Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, May 18, 1993 TAG: 9305180059
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Ed Shamy
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Yes, I recognize a good cause when I see one.
No, I'm not going back north where I came from - not until you buy out my contract.
Yes, it's whining.
Maybe it amounts to oversensitivity on my part, but driving on some miracle-mile strips in the valley has become a real drag on warm-weather weekends.
Maybe it's because, in order to feel some control over the car salesman six years ago and to save $5.95 on my monthly payments, I insisted on no air conditioning when I bought my car. He finally gave up trying to convince me.
As a result of my false thrift and stubbornness, I drive a lot with my windows rolled down.
These openings keep me in touch with my surroundings, or at least as much as I can expect while enveloped in a ton of glass, steel, rubber and fluff. I can sniff a bus, take a June bug in the side of the head, hear the buzz of a flock of flies on nearby road kill, listen to other people's radios and get a very tanned left forearm.
There are trade-offs. You can't very well listen to the radio when the wind is thundering in through the window. And you sweat a lot. And you are prime bait for carjackings, except that no self-respecting carjacker would so much as lift a brick for a 6-year-old car without air conditioning.
The sweating, absence of radio and threat of carjacking I can endure. The curbside car wash wars, somehow, are far more annoying.
They seem most intense in Salem, specifically West Salem, though they can hit the unsuspecting motorist along any strip.
The car washes are fund-raisers, typical of cheering squads, youth basketball teams and church groups. A business donates an open spigot, and the needy group provides the labor and the suds.
All that's left, then, is to lure motorists to the wash. What better way to do that than by getting to the closest road and waving crudely lettered signs?
What's the best attention grabber? Claim that there's a "free" car wash ahead.
Since there are free car washes on every corner, it's not enough to just wave a free car-wash sign. Competition is so fierce, you've also got to shriek your message at passing traffic.
It's not enough that the free car washes aren't, of course, free at all. If they were, they wouldn't be such popular fund-raisers. They're free with a $3 or $3.50 "donation." This is the kind of "donation" that Cosa Nostra shakes down from shopkeepers in Sicily.
That's called false - or highly misleading - advertising.
The enthusiastic screaming, amusing at first, gets pretty annoying by the time you pass the 15th car wash on West Main Street.
The future of the free world doesn't rest on the charity-seekers' sudden adoption of a code of conduct or ethics.
And yes, I can drive another route, shop in another part of the valley.
Better yet, I can get air conditioning, roll up my windows, crank up the music and drive past.
by CNB