CarPort

Few, I suspect, are the carfolk who know that Florida’s Amelia Island is named for the second daughter of England’s George II. Fewer still, I’m quite certain, are those who don’t associate the community near Jacksonville with the southeast’s premier automotive concours d’elegance, worthy of mention in the same breath as Pebble Beach or Meadow Brook Hall. Sunday, March 12th, was the eleventh Amelia Island Concours d’Elegance, held on the grounds of the Ritz Carlton and adjacent Golf Club of Amelia Island, and a wonderful day it was.

It’s not a simple task to put 300 cars on a golf course, but the concours chairman, Jacksonville restorer Bill Warner, and his staff have it down to a fine art. Festivities begin on Friday, with a tour for the featured marque, this year Stanley Steamer. A sea of semis unloads show cars in the staging area, and by Saturday afternoon the furniture arrives. At sundown a number of concours cars have already moved into place.

Sunday morning the arrivals began in earnest, first singly, then in convoys. Stanleys, as featured marque, had three classes: coffin nose, condenser, and tiller-steered. A replica of the record-setting Stanley “Rocket” racer was also on display. Judges swung into action by 9:00, and swiftly completed their rounds. By lunchtime, the grounds were seething with spectators. It’s not all Full Classics at Amelia. There are American convertibles, and microcars, like a Peel Trident and the Biscooter, Gabriel Voisin‘s final automotive design. Alternative propulsion was a sub-theme this year, so there were oddities like a turbine-powered Deuce roadster and the last Rauch & Lang, a gas-electric hybrid sedan built for the son of Hetty Green, the Witch of Wall Street.

A newly restored GM Futurliner was on hand, opened in appropriate display mode, and a few promotional cars, such as a Moxie horseback car. Several parades of automotive genres took place throughout the day, and by afternoon the various prizes were announced. Best of Show was awarded to Richard Riegel’s 1932 DuPont sport phaeton, and the Concours de Sport trophy to the 1961 Ferrari 250TRI of Peter Sachs. Honoree for this year’s event was racing driver Johnny Rutherford.

As shadows grew long, the field of cars took leave. By sundown, only immobile vehicles remained, awaiting a tow, and a few reminders of the elegant day. Did one of the Mercedes drivers forget his hardtop?

It all started aboard the Queen Elizabeth (if the current ocean liner is “QE2,” can we call its predecessor “QE1”?). Donald Healey, the British designer who had been building limited-production Riley-engined Healey Silverstone sports cars, Westland roadsters, Abbott dropheads and Elliot saloons, was on his way to America in search of Cadillac engines to pep up his cars. Aboard ship he met George Mason, head of Nash Motors, and the two men hit it off. “If you can’t get engines from Cadillac,” George told Donald, “come see me.” He couldn’t, so he did.

Thus was born the Nash-Healey, an American drive train in an English chassis and, at first, English body. Mason insisted on a Nash-themed grille, so the prototype borrowed a snout from Bill Flajole’s NXI, a concept car that grew up to become the Metropolitan. The production Nash-Healey, which used the grille of the 1951 Ambassador, debuted at Paris and London in the Autumn of 1950. Healey campaigned several of the cars at LeMans with considerable success in 1950-53. The Healey-modified engine, a Nash Ambassador ohv six with aluminum head and twin SU carburetors, became an optional engine for US Ambassadors in 1953.

Mason didn’t like the British-bodied car, which was built in aluminum by Panelcraft. He had Pininfarina, then doing some contract work for Nash, build up a more voluptuous body in steel, and this became the 1952 Nash-Healey. Its signature grille, which surrounded the headlights, was adapted for Nashes in 1955 and ’56. A Nash-Healey coupe, appropriately called “LeMans,” was introduced at the 1953 Chicago Auto Show and replaced the roadster in production. In mid-1954, the coupe was given a new roof profile with “dog leg” C-pillar.

The 1954 merger of Nash with Hudson and Mason’s subsequent untimely death, not to mention the $1,000 dollar loss the company took on each car, resulted in cancellation of the program after 506 cars were built. Healey, however, became a household word on the success of the Healey Hundred, which enjoyed a long career as the Austin-Healey.

