CarPort

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 of 2001. That implies that it’s in everyday use, not a collector car.

It could be what I call a “summer car.” When I was young I spent many summers at The Cape, and it was common to see older cars, often touring cars or
woodie wagons, on the road. Massachusetts allowed six-month renewals for registration and insurance, so many folk kept a car at their summer cottage for use from July until Labor Day. Friends of ours on Nantucket had a
1930 Lincoln “summer car” in the 1950s and it may still be on the island. In eastern Massachusetts the woodies were called
“beach wagons” for obvious reasons.

Alternatively, it could be in regular use by somebody who simply prefers old cars. For six years we drove a 1963 Ford Falcon as our family car, and it was replaced by a
1970 Chevy Impala that was so roomy and useful we found we didn’t need a minivan. These cars were 16 to 21 years old when we had them, nowhere near automotive senility. In fact, a 56-year-old Hudson is entirely satisfactory for everday use.

In 1948, Hudson introduced its new “Step-down” design, so named because the floor was level with the bottom of the outer frame rail. Thus one stepped down to get into it. Overbuilt by today’s standards, the Step-down had a
steel cage that completely surrounded the passenger compartment. A high belt line gave the “greenhouse”
small windows, unusual at the time but now coming into vogue with the
Chrysler C300. Hudson also had a
new six-cylinder engine for 1948, with full pressure lubrication for the first time in any Hudson.

In 1951, Hudson introduced the
Hornet, a new top-of-the-line model with an enlarged six. It not only had plenty of
luggage space, with the new optional
“Twin H-Power” dual carburetion it had plenty of power.
Marshall Teague, Herb Thomas and
Tim Flock were among the Hudson drivers to knock
Oldsmobile out of the NASCAR championship in 1951 and retain the title through 1954. With the new 308 cubic inch Hornet engine setting records, the old eight, a
pre-war design with
splash oiling, was redundant and was dropped after 1952.

Hudson’s 1954 marriage with Nash to form
American Motors resulted in
1955 models that were more Nash than Hudson. In fact, the best-selling Hudson in ’55 was a rebadged
Rambler Cross Country wagon. The
1954 cars were the last Step-downs and, to many, the last real Hudsons. The final automobile to wear a Hudson badge was the
1957 Hornet, a car
familiar to all CarPort regulars.

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 company that makes automobiles.”

Corporate cutoffs are nothing new at GM. In December 2000 it was announced that Oldsmobile, GM’s longest-lived marque and a founding division of the company, was being abandoned. Then followed a starvation diet of no new product development. Finally, on April 29, 2004, the last Oldsmobile, an Alero sedan, came down the line.

Things had long seemed oh, so promising. Ransom Olds’ popular curved dash model propelled the marque to first place in sales until overtaken by Ford in 1906, and it remained in the nation’s mind in song for years afterwards. Even during the rather unremarkable
1930s, Oldsmobile trundled along in 5th to 7th place in the industry.

Things picked up in 1940, when Olds became GM’s “idea car,” introducing
Hydra-Matic, the first successful fully-automatic gearbox (thanx to The Auto Channel). Engineering continued apace with the
Rocket short-stroke ohv engine for 1949, making Oldsmobile the
NASCAR champ for three seasons.
“Jetfire” turbocharging of the intermediate aluminum V8 for 1962-3 foretold the rise of turbos in the 1980s, and the daring
Toronado of 1966 proved once and for all that front wheel drive was viable with big engines. (It must be said that the
concept for the
drive package did not originate at GM. It was patented by
Frederick Hooven, an engineer under contract to Ford Motor Company, and was intended for the 1961-63
“cigar-shaped” Thunderbirds.
Brock Yates says GM licensed the Hooven/Ford patent for the Toro and similarly-configured Cadillac Eldorado of 1967.)

Despite setbacks like the baroquely-styled
1958 models and the ill-conceived
diesel conversion of gasoline V8s to campaign the energy-challenged late ’70s, Olds enjoyed halcyon days in which the
Cutlass became the best-selling single vehicle model in the United States. Even after it was deposed by the Ford F-150 in 1982, the front-drive
Cutlass Ciera copped the title for passenger cars. Alas, all good things come to an end, and the division seemed to lose heart. When the distinctive Aurora was introduced for 1995 it was bereft of any external Oldsmobile badge. The rest is history.

