All text and photos copyright Michael Lamm, 2012
You’ll recall my recent confession that I lost money on most of the 17 cars I owned in high school. “Owned” might be too strong a word; some cars passed through my hands in just weeks, so “rented” might be more accurate. Either way, my financial losses weren’t great, but money was never my motive. My goal was more to preserve the cars than to turn a profit.
So that you’ll have some inkling of the cars I’m talking about, here’s a list of the infamous 17 in year-model order:
* 1929 Studebaker 6 sedan
* 1929 Ford Model A roadsters (3 of them)
* 1930 Studebaker 6 sedan
* 1931 Hudson Greater 8 sedan
* 1931/32 Ford V-8 hot rod roadster
* 1932 Cadillac V-16 sedan
* 1932 Chevrolet coupe
* 1932 Studebaker 6 roadster
* 1934 Buick sedan
* 1935 Pontiac sedan
* 1935 Plymouth coupe
* 1938 Packard Super Eight 3-window coupe
* 1939 Ford fordor sedan
* 1940 LaSalle convertible (2 of them)
I’ve already talked about some of these cars – the 1931 Hudson, 1932 Chevy, hot rod and 1932 Cadillac V-16 – and now I’d like to devote the bottom of this chapter to the only car of that period that I really made money on, the 1934 Buick. But before I do that, here are observations about a few of the other cars on the list.
Mike bought this 1932 Studebaker convertible because it looked sporty, but he says it was too tame and not much fun to drive. He had a hard time selling it and lost a few bucks when he did.
All three Studebakers were high-mileage and pretty far gone by the time I got them. Best of the lot was the 1932 convertible, but even that didn’t have much going for it except looks. I felt at the time (1950-1954) that 20-year-old Studebaker Sixes tended to be very average and not a lot of fun to drive or play with.
The three Model A roadsters, on the other hand, were all quite good. I paid $15 for each one, and what I especially admired about them (still do) was their mechanical simplicity. Model As were extremely well designed, and they were built with great quality; wonderful cars in every way.
The 1935 Pontiac and 1935 Plymouth had a lot in common, neither being outstanding nor charismatic in any way. Again, very average used cars at the time. But I did manage to forestall the wrecker.
Mike never took pictures of his 1938 Packard Super Eight coupe, but it was essentially a powder blue version of this brochure rendering. He blew up the engine racing the 1940 La Salle owned by his friend, Larry Myers.
One great standout from that group was the 1938 Packard Super Eight coupe. What a marvelous car! Heavy, yes, but it had a certain agility and nimbleness that the others didn’t – a true pleasure to drive. The long transmission lever almost shifted itself; beautifully smooth. The hood stretched on forever, and the cormorant hood ornament stood out there as a sort of aiming beacon. Again, outstanding quality. And an instrument panel that, in my opinion, was one of the most gorgeous art deco designs ever conceived.
I don’t have pictures of the Packard, but it was a sky-blue three-window coupe with dual sidemounts, golfbag doors and a rumbleseat above the trunk. Sunken into the parcel shelf behind the bench seat, someone had installed a lead-lined ice chest. It had a very factory-looking lid and a drain tube that ran down through the rumbleseat floor.
Larry took great pride in his La Salle, and despite its age, Larry could out-accelerate most new cars in La Feria.
I’d traded one of my Model A roadsters plus $10 for the Packard, but I didn’t own it long. Its demise came when I raced my very good friend, Larry Myers, in his 1940 La Salle sedan. The race took place along the smooth, straight, two-lane highway out toward Bluetown. Larry and I hadn’t agreed where to end the race, so we just went. At about 80 MPH, I was trailing slightly when all hell broke loose: A sudden loud, throbbing, rattling noise came bursting out from the engine compartment. I knew immediately that the rod bearings had let go. End of race and end of car. It would have cost way too much to machine the crank and fit new bearings, so the lovely Packard was one car I didn’t manage to save.
The Freebie Buick
The only acquisition I really made money on was the 1934 Buick, and I ended up getting that car for free. Here’s how that unfolded:
My high-school buddy, James Dunn, owned a phone-booth Model T coupe that he’d brush-painted white. Due to our common interest in older cars, he and I bummed around together. James’s father, J.C. Dunn, was La Feria’s foremost industrialist (actually the town’s only industrialist), a man of his own making and, at the time, the town’s largest employer. Roughly a quarter of La Feria’s citizenry worked for J.C. Dunn. But unlike so many bosses, J.C. Dunn was one of those energetic people whom everyone liked: tall, rugged, with a salt-and-pepper crew cut and an outgoing, approachable manner.
