In 1953, 17-year-old Michael Lamm considered his 1932 Cadillac V-16 “totally restored.” Today, it would qualify as a very nice driver. All photos copyright Michael Lamm, 2012
In the early 1950s, what we now call “classic cars” were 20-year-old hulks. Back then, individual “classics” that survived wartime scrap drives found themselves relegated to the back rows of used-car lots.
In that day, classic cars vastly outnumbered collectors, so rolling relics like Duesenbergs, Pierces, Cord L-29s, senior Packards, Stutzes, Marmons, etc., were drugs on the market. Which meant that I’d chosen my teen years perfectly to join that tiny coterie who appreciated the beauty, mechanical excellence, craftsmanship, luxury and history of those large, unloved, often coachbuilt hulks.
I was still driving my hot rod when I happened across THE classic and my second-favorite car of all time, a 1932 Cadillac V-16 sedan. Here’s how I fell into it and hopelessly in love:
Whenever my auto buddy J.D. Cole and I drove over to the next town, Harlingen, Texas, we’d always go by Elliff Motors, a used-car lot whose back row recycled a steady stream of older, slightly offbeat makes and models. Mr. Elliff had an interest in scruffy cars, and he occasionally picked up strays that weren’t running but that he felt were too nice to part out. Those he’d park behind the back-row fence, out of sight to casual passersby but not to hardened car lookie-loos like J.D. and me.
One day I happened to be driving past Elliff’s alone. I stopped and walked onto the lot, checked out the back row and then strolled past the fence to revisit a homemade Model A boattail speedster that had been there the last time I’d visited. Sure enough, the speedster was still hunkered down in the weeds, but what caught my eye was a new addition, an apparition that, for an instant, I couldn’t believe I was seeing. Here, also knee deep in weeds, stood this huge, magnificent, extremely graceful sedan with long clamshell fenders and dull black paint and, thanks to the ads I’d razored out of old Fortune magazines, I immediately recognized it as a 1932 Cadillac. And there on the radiator stood this deal-changing emblem that proclaimed V-16!
In the early 1930s, Cadillac offered three engines: a V-8, a V-12 and a V-16. The V-16 reigned supreme and was relatively expensive. In my favorite year, 1932, Cadillac produced only 300 V-16s, 56 of them Fisher town sedans, and here stood one in all its faded glory. I was bowled over; blissfully excited as only a car-nutty teenager could be.
I scrutinized the car like a jeweler suddenly discovering the Hope Diamond. The Cadillac looked good, even great. I found no rust, everything seemed solid and intact, no accident damage, and nothing had been modified. The car was complete right down to the V-16 hubcaps, and I even found the hubcap wrench beneath the rear seat. The upholstery looked dried out and frail; still, it was all there and fairly decent.
Buy of a Lifetime
Inspection over and heart pounding, I ran up to Mr. Elliff in his little hut out front and breathlessly asked if he’d sell me the car. “Sure,” he said, “but it hasn’t run for a while, and the tires are shot. Still, if you really want it, I’ll let you have it for $100.”
“How’s about $80,” I countered, and we settled on $90. Now all I had to do was come up with $90 which, in 1952, was heavy money, especially for me.
I drove home in my hot rod and asked my parents whether they’d lend me $90. I’d never borrowed anything from anyone in my life, but at that point I would have made a deal with the devil.
“Borrow against what?” my dad asked.
“I’ll sell my hot rod and pay you back as soon as I can,” I promised. That idea appealed to my mom. She didn’t at all like my hot rod; considered it dangerous, and rightly so.
“Give him the money,” she commanded. I was elated.
I asked my dad to make the check out to Elliff Motors, and I delivered it to Mr. Elliff first thing the next morning. I drove to Elliff’s in my mom’s 1951 Hudson Pacemaker and brought along a portable air tank, a big, thick rope plus J.D. Cole. J.D. helped me pump up the tires, and we slowly, ever so carefully towed the Cadillac home to La Feria along back roads. I was inexpressibly, supremely, ecstatically happy.
The Cadillac needed a fair amount of work. First order was to get the engine running. The V-16 actually consisted of two straight-eight engines on a common crankcase, each bank having its own carburetor, exhaust system and ignition coil. The coils were embedded inside the radiator header tank, and J.D. and I soon discovered that one of the coils was bad. Both carburetors were full of crud, and J.D. cleaned one while I reamed out the other. We installed an electric fuel pump, changed the oil (12 quarts) and topped up the radiator.
Couple of days later, we had the engine running, and that’s when we discovered the likely reason for the car’s retirement. Two cylinders on the right bank weren’t firing. New spark plugs didn’t help. J.D. did a compression check and found that two adjoining cylinders registered only 20 PSI while the other 14 pumped 90-125 PSI. We diagnosed a blown head gasket, and it was at that point that I discovered that V-16 parts weren’t all that easy to come by, at least not in South Texas in 1952.
No parts stores in that part of the country carried or even listed an early V-16 head gasket. I finally went to the Cadillac dealer in Harlingen and explained the situation. The parts man told me he couldn’t order just one gasket…that I’d have to buy an entire valve-grind set which, as I recall, cost about $10. He also said he’d have to get the parts out of Detroit and that I shouldn’t expect delivery for at least a week.