Many pundits feel that further brand-letting is in the cards. Buick and Pontiac are alternately rumored to be the next kids to be put on the block. My friend Paul Lashbrook thinks GM may cut the catalog back to simply Chevrolet and Cadillac. He may be right.

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 owner. He bought the car, however, perhaps on impulse, from a New York Times classified around 1959, and drove it for the rest of his nine-decade life.

Don Irving’s
Riley RMD is just like Osborn’s, only it’s been fully restored. The RM-series Rileys are my favorites, because they combine traditional British lines with an emergent streamlining, in the way of that other under-appreciated car, the MG TF. Round and rectangular gauges in a
varnished wood dashboard remind one of an old Atwater Kent radio. Ugly sister of the RMD was the RMC roadster, a three-seater car with an enormous, ungainly trunk. Intended to appeal to Americans, it found its best market in Australia, and even that was disappointing.

Victor Riley of Coventry was a bicycle manufacturer turned automaker, which enabled him to describe his automobiles “As Old as the Industry; As Modern as the Hour.” Intially they looked like bicycles, but by the 1930s Rileys were among the most stylish of cars, the Kestrel sedans
of 1934-38 being a case in point. Alongside the RMC and RMD open cars, Riley built both 1.5-liter and 2.5-liter saloons, the RMA/RME amd RMB/RMF series, respectively. Don also has an
RMF, which, when I saw it, was
completing restoration. The
Riley engine is sometimes mistakenly described as double overhead cam. It has two camshafts, but they are located high in the block and work the valves with short pushrods.

The last “real Riley” is usually considered the 1953-57 Pathfinder, which, although it shares a body with the Wolseley 6/90, has a real Riley engine. Victor Riley was not a good businessman, and his company was absorbed into the Nuffield Organisation (William Morris’s empire) in 1938. Morris, of course, joined with Austin to form the British Motor Corporation in 1952, and Riley cars could not escape becoming badge-egineered corporate clones. The One Point Five of 1957-65 was a Morris Oxford/Wolseley knock-off, and a larger, six-cylinder 2.6 borrowed the MG ZA Magnette body shell, a la Wolseley 6/90. With the finned “Farina” body shell of 1959 came the Riley 4/68, later (with a larger, 1,622 cc version of the
BMC “B” series engine) the 4/72. The
4/72 continued in production until the Riley badge was retired in 1969; while not an exciting car it did retain a
wooden dash, albeit with all round instruments. Perhaps the rarest Riley is the
Riviera, a modified 4/72 created by Wessex Motors of Salisbury, Wiltshire. Dressed up with wire wheels and bonnett-mounted driving lights, the Riviera had subtly-bobbed tail fins. Amazingly, this exact car survives. Almost comic among the recent Rileys were the
Elf, an upmarket Mini, and the revived Kestrel, a version of the 1100 and 1300 BMC siblings.

If you crave more information about Rileys, there’s plenty on Rob’s Riley Page. I’ll leave the last word about Riley to Robert Osborn. In his 1982
autobiography he wrote that his RMD had lines that “only a capable artist could have devised.”

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, and a quarter of the cars left.

Weather has been a regular curse of the Hershey meet ever since, although in good years the autumnal sun of Indian summer makes browsing the 10,000 vendor spaces and 1,500+ car auto show an aficionado’s delight. If Beaulieu Autojumble is just what the doctor ordered, Hershey is an overdose.

The fiftieth anniversary Hershey Region meet (there was one earlier Hershey event hosted by another region) was true to tradition, with diluvian results. Before the rains came, however, there were two warm, partly cloudy days, sufficient to see at least a majority of the wares on sale. Those who came looking for cars could have chosen a nearly-original 1929 Cadillac Fleetwood cabriolet, a Franklin touring car, a Crosley Hotshot, a “heart-front” Brewster Ford, or a ’40 Buick phaeton. Plymouth fanciers would have been too late for this ’33 sedan, “SOLD” by the time we got there. Milk route followers liked this Divco, and project participants grooved on a 1915 Saxon chassis. For liliputians there were both an American Austin and a Bantam.

Probably the majority of Hersheygoers were looking for parts. For them there were trunks, hub caps, automobilia, engine blocks, even radio city. Some vendors were eclectic, others remarkably specific. While some vendors boasted of their years of attendance, buyers came with multiple generations. For 50 bucks you could have bought a 1924 Cad rad, but why? No part of it seemed usable.