Perhaps only 30 Nash-Healeys were the late style coupe, one of whose remains grace the top of this page. The car was snapped a couple of years ago at Ed Moore’s magical Bellingham Auto Sales in Massachusetts. It was in pieces when it left there last month, but Ed still has some Nash-Healey parts and information, and lots of other cars.

Willys-Overland eagerly touted the luggage capacity of the new Aero models in 1952: “24 cubic feet of space – ample for a large family.” They even bragged about the primitive exterior hinges: “outside where they can’t bite into luggage.” That’s quite remarkable for what was a comparatively small car; the Packard Patrician rated but 30 cubic feet.

We take luggage capacity pretty much for granted, forgetting that early cars had none at all. Any passenger suitcases had to go on the roof or behind racks on the running board. The first “indoor” luggage space was the trunk, just that, a steamer trunk fastened to the rear of the car. By the early 1930s, automakers started to provide inside storage with an outside door; by mid-decade the “touring trunk” became popular, though the first ones, like this 1935 Hudson, were top loading.

Our Ford Falcon wagon was a vast cavern, more than adequate for our “large family” of five. Just as adequate, it turned out, was its successor, a 1970 Chevy Impala, another 30-cubic-footer (by GM’s calculation – Automotive Industries counted its “usable luggage space” barely half that). The Chevy Suburban that replaced it, first in a long succession of Foster ‘Burbs, made capacity almost irrelevant.

If luggage-measuring systems are comparable, today’s cars are puny by Packard or Impala standards. The Lincoln Town Car counts only 21 cubic feet of space, though it’s not the largest American sedan trunk. Perhaps surprisingly, that distinction goes to the Ford Five Hundred/Mercury Montego twins with 21.2. Not enough space? You can still put things on the roof.

Need a trunk for your old car? You can find one at Hershey. At Beaulieu Autojumble you can also find vendors of
vintage luggage to put on your vintage roof.

Chances are you associate Consumer Reports with boring, sensible cars – transportation appliances. Chances are you also, like me, sneak off to the library to consult their ratings when buying your own daily driver, whether it’s new or, like mine, well used.

Yesterday
CR opened their
test site to the automotive and mainstream media, giving us a glimpse of how those ratings are made and revealing that there are plenty of car guys and gals on their 21-member staff. Scribblers on hand were as diverse as columnists for the San Francisco Chronicle, the online broadcast “Auto Lab” and popular Professional Car Reporter
Gregg Merksamer.

Senior Director David
“Champ” Champion led the tour of the facility, located on a
327-acre campus originally the site of Connecticut Dragway. Included were demonstrations of CR‘s tests for
cornering abilility,
road handling, headlight performance and
wet-road braking. Particularly convincing was a dramatic demo of electronic stability control, a feature Champ calls the “single most important recent advance in safety.” Comparative runs showed that ESC could make the difference between
controlling a car in an
evasive maneuver and
losing it. He and the CR staff feel it should be standard equipment on all cars.

CR testing now includes all types of cars, economy to luxury, compact to SUV. A dedicated course called
“Rock Hill” sorts out 4×4 prowess, rating yesterday’s cars, in descending order of agility,
Land Rover,
Toyota Tundra,
Hummer H3 and
Ford Explorer (the lack of daylight under the Explorer exposes its Achilles heel – its skid plates got a workout). Sports cars, like the
Mazda MX-5 Miata and Pontiac Solstice, are included, as are hot hatches like the VW GTI. Interesting ongoing investigations are a “grease burning” modification to a
VW diesel and aftermarket supercharger on a
Toyota. Of course practical tests, like
cargo capacity and installation of
child seats, are still a staple of CR evaluations.

CR had an agenda for all this festivity, the launch of the annual
Auto Issue, which
debuts today. Of no surprise to anyone was the fact that all ten Top Picks are
Japanese (last year’s single holdout was the Ford Focus). New (or redesigned) TPs are the
Honda Civic,
Toyota Highlander Hybrid,
Infiniti M35x and Honda Ridgeline pickup. They join returning alumni Honda Accord, Acura TL, Subaru Forester, Honda Odyssey, Toyota Prius and Subaru Impreza WRX/STi.

