Highway 395 Rolls Right Past Hubcap Heaven

Not even “Hubcap Lucy,” as Lucy Pearson likes to be known, can tell you exactly how many hubcaps are stacked and strewn about Pearsonville, Calif., the one-stop town she founded on a forlorn stretch of U.S. 395. Her current estimate--200,000--reflects an obsession that Andy, her late husband, once likened to madness.

“He said, ‘Jan, I’ve got to talk to you--the old lady’s lost her mind,’ ” their daughter Janice Pearson recalled. “He really thought she had lost her mind because she was doing all this incredible collecting of hubcaps.”

That was a quarter of a century ago. Hubcaps have been piling up for 40 years now, and counting. They are, of course, the No. 1 commodity at the Pearsonville Auto Wrecking & Hub Cap Store, where Lucy, at age 75, tends the counter in her favorite blue floral bonnet, hawking taillights and dashboard radios and styles of hubcaps you’re not likely to find anywhere else.

Hanging above the cash register are half a dozen relics that have been shined up and crafted into wall clocks. They go for $35 apiece, about what you’d pay if you bought a hubcap--without the numerals--to stick on the wheel of your old Chevy.

There are hubcaps for Chargers, DeVilles, Falcons, Mustangs, Rivieras and more. Spoked and plain rim, foreign and domestic, they tower in the vast parts warehouse like empty pie tins--some coated with dust, others immaculate in plastic packaging and bread bags. As a leitmotif, hubcaps also provide a gleaming measure of distinction for a town of junked cars and little else.

Pearsonville sits on the east flank of the Sierra Nevada between Ridgecrest and Lone Pine. Its most conspicuous landmarks are a gas station, a dirt racetrack and a sign over a boarded-up cafe: EAT. It might be a stretch to say 30 people live here, and they survive without a grocery store, school, post office or restaurant.

Lucy’s home sits in an oasis of trees across the highway from the parts store. Hubcaps festoon her wire fence like bottle caps wedged in the spokes of a bicycle. Whipping desert winds occasionally blow them around. They dot the yard like crop circles.

Janice remembers opening Mom’s freezer one day and finding a hubcap in there, too--a platter for burritos.

“Can you imagine?”

Lucy just about cackles. “This really is the hubcap capital of the world,” she said, repeating a slogan emblazoned on caps and T-shirts and on the side of Pearsonville’s lone water tank. Customers have driven 200 miles just to buy hubcaps, she boasted. Pat Beckett of North Hollywood-based Cinema Vehicles, which supplies cars to the film industry, sought her out to scrounge up hubcaps for--of all things--a 1974 AMC Gremlin.

“I didn’t think there were any of those left in the world,” Beckett said. “She had enough to do three cars.”

Orders filter in from New York, Texas, Florida--practically anywhere. After the Berlin Wall came down, a man in Germany paid $250 for a set of four to fit a 1953 Plymouth. Shipping cost him as much as the hubcaps.

“Somebody loses a hubcap, they’re sick till they find it,” Lucy said. “I’ve usually got them. It makes me feel good that I’ve got them.”

She isn’t crazy, just proud of her niche in the car culture. Savvy as Cal Worthington, she is also as tough as the chrome on a ’64 Caddie. This is a woman who, nevermind her age, races around the desert washes in a new four-by-four.

“I wouldn’t cross her,” said son Don, who owns and operates the Pearsonville wrecking yard and channels hubcaps directly to Mom. “She’s a redhead. She’s got a little temper.”

How she got here, from the mountains of Kentucky, is a case study in unquenchable spirit. At 16, she was engaged to be married, a situation complicated by the fact that her father didn’t know and she longed to escape the hardships of canning and milking. At the last minute she skirted the altar and fled to Dayton, Ohio, where her sister was living, and found a job in a rifle factory.

“I eloped by myself!” Lucy said, her voice rising shrill as a schoolgirl’s.

A couple of years later, with World War II ending, her sister raved about a young infantryman home with his head bandaged, arm in a sling.

Sight unseen, Lucy claimed him and proceeded to the men-only bar where he was known to hang out. “I went in and got him,” she said. “I’d never seen him--I’d never seen him!”

The courtship took two months. The marriage lasted 52 years, until Andy Pearson died four years ago. They came to California when land was cheap and bought 40 acres of desert for their wrecking yard. “When we got here,” said Don, who was a child then, “there was nothing. Nothing.”

Home was a trailer. Crashed cars rolled in and Lucy demanded the hubcaps. That’s how it started.

A dozen hubcap catalogs now fill her Navy-surplus desk, beneath paintings of Andy and Lucy--and her hubcaps. She deals by fax and computer. Her Web site, www.hubcapqueen.com, shows her waist-deep in a sea of hubcaps, smiling.

It’s where she plans to be for “as long as I can put one foot in front of the other,” Lucy said. “Don said if I get disabled or something, he’ll get me a wheelchair and I can run up and down the aisles ....

“My hubcaps is my hobby. I talk to people and show them my hubcaps.”