The rains started early Friday morning. In past years, the whole meet would quickly turn to mud, but now much of the area is paved, and fewer than half the fields require assisted extrication. As the precipitation became more earnest, huddled masses took shelter. Some, like the Society of Automotive Historians, packed up early, retiring president Joe Freeman and Benz Award chairman Don Keefe appropriating table cloths for rain gear.

Friday evening gave welcome respite at the SAH awards banquet, where The Stanley Steamer: America’s Legendary Steam Car received the prestigious Cugnot Award for the best book of 2004 in the field of automotive history.

By Saturday morning, however, the skies were still falling, with no relief promised for a week. I reluctantly hitched up my hacienda by dawn’s early light and began my homeward trek.

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 hardtop convertible, were built, and a single “Brougham,” a two-door sedan. The “Roadster” style, according to Chrysler designers interviewed by Langworth, existed as artwork only.

Thus we wondered who built this roadster, sold at auction in Phoenix, and how and when. The answer arrived from CarPort visitors within days. Dave Duricy, resourceful proprietor of DeSotoland, sent several pertinent links. RM Auctions, which sold the roadster for $143,000 in 2002, described the car as built from a Windsor sedan (sic) by the late Town and Country collector Lloyd Mayes (1933-2003). The project took several years. The car was accurately described in the auction catalog, so the tire kickers that told Fred Summers it was one of three originals were either spinning yarns or perhaps confusing it with the brougham. In any case, thanks to Dave’s web-crawling skills we now know who and how, though not precisely when.

Langworth notes that the three-passenger roadster did eventually see production, but not as a Chrysler and not with a wood body. Instead, the concept became the
Dodge Wayfarer roadster, built from 1949 to 1951. The reasons for this undoubtedly involved cost. The Town & Country convertible was the most expensive non-Imperial Chrysler from 1946-48. Mopar product planners probably figured out that a premium three-passenger ragtop would not sell well. They were right. The three-passenger roadster didn’t sell terribly well as a Dodge either, where it was near the bottom of the price list. Only 9,325 were made in three years (though slightly more, truth to tell, than the Town & Country sedan – 7,975 – or convertible – 8,569 – from 1946 to 1948).

Windows started this thread, and with windows we’ll finish it. The Dodge Wayfarer roadster, as introduced, didn’t have side windows – side curtains provided the only weather protection. Within months, vent wings and roll-up windows had been added to the roadster’s doors – at no extra cost. Would the Chrysler roadster have had windows? The illustrations show a
chrome window frame, so the answer is undoubtedly “yes.”

Clever CarPorters are invited to tell us the next window-less American roadster, of any seating capacity, introduced after the Dodge Wayfarer.

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 single word.

Held each year the second weekend in September,
Autojumble takes place on the grounds of the National Motor Museum in Beaulieu (say Byoo-lee), Hampshire. Combining elements of Hershey, Carlisle and Chickasha,
Autojumble brings together some 1,000 vendors and 40,000 visitors, all on a compact 17-acre site that one can cover in a weekend.

Autojumble is, naturally, strong on British cars and parts, but not exclusively, so whether you need an engine for your
Austin 7 or
Lagonda or
Horstman or
Fiat, you can find it at Beaulieu. If you long for the more exotic, how about a
V8 Curtiss aero engine? A
transmission for your
MG or parts for your
De Dion are all within reach. There are Bentleys
large and
small, and even a
Lancia Augusta that might have been driven by
Tazio Nuvolari (or maybe not).

There’s
automobilia galore, including
luggage,
picnic sets and acres of
gleaming brass.

Beaulieu’s Automart is their version of a car corral, replete with elegant cars like a
Rolls-Royce 20 hp doctor’s coupe, a charming
Amilcar or a rare
Australian Chevy with
“sloper” body by Holdens of Adelaide. The more adventurous might like this
Jaguar 3.4 Mk 2, complete with
vintage cigarette butts in the ashtray. In the Automart interesting things can happen, such as this demonstration of why Wolseleys were
furnished with starting handles.

