In the Hubcap Realm, One Queen Reigns

When Lucy Pearson looks at hubcaps, she sees beauty. She doesn’t know why. They just speak to her.

“They’re just all so pretty,” she says from behind the counter of Pearsonville Auto Parts in downtown Pearsonville.

There is no traffic light here, no school, no supermarket and, as of two years ago, no post office. Heck, there’s barely a Pearsonville.

Surrounded by desert, rising up from U.S. Highway 395 about 100 miles north of Los Angeles, is a parts store, a gas station, a Burger King and about 50 people, many of them Pearsons.

The government closed the post office a few years back. “They said we wasn’t big enough,” the 70-year-old great-grandmother says, sighing. “When they took the post office, Rand McNally took us off the map.”

That still rankles Lucy. She and her husband, Andrew, founded Pearsonville 35 years ago.

But post office or no, people still flock here to see Lucy’s hubcaps.

With good reason. She’s got 140,000 of them. “The Hub Cap Capital of the World,” reads careful white printing on a cinder-block wall fronting the highway.

It even earned her a spot in the Smithsonian. Last year, Lucy’s fine, weathered face was part of a Harvey Wang photography exhibit chronicling elder Americans at work.

Magazines from all over send writers here. She displays, with great bemusement, glossy publications in French, Arabic and German. She can’t read a word of any of them, but that’s her in the photos, no doubt about it, sporting her trademark bonnet and V-neck apron, smiling sweetly surrounded by silver-colored discs.

Need a hubcap for a 1936 Dodge pickup? Lucy just found one for a guy in Kansas. “It’s not in the best shape,” she says ruefully. “I like to send them in good shape.”

How about a Rolls-Royce wheel cover? Hard to come by and not cheap. She just sold a pair for $350 to a man in Florida. “I’m going to specialize in those,” she says, giggling.

It’s not the money she’s after. She sells hubcaps for about what they cost her.

She likes helping people. She’ll call all over God’s green acre to find a hubcap for a customer. Since she started collecting 20 years ago, she has built quite a network buying, bartering and trading.

Lucy finally moved her inventory indoors when the yard filled up, stacking her treasures in neat rows that nearly touch the ceiling of the auto parts warehouse.

Like most folks, Lucy Pearson has seen the good and bad in life and lived through both. Andrew suffered a stroke three years ago and uses a wheelchair.

Lucy stares at some faraway place when she speaks of that. “He’s not able to do much for himself,” she says, sadness creeping into her voice.

Most of the time, Lucy Pearson smiles. When she gets good and tickled, which happens quite often, her eyes twinkle with a child’s merriment. Sometimes she laughs so hard she doubles over and clasps her knees.

Lucy and Andrew Pearson built this town with their bare hands. They married when Lucy was 18 and a new resident of Dayton, Ohio. She had crossed the Ohio River two years before, fleeing the hard poverty of her daddy’s Kentucky farm and carrying a twang that coats her voice even today.

The Pearsons and their two kids drove west. Driving up 395 one bright day, they saw a sign--and took it as one.

“Land for Sale,” it read. They bought 40 acres. They built a 12-by-12-foot shack, lived without running water and electricity for two years to scrape money together to buy more land.

They were going to build a steakhouse. But since it was situated between Lone Pine and Los Angeles, just about the midpoint of nowhere, stranded motorists kept coming for help at all hours of the day and night.

Andrew, who was a mechanic, decided that he might as well go into business as one.

“Our steakhouse became an auto parts house,” Lucy says. And a towing yard. Which is where the cars come in. Wrecked cars bearing hubcaps, with which Lucy fell in love.

When Andrew wasn’t looking, she would get a tool and pry off the circular beauties. “I think the old lady is losing her marbles,” Andrew would say, watching his wife sit for hours in a mountain of chrome, polishing like she was unearthing gold.

It took her years to sell one. Didn’t really want to part with it. Then people started writing about her. TV crews came. Called her “The Hubcap Queen.”

“Now people come in here all the time saying, ‘Where’s Lucy? Where’s Lucy?’ Sometimes I hide,” she confides.

She’s gotten over that, mostly. Now, whenever some television crew tromps all the way out here to do a feature, she tries to enjoy it. Because it makes Andrew proud.

“He gets so tickled. ‘There’s my Lucy,’ he’ll say. He gets such a kick out of it, you know. It helps him.

“Since people found out about me, now he says, ‘I think the old lady is doin’ all right.’ ”