While all CR-tested cars are new (they buy them from dealers and keep them for 6-8 months and about that many thousand miles) there’s evidence that somebody on staff has a fondness for
old cars –
British ones at that.

I come from a Franklin family. Not descended from Ben, the Foster household had several Franklin cars during the 1920s. The last one, a 1928 sedan, was
owned by my
grandmother into the mid-1930s (interestingly, she never drove, nor did my grandfather; they had a chauffeur and in later years their children took over the driving duties.)

The H.H. Franklin company, of Syracuse, New York, built air-cooled cars from 1902 to 1934, the first being
light runabouts with transversely-mounted four-cylinder engines. Though the drive train soon took on a conventional north-south orientation, Franklins retained distinctive looks until the mid-twenties. Because a radiator was not required, the frontal appearance was entirely functional, to 1910 a “barrel front,” through 1920 as the “coal scuttle,” later the “horse collar.”

In order to look more “mainstream,” a
false radiator was adopted for 1925.
Charles Lindberg christened the new Airman model for 1928, the first Franklin with four-wheel hydraulic brakes. Amelia Earhart had one, too, and by accounts she liked it better than her
Terraplane.

Pictures of “our” Franklins have not come to light. My late father remembered that the first one was a “horse collar,” the
1928 sedan much like
Lindberg’s, which survives at The Henry Ford museum. When Franklin adopted a mascot in the 1920s, it was a
rearing lion, although in the “Lindberg era” some cars had a
Spirit of St. Louis ornament. Franklin engines were distinctive, too, all with overhead valves and
cooling ducts reminiscent of Briggs and Stratton.
Full-elliptic springs were used almost until the end.
This chassis dates from 1929, the first year of the steel frame – earlier chassis were made of wood.

By
1930, Franklins were aping the competition, and with the
Olympic model of 1933 used bodies and chassis from Reo. Times were tough, but Franklin didn’t wince, introducing a
huge 144-inch wheelbase
V12 model. It didn’t help, and after 360 cars in 1934 Mr. Franklin simply gave up.

If I were shopping for an interesting 1920s car, I’d look carefully at this
1929 Franklin
rumble seat
coupe owned by Pamela Kane. It’s an older restoration, but very
presentable and practical. Located in Connecticut, it’s currently for sale. Contact Pamela and Greg Kane for further particulars, or the H.H. Franklin Club to learn more about Franklin cars.

The Fosters haven’t given up on air cooling. What’s not to like about a car that never overheats and needs no antifreeze? My daughter Harriet, namesake of her Franklin-owning forebear, has
her own fresh-air car, inherited from her grandmother.

The weather forecasters promised us a blizzard this past Sunday, and a
blizzard, of a sort, is what we got. “Blizzard” is defined as “a violent windstorm with dry, driving snow and intense cold.” The National Weather Service quantifies this as 35 mph winds and quarter mile visibility or less (there is no specific temperature requirement). Most people had hunkered down at home for the storm, so there was
little traffic nor need for frantic
snow plowing.

Although this was nothing like the Blizzard of 1888, the gold standard for storms in my youth when a few living folk could still remember it, or the Blizzard of 1978, which shut Connecticut down for three days, it was enough to jog my memories of snow removal. I grew up in northwestern Connecticut where it snows more seriously than in this southern corner of the state. Ordinary snow plowing was handled by dump trucks,
Chevys,
Dodges or
Internationals, for example, fitted with snow plows. Some towns had
Walter Snow Fighters, at least one of which was equipped with a
rotary wing plow.

For really serious snow drifts there was the
Klauer SnoGo, which had a front-mounted two- or three-bank auger ahead of a rotary blower. The thing consumed so much power that a
dedicated engine, mounted on the rear, was required to drive it. Klauer also built smaller SnoGos, for mounting on standard truck chassis. You can still buy a SnoGo; they’re now made by Wausau-Everest of New Berlin, Wisconsin.

My driveway measures some 240 feet from street to garage, too long for a geezer like me to shovel. My venerable
Gravely, about which you’ve read before, sprang to
action and had it
cleaned up in about two hours. One day I must re-activate the
Jeep left to me by my father. With a little work on the brakes, exhaust and generator, it would do much more than occupy a
corner of the garage.

