What I Believe: Weird Wally Smith
Weird Wally Smith, the used-car dealer and ruler of Weird Country, would like to take teenage girls for a drive.
He’d take them out in his 2005 beige metallic Cadillac, which has a license plate that says “Ol Bastard,” through neighborhoods where the homes are solid and the grass is soft and kids are playing in the driveway, and he’d ask them: Do you know there are two parents behind that front door?
Then the man who puts up billboards that say “This Is Weird Country” would drive them through neighborhoods where many single mothers live and he’d point them out, sitting on the front steps of old houses that were made into triplexes by a slumlords – neighborhoods like the one near his car lot, 2323 P St., the same one where he grew up as the son of parents who didn’t go to high school.
And he’d tell those teenage girls: This is where you’re going to live the rest of your life if you’re going to have two or three kids out of wedlock. So now what would you rather have?
He’d hope they wouldn’t think he was a weird old man, just someone who cares about them.
“Not enough of us people are telling our kids these kinds of things,” he says.
It doesn’t take a village, he says. It takes two dedicated parents and accountability and a sense of shame.
That’s the way he and his wife brought up their daughter, now a physician in Indianapolis with a physician husband and two boys.
Weird Wally has owned Wally’s Used Cars since 1975. He’s sold more than 22,000 cars so far and talked to many more people than that, so many he feels he’s almost has earned a diploma in psychology.
Say he sees a guy walking up to the door. He can tell if the guy wants to buy a car or just use the bathroom. Say a customer sits down in his office and starts spilling his life story. Sometimes the best thing he can do is just to listen.
Over the years, he’s seen more and more young men come to his lot and open a hood and not know the difference between an alternator and a compressor or how to change the oil.
He’s seen more young mothers come in alone, looking for a car. The other day, one told him she had two kids, as if she were proud of it.
He’d like to tell all the girls who aren’t pregnant yet that they hold the keys to a better life.
I don’t need no damn man.
Yeah. But your children do.
That’s what he’d like to tell them.
This country is heading in the wrong direction, he says, and it’s weird.
Colleen Kenney is on leave. Reach her editors at 473-7306 or citydesk@journalstar.com
He’d take them out in his 2005 beige metallic Cadillac, which has a license plate that says “Ol Bastard,” through neighborhoods where the homes are solid and the grass is soft and kids are playing in the driveway, and he’d ask them: Do you know there are two parents behind that front door?
Then the man who puts up billboards that say “This Is Weird Country” would drive them through neighborhoods where many single mothers live and he’d point them out, sitting on the front steps of old houses that were made into triplexes by a slumlords – neighborhoods like the one near his car lot, 2323 P St., the same one where he grew up as the son of parents who didn’t go to high school.
And he’d tell those teenage girls: This is where you’re going to live the rest of your life if you’re going to have two or three kids out of wedlock. So now what would you rather have?
He’d hope they wouldn’t think he was a weird old man, just someone who cares about them.
“Not enough of us people are telling our kids these kinds of things,” he says.
It doesn’t take a village, he says. It takes two dedicated parents and accountability and a sense of shame.
That’s the way he and his wife brought up their daughter, now a physician in Indianapolis with a physician husband and two boys.
Weird Wally has owned Wally’s Used Cars since 1975. He’s sold more than 22,000 cars so far and talked to many more people than that, so many he feels he’s almost has earned a diploma in psychology.
Say he sees a guy walking up to the door. He can tell if the guy wants to buy a car or just use the bathroom. Say a customer sits down in his office and starts spilling his life story. Sometimes the best thing he can do is just to listen.
Over the years, he’s seen more and more young men come to his lot and open a hood and not know the difference between an alternator and a compressor or how to change the oil.
He’s seen more young mothers come in alone, looking for a car. The other day, one told him she had two kids, as if she were proud of it.
He’d like to tell all the girls who aren’t pregnant yet that they hold the keys to a better life.
I don’t need no damn man.
Yeah. But your children do.
That’s what he’d like to tell them.
This country is heading in the wrong direction, he says, and it’s weird.
Colleen Kenney is on leave. Reach her editors at 473-7306 or citydesk@journalstar.com
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