Bonhams hold an
auction during Autojumble weekend. This year, the cars were as varied as a
1910 Austin 18/24 Endcliffe tourer (£41,100 with buyer’s premium), a
1931 Mathis PY coupe (£1,265) and at the low end a browbeaten
Humber Super Snipe for £250. My favorite was the
1929 Singer Junior delivery
van, that went for £5,750. But since cars and parts are difficult to pack in one’s suitcase, I followed the lead of my friend, journalist
Mike Worthington-Williams, and concentrated on literature.

The organizers of Beaulieu Autojumble take pains to make the weekend visitor- and vendor-friendly. To guard against mud in rainy weather there are
“plastic roads,” there are food concessions offering
ice cream to noodles, there’s a free tent for
leaving heavy parts (and free truck transport to your car when it’s time to take them home). They even have
classic toilets.

Serious autojumblers can sign up for a
tour to Hershey. The 2006 Autojumble will take place on September 9th and 10th. Book your B&B now.

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 the Packard is 2 miles from Milldale, 5 from Marion, 11 from Waterbury, 3 from Meriden and 12 miles from Middletown. Marion and Middletown might be anywhere: there are 19 Middletowns and 20 Marions in the United States. A bit less numerous are Meriden (5 in US) and Waterbury (only 3, though there are 8 Watertowns). “Milldale,” however, struck a chord. I recognized it as a village in central Connecticut, not far from the CarPort’s cyberportal. A glance at a
Connecticut map confirmed my suspicions: all five locations lie within a
twenty mile stretch of what would, in 1948, have been US Route 6A (now State Routes 322 and 66, interspersed with sections of Interstate 691).

I wondered if the
artist, Australian-born Melbourne Brindle, might have lived near the area, as the legendary Peter Helck often painted scenes near his home in Boston Corners, New York. The location of the Packard is accurate, and represents
a point on old 6A where two rutted dirt roads intersected the maine highway. The reader looks generally east, toward Meriden. Automobile Quarterly (Vol. 28 No. 3, Third Quarter 1990) published an article on Brindle, explaining that he lived for much of his working life in New Canaan and Bridgewater, Connecticut, and that many of his other works use local backgrounds.

Jim has recently lauched Vivipix, an enterprise marketing posters made from some 1,000 advertising images in his collection. This Packard ad is one of them, and they span the period 1937 to 1970. It is interesting to note the progression of Packard during this time, from the conservative 1937 cars to the decorous 1956 Caribbean. I consider Packard to have been at a crossroads in 1948, wondering whether to be a prestige car, or merely an upper-middle class on. This ad confirms their quandary, for it implies that the Packard Eight, the entry-level car, was the measure of the Custom Eight, which sold for more than twice as much. Unfortunately, they didn’t look very much different, which might have been the problem.

Vivipix posters can be ordered on line; presently Packard and all GM marques, covering 1937 to 1970 are available. In some of them you will recognize artwork that appears in other installments of the CarPort.

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 a car, because we
used it for illustration. As you can see here, there was at least one real three-passenger T&C; Fred Summers has seen it and
took some pictures.

Last year, Fred, who travels a lot on business, was in Phoenix at the time of the marathon auctions. While cruising the parking garage at one of the hotels, he found this car in an area reserved for “sold cars.” Not surprisingly, a group of men had gathered and they were discussing the car. One proffered the idea that it had been converted from a business coupe (Chrysler Corporation, remember, offered three-passenger coupes in all their makes, and for some reason the Chrysler catalog had
business coupes in all series, Royal to
New Yorker, through 1948. Thus with a Sawzall and some wood applique it would be possible to make a salesman’s T&C.

Another person in the group said he’d seen another such car; that three were built, one Windsor and two New Yorkers (the Windsor, remember, had a six-inch-shorter wheelbase). He knew the owner of one of the cars, and he’d heard another was in Cleveland. This must be the third. Tire kickers have been known to spin (or repeat) tall tales, so we looked for some independent corroboration.

Richard Langworth has been delving the mysteries of the automobile for more than forty years. While many tire kickers were speculating, he was talking to the people who designed and built the cars, people now largely deceased. His book
Chrysler – The Postwar Years contains a chapter on the T&Cs. Indeed, there was an intention at Chrysler to build more than just a convertible and a sedan Town & Country. In 1946, literature was printed showing five wood-bodied models,the
convertible and
sedan production cars, a
“hardtop convertible” (
factory photos of which are quite well-known), the
three-passenger car (“roadster”), and a
two-door sedan version (“brougham”). In fact, the
cut-outs of the two T&C
soft-tops illustrating that August 10th item were taken from just such a brochure. There must have been more than one brochure, because this
green brougham, headed the opposite direction, turned up in the CarPort archives.

