Random picture thread
- Thread starter HEMI-ITIS
- Start date
lots of wild turkeys around here, if they tasted better I would shoot some again
August 14, 1976 — the sun beat down on the two-lane blacktop outside Woody’s Grocery & Service in Ashland, Kentucky, as Linda Jo Carter leaned against her dad’s ’75 Dodge Ramcharger, sipping a cold Pepsi like a rebel queen of summer. The small town rumbled with the spirit of Bicentennial pride—flags waved, Elvis still ruled the airwaves, and Ford trucks were built like tanks. “Folks around here don’t just drive,” Linda once said, “they cruise like it’s church.” And on that lazy Saturday, she embodied everything America loved about itself: freedom, denim, horsepower, and a thirst for something more.
Woody himself had run the store since ’59, fixing flat tires out back and slicing baloney by hand up front. The place was more than a pit stop—it was where veterans swapped war stories and high school seniors planned joyrides to Myrtle Beach. Linda’s grandpa fought in WWII, her brother had just gotten back from Saigon, and her cousin was racing stock cars at the Ohio Valley Speedway. That summer, gas was cheap, dreams were loud, and every backroad from West Virginia to Tennessee echoed with the hum of youth.
Now, the paint may be peeling on Woody’s old siding, but that photo—snapped by her boyfriend with a Kodak Instamatic—still circulates in diners and Facebook groups. “That was America,” one old-timer says. “And Linda Jo? She was our blonde thunderbolt.” Her smile in that snapshot? Timeless proof that in the heart of the Rust Belt, beauty and grit shared the same engine.
Similar threads
