I’m surprised that no one has written a song about Blackwell’s Corner, the service station at the intersection of Highway’s 33 and 46 that was James Dean’s last stop before the accident. The business is still going strong and has interesting James Dean pictures, paintings, and other memoribilia on the walls of the convenience store area.

James Dean had stopped there primarily to check out another race car headed toward the track at Salinas that had stopped for gas. If James had just left a few seconds earlier or later he might have missed crashing into the Ford sedan of Donald Turnipseed. Them’s the breaks.

An interesting aside: For many decades the Porsche auto company downplayed the 550 Spyder for advertising purposes in the US because of its connection to Dean’s death. This paranoia has now passed and Porsche recently announced they may be launching a new 550 Spyder model as their entry level car model. Fiberglass bodied versions of the car that mount on a Volkswagen Beetle chassis have been popular since the 1980′s and remain so today.