CarPort

Wayne Graefen collects interesting stuff. He just bought a whole car in order to get a set of vintage Port-o-Walls. If you’re around my age you remember Port-o-Walls; you probably even had them on one of your cars. Port-o-Walls were rings of white rubber that attached to your blackwall tires to make them look like….
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Fred Summers faults me for not including Studebaker with the cars of 1940 offering sidemounts. Truth to tell, I avoided mentioning Studebaker in the CarPort installment on fender-mounted spares because I wasn’t sure just when the South Bend automaker took them off the options list. To prove his thesis, Fred sends pix of this ’40….
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Our culture deems that when one year gives way to another we take stock and resolve to better ourselves for the next twelvemonth. In 1978, I resolved to build a garage. My car collection was under cover, but it was 25 miles away, which meant I spent more time driving to and fro than I….
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Frank McMullen’s DeSoto is not a trailer queen. It’s not even a beauty queen, and he likes it that way. His 1941 S-8 Deluxe sedan is one of two older cars he uses as daily drivers (the other being a 1960 Chrysler Windsor). Re-painted and re-upholstered by some previous owner, it’s otherwise unrestored and turned….
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Winter officially rolls in at 1:35 PM today. In northern climes, of course, folks have been experiencing winter for some time. Northern Connecticut has plenty of snow for Chris David to try out the Ski-Doo élan that his father, popular Mustang and Tonka authority Dennis David, purchased from a neighbor who was clearing out his….
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I’ve always been glad that, in several erratic attempts to market a little Lincoln, Ford Motor Company has not wasted the name “Zephyr.” Both the Versailles and the more recent LS seemed a little too commonplace to claim the name of the revolutionary low-priced Lincoln introduced for 1936. The Versailles was a Ford Granada with….
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Peugeots and I go back a long way. The year I graduated from elementary school, my parents bought a new Peugeot 403, one of the first imported to the USA. When I got my driver’s license almost three years later, I was allowed to drive it on special occasions (my everyday wheels being either the….
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Wayne Graefen has found this nifty little custom in Junction, Texas, one of the hamlets in Greater Wayne’s World, which comprises much of the central part of the Lone Star State. Built probably in the 1950s, it’s based on a 1941 Ford coupe body and sports a ’53 Studebaker windshield and 1935 Ford wire wheels.….
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Thanksgiving is a time to express gratitude for the good things in our lives. A modern expression of the harvest festivals that have taken place since the beginning of civilization, it recognizes the role of the sun, moon and rain that have brought plenteous crops and raised fatted beasts, as well as the divine providence….
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Eighty-five years ago today, Gertrude Marguerite Bates was born in Morristown, New Jersey. Called “Bunny” by the family, a tradition accorded the youngest child, she was known to kith and kin by that name her entire life, since she never had younger siblings. She didn’t have a particular interest in cars, but she drove them….
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