photo by John Cirillo

I love these fiberglass “muffler men”. This one’s still standing at the SE corner of Illinois and RLThornton Freeway as part of Brothers Mufflers company. Bud and Ben Mufflers was originally called Bud and Ken Mufflers. I seem to remember their first building was on the west side of the freeway access road as you approached Illinois Ave., but that may be the imperfect memory of a little kid.  That would have been around 1965. We used to wonder what happened to Ken and if the “B” in Ben was just an easy way to replace the “K” in Ken.