Harper’s Car Wash At Douglasdale

municipality’s first ever serious automobile accident; a vehicle collided with a horse, killing the people in the vehicle and injuring the animal.

In 1914, as the First World War started, J.M., his three brothers and their father all enlisted in the Royal Canadian Army. After serving in France for the course of the war, J.M was offered post-service education and signed up for a vulcanizing course to learn the process of hardening rubber. In 1919, he started working at Fisk Tire where he changed the tires on milk trucks. He married Marion, who had been born in Yorkshire, in 1922.

In November 1931, just days after Dupont started manufacturing synthetic rubber, J.M., by now a father himself, bought Foster’s Vulcanizing at130 12th Ave SW. He paid the princely sum of $1,450, putting $400 up front and paying $100 a month, with 7 per cent interest.

Three generations later, after a few expansions and a couple of locations, a foray into selling boats and skis, a small stack of yellowing NSF cheques and countless tires, Harper’s Tire is celebrating 90 years in business.

Forty years ago, when Harper’s Tire moved from downtown to its current location, decades of the company’s history came along too: boxes and boxes of documents, photographs and other items dating back to the early days of the business. Many of these artifacts are reproduced on the following pages. The next time you come by the “new” location, if look closely at the concrete lip outside you’ll see where a high school student marked his initials in the wet concrete outside the brand new building: “D.H. 1981.” That student, Dan Harper, is now the president and chief historian of Harper’s Tire.