CarPort

In 1907, Edward and Mary Harkness bought a summer cottage at Waterford, Connecticut, on the shore of Long Island Sound. They named it “ Eolia,” after the Greek god of wind, appropriate since the sea breezes and gales were ever whistling though their porch. Edward S. Harkness was an heir to the Standard Oil fortune,….
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My neighbor Dale Treadway snapped this Hudson while vacationing at Cape Cod last summer. It’s a 1948 or ’49 Commodore – only the interiors differed between those two years. He spotted it in the parking lot at Rock Harbor in Orleans, and noted that it carries a regular passenger registration, a number issued in November….
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General Motors has been prominent in the news lately, most recently regarding the bankruptcy of Delphi Automotive Systems, the recently-independent successor to the United Motors parts subsidiary. The troubles of this emancipated child are only one symptom of a larger corporate struggle. It’s been popular lately for pundits to call The General a “health care….
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I remember distinctly my first meeting with a Riley. It was an RMD drophead coupe like this one, and it belonged to cartoonist Robert Osborn, a friend of my parents. The illustrator of, inter alia, John Keats’ 1958 book The Insolent Chariots, which excoriated the excesses of 1950s Detroit, Osborn might seem an unlikely Riley….
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In 1905, Milton Hershey built a chocolate factory in south central Pennsylvania. Over the next few years he built a model town around it, and began construction of an amusement park. Fifty years later, the newly-chartered Hershey Region of the Antique Automobile Club of America held their first National Fall Meet at Hershey. It rained,….
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Not so long ago we pondered this timbered Mopar. In 1946, Chrysler printed literature for five wood-bodied cars, but put only two of them, the Town & Country convertible and the Town and Country sedan, into production. According to author and historian Richard Langworth, seven “Club Coupes,” which were really an early manifestation of the….
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You’ve got to hand it to the Brits. They’ve come up with an elegant word to describe what we call an “old car, rusty metal and automobilia flea market.” Coined by former National Motor Museum director Michael Ware, “autojumble,” derived from “jumble sale,” the British equivalent of rummage sale, rolls all those meanings into a….
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I first met Jim Schwantes in 2003, when he joined the Society of Automotive Historians. An enthusiast and collector of automotive advertising and art, Jim wondered about the 1948 Packard ad seen here, whether it represented an actual place or whether the location was entirely a creation of the artist. The signpost tells us that….
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Five weeks ago the CarPort explored the mysteries of convertible windows, a subject which resonates with a number of our regular readers. One of the oddities discovered in researching that story was the three-passenger Chrysler Town & Country convertible, and we speculated that no such car was ever built. Clearly there was literature for such….
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Where’d you get those Jeepsters? The Larz Anderson Auto Museum in Brookline, Massachusetts, got them through its Collector Car Program, where donated cars are sold to help finance museum operations and recycle cars back to the enthusiast community. This 1949 car is from the first Jeepster generation, 1948-50. Originally powered with the 134 cubic inch….
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