Langworth puts the total of hardtops at seven, and records one brougham, built in 1946, sold to a private owner and never seen again. He says no roadsters were actually built. When asked about his sources and he said that Chrysler Historical had records on the hardtops and the brougham, but nothing on the roadster. According to one of the designers involved with the T&Cs, “not even a prototype was built.” But that doesn’t rule out something happening in a back room somewhere, and even the factory would probably start with the closest production body style, in this case a business coupe, just like a latter-day clone crafter.

So there we leave it. The fact that at least one Town & Country roadster now exists rules out “never.” The relevant questions, then, are “Who?”, “When?” and “How?”

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
“Go Devil” engine from the Universal Jeep, the Jeepster got an optional
six-cylinder engine in ’49. This Jeepster is unusual, however, for it has
four-wheel drive.

Four-wheel drive Jeepsters didn’t regularly appear until the second generation, the
Jeepster Commando of 1967. The Commando, based on the CJ-6 chassis, came in four body styles, roadster,
station wagon,
pickup and
convertible. Power came from the F-head Willys Hurricane Four, and a Dauntless V6, adopted from Buick, was optional. In the transition period from Kaiser to American Motors ownership, AMC engines were substituted, and the V6 was eventually sold back to General Motors. The Jeepster, later simply “Commando”, was discontinued after 1973. This Jeepster Commando is a 1967 model with the
V6 and
automatic transmission (the bulletproof Turbo 400 Hydra-Matic). It is
not pristine, but is an unusual vehicle that would make a nice project. The Museum is asking $2,500 for it; contact Collector Car Program Manager Andy Jeffrey if it appeals to you.

The
’49 Jeepster has already been sold, but what about that four-wheel drive? My explanation is that someone transplanted the Jeepster body onto the chassis of a 1954 Willys four-wheel drive station wagon. The Jeepster and wagon wheelbases differ by a mere half-inch. There must have been some interference, though, for the pedal arrangement is
quite peculiar.

Both first and second generation Jeepsters have constituencies. There are at least two clubs for the early Jeepsters, the Willys-Overland Jeepster Club in Massachusetts and the Midstates Jeepster Association in Michigan. The American Jeepster Club caters to the needs of Jeepster Commando owners. Their website has a wealth of information on both the Kaiser and AMC models.

Wayne’s World, which comprises most of central Texas, is rife with hibernating cars, and Wayne, who runs it, knows where to find them. This time, with help from long-time area resident Phillip Koch, he’s come up with a
whale of a stake truck. Everything is so specialized now that few people not living on farms have even heard of stake trucks. But there’s nothing so versatile as a stake truck because you can configure the business end any way you want. Wayne found this 1933 Dodge H30 ton-and-a-half stake truck in Castell, Texas. It’s been dormant for forty years, but protected, so it’s a solid and unmolested, if well-used, vehicle.

Dodge trucks of the 1933-35 period are interesting because they embraced the styling cues of Dodge passenger cars. Many manufacturers aped cars with their pickups, but not many extended this to big trucks. For Dodge, this was a sea change. Dodge trucks had always been upright and square. For many years, what served as a Dodge truck had been made by the Graham Brothers, with Dodge engines, and sold through Dodge dealers. Walter Chrysler absorbed the Graham Bros. truck business in stages, and the brothers took over the Paige-Detroit Motor Car Company in quest of making Graham-Paiges. Although the trucks were thereafter badged as Dodges, they remained upright through 1932.

The 1933 trucks changed all that, even to the extent of cabs with
suicide doors, perhaps unique in the truck world (tell us if this is not so). In 1936, though, the Fore-Point cab pulled Dodge out of its slouch and made the doors open at the rear again.

This Dodge has been staked for tall loads – I said stake trucks were versatile. Its bed is
weathered but sound, the cab is
littered but sturdy, and the
speedometer shows something south of 36,000 miles. The
engine is the same 201.3 cubic inch six as used in Dodge cars, and it rides on
Budd wheels, whose tires look like they may hold air.

The owner, whose father bought it new, will entertain offers. If you’d like to make one, contact the CarPort, which can channel you through to Wayne’s World.