeel says.
Clingenpeel still waves and says hello to Roop whenever he sees him. They live right across the street from each other on Crowmoor.
Roop is pretty much out of the hubcap business anyway, which brings us back to current Shenandoah Hubcap owner Gary Long. Mildred Roop sold the shop in 1990, when her husband developed stomach problems. Son L.J. Roop stayed on to help the new owners. Long got involved two and a half years ago and now owns the shop outright.
One day you might find Long at Clingenpeel's trying to hunt down quarter-inch lugnuts; or Clingenpeel at Long's showing off his new boots and warming up to the woodstove.
``Just wander around,'' Long says. ``Don't wander too close to that dog.''
The dog, Bear, is chained up outside. He comes to work everyday with mechanic Jimmy Brown. ``He's my big baby is what he is,'' Brown said. A month ago Bear bit a man and had to be quarantined.
Inside, rows of hubcaps hang from nails and dangle from the ceiling like the drying bones of old animals. Out back, they lay in stacks among high, brown weeds next to piles of new and used tires. Long figures he's got 4,000 or so hubcaps in stock.
``They'll be the devil to find in the snow,'' Brown says. Penned up in the corner, eating dry dog food out of an upturned hubcap, are Momo, Penny and Heather, the night watchdogs.
Hubcaps breed security measures, it seems.
``You walk a thin line between the police and the public,'' B.S. Roop said. ``If they couldn't identify 'em, we'd keep 'em. They never took a set from us.''
The Roops had a simple system: Never buy more than one set from someone at a time, and never buy more than one nice set every three or four months from the same person.
Still, customers who accuse hubcap merchants of selling them their own hubcaps are just part of the business.
``I'm sure it's happened,'' Long confesses, shifting his baseball cap to a friendly angle on the back of his head. ``But when you see a guy come in, you know what kind of deal he's got.''
The safest policy is to get identification and a name and address on a bill of sale. That way, if someone else lays claim to a set of hubcaps, the police are easily referred to the seller. No I.D., no deal.
``I ain't going to jail for no damn hubcap,'' Clingenpeel says in his tiny, hubcap-lined office. Through the door in the garage, the Roops' son L.J. is mounting a tire. He had a falling out with Long a year ago and came to work for Clingenpeel the same day.
Hubcap, a three-legged German Shepherd, hobbles up from the back of the garage. Hubcap had his leg shot off by a thief who broke in to steal a set of pricey custom wheels. The dog nuzzles Clingenpeel's hand sweetly, but Clingenpeel insists he's ``a different dog after 5 o'clock.''
A money-making business
The largest part of Clingenpeel's business is from custom wheels, with auto glass coming in second. Hubcaps are more of a sideline for him. Most of his 20,000 or so hubcaps came from people buying new mags and leaving their old hubcaps behind.
Long gets them anywhere he can. ``I do a lot of trading. It's easiest on the government.''
Long buys them by the hundreds from scrap yards and by the handful from two old men who walk the streets looking for them.
He's also been known to buy a hubcap off Clingenpeel at a neighborly discount and sell it to one of his own customers, or so Clingenpeel says.
And Long is not averse to picking one up himself once in a while.
``Coming through the [Shaffer's Crossing] underpass before they fixed them potholes, I was picking up a hubcap a day.''
Long says hubcaps are a money-making business, but it won't be forever. The hubcaps put on cars today won't last like the shiny domes on his office wall - the ones with names like Packard, DeSoto, Nash and Studebaker.
``Mostly now it's plastic, press-on stuff. You hit a curb, you need a new hubcap.''
That's just typical of our new disposable society, says Marvin Pippert, sociology and pop culture professor at Roanoke College. The individualism of the 1950s is long gone.
The shops at 24th and Shenandoah, he says, are like ``sturdy monuments of rebellion against the ticky-tacky approach to life.''
``The wheel has always been symbolic of American culture, even before there were automobiles, when wagons went west,'' says Marshall Fishwick, professor of humanities and communication studies at Virginia Tech. He teaches a class called ``Car Culture.''
Hubcaps, he points out, are mere ornaments that serve no useful purpose. The whole hubcap phenomenon is ``an indication of how the excesses of a society can be turned into something valuable and treasurable.''
At 24th and Shenandoah, they don't talk much about pop culture. Oh, they have their favorites. Long favors the '67 Buick Wildcat, Clingenpeel the '57 Lancer. As far as value goes, hubcaps are first and foremost a business here. But they also serve a dual role as the currency of friendship between one corner of this crossroads and the other.
At the end of the day, Clingenpeel, Long and a few others often gather up the road at Charbel's Sports Grill to swap stories and drink beer. Life for them never seems to stray far from the Shenandoah Avenue corridor.
These days, B.S. Roop is still fighting sickness. He's had a stroke and a heart attack in the last few years, and his stomach problems linger.
But if you catch him on a good day, he'll still talk shop with you. At Happy's Flea Market, people often corner him and ask him to identify whatever odd hubcap they have on hand. They call him the ``Hubcap Man.''
``Everybody got into the business after they looked at me,'' he says. ``I'd still be selling hubcaps, if it wasn't for this sickness.''
by CNB