By Monday morning, the
driveway and the
street were both clear, the sun was out and the temperature was rising. Life was back to normal, which includes not working on the Jeep.

Wayne Graefen has a keen eye for old cars. He spotted this Pontiac sedan delivery from the fast lane of I-35 while towing a new acquisition home from his Kansas vacation. Closer investigation showed it to be a
1950 model, of which 2,158 were built, some (perhaps most), like this one, with six-cylinder engines, others with eights.

Sedan deliveries comprise a nearly forgotten art form. Intended for light delivery duties, they were based on car chassis, less commodious but more stylish than the truck-based
panel van. The first ones were simply
blind-quartered two-door sedans, when all cars were boxes, with
barn doors cut into the back. Later, many were based on two-door station wagons, although not this Pontiac as GM didn’t build two-door wagons until 1955. It is said that Oldsmobile built one sedan delivery as a feasibility exercise. We don’t know if this one is real, or simply a Pontiac with tail- and nose job. It’s not a Chevrolet derivative because Chevy, unlike Pontiac, had
separable rear fenders.

Ford, which had built sedan deliveries from 1940, abandoned them with the advent of F-series trucks in 1948. It took the new wagons for 1952 to provide a base for the Courier sedan delivery (like this’ 53), essentially a Ranch Wagon with a side-hinged rear door. From 1957, the Courier was given a liftgate (check the heavy hinges; the 1959-60 Chev sedan deliveries had a similar arrangement). For 1959, Ford reduced the number of Courier-specific parts, jettisoning the blind quarters and liftgate. In fact, the 5,141 Couriers built that year were simply
Ranch Wagons with no rear seat. In 1960, the sedan delivery moved to the Falcon line.

Chrysler Corporation was not a big player in the sedan delivery sweepstakes, but did turn out this handsome
1956 Dodge (or at least someone did).

Ultimately, the light vans, Econoline, Chevy Van and Dodge A100, put the sedan delivery out of business, although the Falcon delivery lasted through 1965. Curiously, Chevrolet resurrected the genre in 1971 with the Vega Panel Express, continued through 1975. Ford’s
Pinto Cruising Wagon was somewhat reminiscent, too, if one ignored the quirky porthole. CarPort’s St. Louis Bureau Chief
Fred Summers still has his, purchased new in 1980.

Has Wayne bought the pretty Poncho? Those who should know are being uncannily evasive.

On January 26, 1906,
Fred Marriott became the first person to drive an automobile more that two miles in a minute, when he was timed at 127.66 mph in the
Stanley “Rocket” racer on Ormond Beach, Florida. Exactly a century later, his great-grandson
Robert Landry, Jr., re-enacted
his feat (at a slower speed) in a 3/4-scale
replica Rocket built in 1971. Robert’s
remarkable resemblance to
his forebear gave spectators a sense of re-living history.

Thousands flocked to the beach for the centenary celebrations on January 26, 2006, sponsored jointly the the Stanley Museum and the City of Ormond Beach. Festivities began with a
flyover of vintage aircraft, followed by exhibition runs of vintage
steam and
gasoline cars.
Sarah Stanley, great-granddaughter of inventor
F.E. Stanley, owner of the original Rocket, also drove the replica, as did Robert’s brother
Steve Landry. Sarah’s sister,
Constance Stanley Boudeman, made a beach run in a replica Stanley Vanderbilt racer built by her husband Robert.

Celebrities turning out for the event included drag racing legend
Don “Big Daddy” Garlits, in his 1936 Ford hot rod, and vintage auto icon
Dave Brownell driving George Dragone’s 1914 Hotchkiss. Cameo vehicles included the
Leslie Special, film star of The Great Race.

Following the beach runs, members of the
Marriott and Stanley families dedicated a
monument to the 1906 speed record at Ormond’s
Birthplace of Speed Park. Chairing the events were Susan Davis
(driving) of the Stanley Museum and Dan Smith
(directing) for Ormond Beach.

During the week there were several
tours for vintage cars, including visits to St. Augustine and its
historic lighthouse.
Steam cars also
dedicated a preserved section of the historic
brick-paved Dixie Highway in Flagler County. At festival’s end, the replica Rocket was
whisked back to the Daytona USA museum where it will be on display until the next anniversary re-enactment.

