All photos courtesy and copyright Charlie Beesley.
People do strange things with cars. And while Charlie Beesley didn’t purposefully look for pictures of motorized oddballs and weirdos, they do seem to trickle down his way.
As I mentioned last time, Charlie was actually looking for pictures that depicted little snapshots of American life – freezes in time and culture. The pictures he looks for have to have cars in them, but cars aren’t necessarily the main subjects.
Well, in the photos we’re posting here, the car is the main subject, and we’re showing them because there’s something weird about the car itself. The people in these pictures might also be odd and unusual, but not necessarily. Some seem quite ordinary and sane.
In some cases, we have no idea who built the car or why. You, the readers of Hemmings and members of an even larger automotive fraternity, might be able to shed some light on cars that Charlie and I can’t explain. I certainly hope so, and if you can, we’ll both be looking forward to your comments.
We’re showing the 1959 Cadillac Cyclone Motorama concept car because it’s from the same family as our next two pictures.
Wing-tank special, built in England by USAF Lt. Col. Edward Richer, used a Ford Anglia chassis, plus parts from Chevrolet and Austin. The tanks came off an early Lockheed T-33 jet trainer.
The leaning tower was built by industrialist Robert Ilg in Niles, Illinois, in 1934. The car might have been inspired by the Cadillac Cyclone, but beyond that we know nothing about it.
It’s a fabric-covered tractor camouflaged to look like a rocket. Or maybe a submarine. The picture was taken in Al Qassasin, Egypt, near the Suez canal, during World War II.
The four-place Kama amphibian was built in Perm, Russia, in 1969. The four rear wheels could be fitted with tracks for snow and mud.
The 1948 Davis wasn’t all that weird except for its tricycle wheel pattern and rocket-like shape. This one just got painted at Duco Bill’s in Southern California; date unknown.
The history and significance of the Dubonnet Dolphin is well documented. Someone snapped this photo on the streets of what appears to be the French Riviera. That’s a Rosengart cabriolet to the right.
Rust Heinz, the ketchup king, designed not only the 1938 Phantom Corsair (a weird car in its own right) but this delivery truck, called the Comet. As Daniel Strohl has pointed out, the 1938 Comet was built on an Autocar chassis, and if Rust Heinz hadn’t died in a car crash in 1939 at age 25, the company would probably have commissioned a fleet of these vehicles.
J.V. Martin built three Aerodynamics between 1928 and 1932, one of them for USAF Gen. Billy Mitchell. At least one Aerodynamic still exists at the Lane Motor Museum in Nashville. (Editor’s Note: It appears this one was snapped just outside of the old Hershey stadium.)
Another well-documented car, Gordon Buehrig’s Tasco sportster was slated for limited production. Derham built this single prototype on a 1948 Mercury chassis. The Tasco’s failure was probably due – at least partly – to its styling, which was radical by the kindest of appraisals. Buehrig had succeeded with his radical design of the Cord 810/812, but not this time. This photo was taken in Indiana, possibly parked at a race, and the passenger might have been Mrs. Buehrig.
Built in the early 1930s by Minnesota teenager Bob Shotwell, this rear-engined three wheeler was powered by a 1931 Indian in-line four-cylinder engine. Shotwell hammered the body from sheet steel at his dad’s radiator shop. He and his brother, Edward, made local headlines with a 6,000-mile grand tour of the United States. The car eventually racked up some 150,000 miles before its retirement. Fearing the engine might be plundered by a motorcycle restorer, Shotwell offered the car to Jay Leno, whose craftsmen restored it to a semblance of its former glory.
The man who drove the Texaco Doodlebug on a promotional tour in 1934 snapped this picture at a stop in New Orleans. The Doodlebug, designed by Norman Bel Geddes and built by the Heil Co. in Alabama, was decades ahead of its time stylistically – “streamlined” in the best sense of that era’s definition.
It’s the scale of this custom convertible that makes it odd. It’s approximately three-fourths the size of a normal car of the 1930s. It appears to be based on mid-1930s Studebaker body panels and grille, but that’s just a guess.
Another miniaturized open car, this one seems to borrow from an early 1930s Packard. Amazingly, the builder managed to include four doors plus a rear cowl and windshield.
Recruitment officers at the Los Alamitos Naval Air Station, near Long Beach, California, used mostly Willys components to build this roadster to advertise their services.
Speaking of advertising, here’s a fellow whose go-kart-like vehicle was set up to hawk Nehi soda pop, probably at a county fair or some such. The car with it appears to be a 1926 or 1927 Star.
Honest Charley Hisself, aka Charles Edward Card Jr., owned a mail-order speed shop in Chattanooga and sold parts through Hot Rod and other magazines. Charley also owned a restaurant, so he customized various cars and parked them around town to draw attention to both ventures. This seems to have been a 1939 Ford in a previous life.
In 1987, Manny Powell of Columbus, Ohio, traded a wooden end table for a 1969 Camaro that had been mired in mud for years. He cut the body into 29 pieces and slowly reassembled it in miniature, the idea being to show off his killer Chevrolet 454-cu.in. V-8 with a Weiand blower. He figured the smaller the car, the bigger the engine would look. Manny’s mini won more shows than races, but it did all right on the drag strip, too.
It looks like the world’s largest bumper car, but it’s actually an extensively modified postwar Buick with a 1946-1948 Dodge grille. The photo was taken in Manhattan, but we have no other details.
No i.d. on this one, but we’re guessing it began as an Auburn speedster. Someone grafted on a 1939-1940 Cadillac grille and front fenders, then added Packard wire wheels. Not bad, actually.
Someone put a lot of work into this custom, but it seems unfinished in this 1936 photo. It uses 1935 Ford wheels, but the rest of the assemblage remains a mystery.
Odd place to put the spare. We figure the body comes from a 1920s Nash, with the wheels from a 1928 Dodge Senior Six. License plate says Ohio, 1939, so the owner apparently drove the car on the street as well as on the track.
Charlie Beesley bought this picture in the same batch as the 1935 Cadillac V-16 coupe shown in our previous chapter. This shot shows a 1932 Chevrolet roadster which the nattily dressed young man loaded up with just about all the automotive jewelry he could find.
Will Danelz of Benson Swift, Minnesota, built a rocket car in 1940 to promote the city’s newspaper. Young Will apparently worked for the Monitor-News, but in what capacity isn’t clear.
Whether the German coachbuilder Spohn actually built this coupe we don’t know, but it does look like a Spohn creation. It appears to use a postwar Studebaker greenhouse, and the engine was supposedly a supercharged Porsche. You can tell we’re not too sure about its provenance.
Finally, we leave you with the car we led the story with, a cliffhanger. The question is, how did this fellow suspend the Pontiac upside down in his upstairs breezeway, and why?