La Feria legend had it that J.C. Dunn’s best friend was the hurricane of 1933, one of the most devastating blows ever to hit South Texas. After the hurricane, he’d gone around the countryside in a World War I Nash Quad truck and trailer and picked up all the corrugated tin that had blown off people’s roofs.
With the tin, he built a fruit-packing shed alongside the railroad tracks that ran through La Feria. Over time, the success of one packing shed led to another, then another, until Mr. Dunn found himself the captain of an empire. By the 1950s, he owned not only a modern, block-long, brick canning plant but also a series of warehouses and half a dozen smaller sheds for processing all sorts of farm produce, all with good rail and highway access.
In getting to know James, I discovered that his dad never threw anything away. As J.C. Dunn’s enterprise grew and the equipment he’d used in his early packing sheds became obsolete, he’d drag each piece off into a big, weedy field behind the canning plant. Or he might stash it in one of his many warehouses.
So James and I became junior archeologists, wading through the weeds that hid all sorts of abandoned engines, pumps, generators, wheeled ramps and even ancient trucks and cars, including a 1936 La Salle hearse. J.C. Dunn’s private junkyard still contained the Nash Quad truck, which, James told me, his father couldn’t bear to part with for sentimental reasons. Another interesting relic was an eight-foot-tall, four-cylinder engine that must, at one time, have powered a huge electric generator.
James and I liked to pick through Mr. Dunn’s backlot and warehouses simply for the joy of finding what the old man had hoarded. One shed contained shelf upon shelf of new and used Model T and Model A Ford parts, items that James could use in his car. In the darker depths of another shed we discovered, under layers of dust, a dark green 1934 Buick sedan with 1945 Texas license plates, meaning the car hadn’t moved in five or six years.
The car Mike made the most money on in high school was this 1934 Buick sedan. The town’s industrialist, J.C. Dunn, gave Mike the freebie Buick as a reward for getting it running.
The Buick intrigued me. It was basically all there and, beneath that mantle of dust, looked good. I asked James whether he thought his dad might want to sell it. James had no idea, but he suggested we ask. So we walked directly from the shed into J.C. Dunn’s private office in the main building. I don’t believe Mr. Dunn had a secretary, but the man himself generously invited James and me to come in, and what impressed me was the size of his office and the fact that it looked so uncluttered and modern, totally unlike the Dunn junkyard and hodgepodge storage sheds.
I came to the point straightaway and asked Mr. Dunn whether he’d consider selling me the Buick. He drew a blank at first, but then he remembered the car, and he drawled, very slowly, “No, I won’t sell it to you, Mike, but I’ll give it to you if you can make it run. I put it in there during the war, and if you can drive the Buick out of that shed, you can have it.”
I was overjoyed. What a deal! Of course I could make it run – no question about that. I thanked Mr. Dunn, and James and I ran back to the shed and lifted one side of the Buick’s massive hood. The engine was all there, caked with grease and dust and looking like a big, black stick of butter. At that point, James turned to me and said, “It’s all yours. I don’t want anything to do with this car,” and he walked out of the shed. To this day, I have no idea why he felt that way, but at that moment I thought, “Well, fine.”
For the next week after school, I slaved over that car, working under a dropcord with a cardboard box full of tools. I borrowed a six-volt battery from Joe Machner, my boss at the filling station, and talked my car buddy, J.D. Cole, into helping me. J.D. and I went through the carburetor four times. The engine was now getting fuel, and it turned over, but it wouldn’t fire. I bought a set of new sparkplugs and ignition wires at Western Auto, but still no spark.
Everything looked right enough: decent compression in all eight cylinders. We set and regapped the points and swapped out the condenser for one we found among the Model A parts in the shed. Finally, at J.D.’s suggestion, we borrowed a new ignition coil from the Model A parts bin, and that did the trick. The engine finally fired, belching great volumes of smoke.
I called James over to see our triumph, and then he and I drove the still-dusty Buick to his father’s office. Mr. Dunn came out, looked at the car, smiled, went back into his office and emerged with the registration papers. He then signed them over to me, and the Buick became mine. Kaloo kalay!
I thanked Mr. Dunn profusely and drove the car home. Four days later, a fellow who worked at the local grocery stopped me on the street and asked if I wanted to sell the Buick. I said sure. The guy paid me $30 cash on the spot. He was happy, I was ecstatic, and for the first time in my life, I’d actually made money on a car.
That $30, and especially the immediacy of it, felt mighty good. But why had J.C. Dunn given me a car for free? Years later, it finally dawned on me that the industrialist who’d made his fortune adding sweat equity to a windfall of corrugated tin was teaching me how to do the same.
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.