I’ve always had a fondness for the Edsel. As a car-consumed young person, I eagerly followed the gestation of Ford’s “E-car” in the press and broadcast news reports. When the car was unveiled on September 4, 1957, just five days before my 13th birthday, I was elated. The car was
dramatic in a way that hadn’t been seen since, perhaps, the Step-down Hudson of 1948. I was not, however, enamored of the name, for unlike most Americans I was fully aware of Edsel Ford and his automotive legacy – and shared the Ford family view that attaching his name to an automobile accrued some measure of risk. Little did we know, however, that it would become a synonym for failure.

The 1958 Edsel was
bold in its styling, which people either liked or hated (I liked it; still do). I was also bold in its market approach: two niches in the Ford catalog, one between Mercury and Lincoln and another between Ford and Mercury. There were two sizes and four series, from the top
Citation and
Corsair on a 124-inch wheelbase,
Pacer and
Ranger on Ford’s 118 and 116-inch wheelbases. Exclusive Edsel features included
“Teletouch” push button transmission control on the steering wheel, a novel
heating and ventilating system, and a
dashboard-mounted
tachometer and compass. Engines were designated not by their horsepower or displacement but by their
torque figures.

Any one of these innovations might have been risky; together they were a disaster. The public stayed away in droves, and the make that was supposed to plug alleged “holes” in the Ford catalog sold barely 63,000 cars, less than half Mercury’s total and one fifth that of Buick or one third of Pontiac, and it was supposed to compete with both of them.

For 1959, retrenchment was the word, one wheelbase and two series of Ford-based cars,
Corsair and Ranger. The “horsecollar” grille became an ornament on a Ford nose, though the rear retained its
boomerang fin theme. Sales fell by a third, in a generally improving market.

By the 1960 model year it was really over. The car became a
Ford clone with a
grille resembling the previous year’s Pontiac.
Inside and out it was plain that it was a Ford, with
Ford engines – including a six introduced for 1959. Conventional wisdom says the
convertible, with 76 built, was the rarest, but acutally the
nine-passenger Villager
wagon, at 59 units, was the champion underachiever.

On November 19, 1959, the Edsel was given a lethal injection and the last car rolled off the line. In retrospect it seems like a foolhardy venture, but it must have seemed like a good idea at the time. The Edsel is sometimes described as poorly engineered, but aside from features, like Teletouch, not fully developed it was no worse than any other 1958 Ford product.

Were I to indulge in an Edsel, which one would I buy? I’d probably go whole hog with a
’58 Citation convertible. It’s unlikely it would be a prizewinner; it certainly wouldn’t be a
trailer queen.

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 whitewalls, without the expense of actually buying new tires. You simply deflated your tire, broke the bead, and stuffed the Port-o-Wall between the tire and the rim. Re-inflated, voila, your tires looked like genuine whitewalls, the rings now held on by tire pressure.

You could buy Port-o-Walls at Western Auto or Pep Boys or from the ubiquitous
J.C. Whitney catalog, which good customers received about once a week. J.C. Whitney sold them for
$3.95 a set. For $7.95 you could get them in
genuine butyl rubber, which wouldn’t turn yellow after a few months. If you didn’t have $3.95 you could buy a kit of white rubber to
paint your whitewalls on. Despite what the catalog said, they were not so good with tubeless tires, but by that time real whitewalls had come down in price and increased in availability.

One of the first things I did when I started driving the family
Nash Rambler was to put on a set of Port-o-Walls. The car had always looked
rather drab without them. When I bought my ’40 DeSoto I got a set for it, too, although by the time
this picture was taken I had removed them to put on my friend Tod’s
’36 Plymouth: They were portable, after all… (The red wheels on the DeSoto look odd without whitewalls. With the Port-o-Walls I thought they looked nifty. I got the idea from a 1950 Buick, which used a similar accent scheme.)

Chrysler Corporation used another approach to whitewalls after World War II. Many Mopars came with
metal whitewalls (“spats?”) that were held on like a wheel cover. Smaller in diameter than real whitewalls or Port-o-Walls, they provided a nice accent to the car. To my mind, a correctly-restored
1946-48 Chrysler should have them.