Don Mates loves his 1903 Curved Dash Olds. Really loves it. Loves it so much it has been sitting in the foyer of his house in Midlothian.
“I’ve always wanted it to be in the house ever since we bought the house” in the 1960s, says Mates, 66, whose car sat under a staircase until a few days ago, when he took it out of the house to prepare it for a road trip.
“We were running a little short on garage space where we kept it so just before Christmas, we put the top down, put down some planks and pushed it up here,” Mates explains. “I love having it in the foyer. Now I get to look at it almost all the time.”
Mates is one of about 350 hobbyists with a Curved Dash Olds, of which about 19,000 were produced between 1900 and 1906, says Gary Hoonsbeen, founder of the Curved Dash Olds Club.
Hoonsbeen estimates about 750 to 1,000 Curved Dash Olds still exist, of which about 500 run.
“Its simplicity is what made it as good a car as it was,” says Hoonsbeen. “It was simple construction, simple to fix and extremely easy to operate.”
“The reason I got interested in it is because they run so nice, and they are considered to be America’s first mass-produced car,” says Mates.
“It sold in big numbers and it was cheap–about $650,” says Mates, who adds he paid substantially more for his Curved Dash Olds in 1969.
Mates’ interest in the Olds and antique cars goes back to his youth in Roseland on Chicago’s South Side.
“My grandfather was one of those thrifty old souls who wasn’t going to get rid of his old car,” recalls Mates. “So when he retired to this little farm in Knox, Ind., in the 1940s, he kept his 1914 Studebaker 4-cylinder Touring Car Model SE4. And when I got old enough to monkey with cars as a kid in high school, I got that thing running.”
In 1955, Mates bought a Curved Dash Olds and started restoring it. The hobby of restoring cars grew into a full-time job for Mates, who became known as “Dr. Flywheel.”
But what Mates really wanted was a Curved Dash restored by George C. Greene of New Jersey.
“Greene, who ran a two-man machine shop, restored 28 cars in the last 20 years of his life,” says Mates. Greene died in 1974. “He owned his Curved Dash Olds since 1907, when he had bought it used and did his first restoration for someone else in 1944.
“Then when the antique car craze mushroomed after World War II, his name became known in the East,” adds Mates. “You would ship your mess to him and he worked on your car in the order he received it. There was no amount of enticement to get him to jump ahead on your car.”
In 1969, Mates heard a Greene-restored Olds was for sale by the widow of a Iowa-based car collector and he jumped on it.
“(The collector) was a Curved Dash Olds freak and had three, which he kept under a glass showcase in his garage,” says Mates.
(Mates sold his first Olds to a friend in Crete, who restored it.)
After purchasing the Greene-restored Olds, Mates modified it.
“This one didn’t have a top on it when we got it,” says Mates, who dropped out of the restoration business full time to work in the restaurant business in the 1970s until he retired last year. “A standard Oldsmobile of the time came sans accessories. But when I got it, I wanted to dress it up with all the accessories that were factory offered back then.”
In a machine and wood shop in his garage, Mates built a top for the Olds as well as a dash boot, copying those items from the original factory accessories.
He also restored a dos-a-dos bench seat for the back and added a carbide light to the center.
For nearly 30 years, the Olds was in Mates’ garage. “It got a little crowded in there, so we brought it inside the house,” says Mates, who also owns a couple of antique Packards.
Mates removed the Olds’ top, opened the double front doors to his home and pushed the car into the foyer, where it rests near a small indoor pond.
“My wife wasn’t home when we brought it in,” Mates says with a smile.
Mates hadn’t run the car until last week when he pulled it out for a trip Wednesday to Lansing, Mich., for the 100th anniversary celebration of Oldsmobile. About 100 members of the Curved Dash Olds Club plan to be there.
In addition, Mates takes the car to events such as the annual Lansing-to-Dearborn Run, a touring event for 1- and 2-cylinder cars. The Curved Dash has 1 cylinder.
“I usually run it about five times a year and may put 500 miles a year on it, which is a hell of a lot for a primitive car,” he says.
When the cold weather returns, Mates hopes to put the car back in his foyer. “If I can again sneak it past my wife.”
