In the middle of the last century, used car salesmen and the tawdry businesses they fronted became icons of shady business practices. Every city had its used car sales lots, usually all clustered together like strings of blemished pearls lining roads in seedier districts.

I remember as a little kid that Toronto’s were on the Danforth. These lots were huddled into what to a small child appeared to be a carnival of some sort. Multi-coloured flags and banners flapped from wires and strings of lights flashed on and off while blaring signs painted on wooden back fences and on the faces of small sales huts proclaimed great deals and unerring honesty and integrity.

The clowns were there as well, tarnished clowns with the faint odour of a lesser evil. These were the polyester-clad used car salesmen who would say anything and promise anything to make a sale.

Like carnival barkers, they would stand at the front of their car lots and call out to the shills who wandered up and down the sidewalks, searching, often in vain, for a car that might last them longer than the trip home. In those days, almost every car was owned by as sweet, little old lady who had rarely used it. To support this supposition, the cars often had quick $40 paint jobs where Bondo-soaked rags and newspapers covered rust holes and dents. Their odometers were rolled back and black shoe polish was rubbed on to worn, blistered tires.

I remember a couple of cars bought by my father, not the most prudent car buyer. One was a Triumph Mayflower, a razor-edged British saloon that shouted class to a recent English immigrant but in truth was a troublesome, badly designed little tank unable to survive a Canadian winter. We made it about two blocks from the used car lot where he purchased it before it expired in a tiny puff of smoke and rolled to a stop. After a brief walk back to the lot, my father discovered that all of his friends of moments ago no longer had any clear recollection of who he was or what car he had bought.

Since that time, governments have passed volumes of acts and laws that protect the consumer from the tender ministrations of the used car lot and its attendants.

It is now a rather serious criminal offence to alter odometers or rig cars so that a really bad car can pass as a delightful family hauler to the naive buyer. There are laws that disallow rebuilding wrecked cars and offering them as unblemished and even titles proclaim these rebuilders as salvaged cars so that an interested party is under no illusions as to its origins. There are websites that trace car’s damage histories and every car that changes hands in Ontario is accompanied by a title report on its past owners, a mandatory paid service provided by licence offices.

So, where, you might ask, have all those shady used car salesmen gone? Oh, there are still some out there. Despite government licensing and a code of good behaviour, there are some who are not that evolved from their huckster forebears.