While waiting for a head gasket to arrive from Detroit, Mike stripped the body to bare metal in preparation for painting and discovered lead filler underneath the paint. The filler showed that the body had been widened at the factory. Fisher Body might have used a narrower body, say for a Buick, and added width to create the Cadillac town sedan.
In the meantime, I did manage to sell my hot rod to a kid from Weslaco. He gave me $350 cash and, sadly, I never saw the car again. I repaid my dad the $90 and, as I waited for the valve-grind set to arrive, I started sanding the Cadillac’s body, taking it down to bare metal. I’d arranged for the bodyshop foreman at Lafond’s, our local Hudson dealership, to paint the car. And because the engine did run, albeit on only 14 cylinders, I was able to move the car under its own power.
A week or so later, the Cadillac dealer called and announced that the gasket set had come in. When I picked it up, the parts man showed me a note from the factory saying that this was the very last early V-16 gasket set in stock and that no more were going to be made.
J.D. and I replaced the right-bank head gasket and, in the process, I managed to break off the front bolt that held on the exhaust manifold. I tried to remove the broken stud with an EZ-Out but couldn’t. Luckily, the manifold didn’t leak, but the broken bolt would become significant 60 years later.
The Cadillac now ran fine, and its low-speed torque was absolutely phenomenal. By slipping the clutch just a little, I could launch the car in high gear, and up to about five miles an hour, there was no engine sound at all. The engine pulled like an electric motor.
Cadillac’s 452-cu.in. V-16 was a work of art in its own right. Mike was amazed by the engine’s low-end torque which, he says, pulled like an electric motor.
I also discovered a trove of other unexpected wonders in, around and underneath the car. For example, the vacuum brake booster, which stood beneath the wooden floorboards, was held in place by a set of chromed nuts and bolts. No one except a mechanic would ever see them, but there they were, gleaming. And a number of other pieces were likewise chrome-plated: the generator air horn and the shaft that connected the generator to the water pump. Both carburetors had red-and-black V-16 emblems silk-screened on the float-bowl covers. Again, the car’s owner would rarely, if ever, see any of these things.
With the engine now running smoothly, I took the Cadillac to Lafond’s paint shop and, for $85, had the entire exterior painted the original gloss black. The shop foreman then double pinstriped the beltline in Boston ivory, same color I’d used on the wheels of my hot rod.
Restored for the Road
Next stop was an upholstery shop in Harlingen, which redid the entire interior – seats, door panels, carpets and headliner – for $100. I had them duplicate the wool upholstery in the original gray, same pattern as factory, with the rugs and door-panel bottoms in a navy-blue carpeting. So by the standards of that day, the Cadillac was now “totally restored.”
The Cadillac became Mike’s daily driver for two years and proved trouble-free and reliable.
I used the Cadillac as my daily driver for two years despite the fact that it averaged eight miles per gallon. I commuted in it from my home in La Feria to Harlingen when I worked as an orderly at the Valley Baptist Hospital during the summer of my senior year of high school. Never once did the Caddy let me down. Except for being hard to park and needing an occasional adjustment of the mechanical brakes, this huge sedan was a joy on the road and could easily keep up with that day’s traffic, both in town and on the highway.
I still owned the V-16 when I went away to college in late 1954, and I certainly didn’t want to sell it. But it made no sense to keep it, so during my first semester of college, I ran two classified ads in Motor Trend. My asking price was $700. I got a couple of nibbles but no bites. And then, around the middle of the semester, I got a letter from my dad saying that Pinky Dierks, our local highway patrolman, was interested. Pinky ultimately bought the car for $450. I figured I pretty much broke even.
And here’s the postscript: Pinky sold the Cadillac V-16 to persons unknown, after which it probably changed hands several times. Then, in 1977, I ran across an ad in Hemmings Motor News for “my” car. The Cadillac was in Ohio by then, and I recognized it by the bumper-mounted headlights I’d installed. The owner was asking $22,000.
I mailed him and asked that he send me pictures, which he did. And as much as I would have loved to buy my old sweetheart back in 1977, I really couldn’t afford to. In fact, $22,000 was about half what my wife and I had paid for our house in California four years earlier.
Then in 2009, the car came up for sale again in Hemmings. This time it was being offered by a dealer in Georgia, and the price was now $115,000. Again, I asked for photographs, and the dealer kindly e-mailed me a set. Among them was a shot of the engine, and sure enough, the front manifold stud was still broken. No one had ever fixed it.
Unfortunately, this time the car was in worse shape than it had been when I owned it – or so it seemed from the pictures. The Georgia dealer later e-mailed me that he’d sold the car to someone in Washington state. He added that he believed the new owner intended to remove the sedan body and, in its place, install a roadster body from a 1932 Cadillac V-8. It’s a common conversion: V-16 roadsters typically bring a lot more at auction than V-16 sedans. So I’m pretty sure my wonderful old Cadillac sedan doesn’t exist anymore. Pity.
Michael Lamm grew up in South Texas. He’s always loved cars and, after graduating from Columbia University in New York in 1959, took a job as editor of Foreign Car Guide, a magazine about VWs. In the mid 1960s, Mike became managing editor of Motor Trend and, in 1970, he co-founded Special-Interest Autos magazine in partnership with Hemmings Motor News. In 1978, Mike began to publish his own line of automotive books. For more information, go to www.LammMorada.com.