(The headline as published has been corrected in this text.)
Ever meet a car nut who didn’t have at least one story about a “find?”
There’s always “a guy” whose cousin’s barber rescued a 1958 Corvette from under a moldy horse blanket in a shed outside Woodstock.
Barn finds bring out the Indiana Jones in all of us. Doesn’t matter whether the car was towed out of a barn, unearthed from some old coot’s garage or abandoned in a Public Storage locker. And there’s plenty of antique iron out there just waiting to be discovered.
Ask Doug Jones of St. Charles. He picked up a 1950 Jeepster on the Internet.
“Watching unusual cars pass through Geneva’s Swedish Days parade, my wife was inspired to ask if I would buy her an old Jeepster someday,” Jones recalled. “Of course, I replied in the affirmative. I expected it would be years before the subject ever reared its ugly head again.”
Within a week, Jones found “the perfect candidate” on eBay.
“The 1950 Jeepster was presented as rock-solid with ‘no rust,'” Jones said. “It was pulled out of a barn in Texas and put up for auction by the owner, who’d acquired it in 1979 from his father-in-law.
“Ignoring my own principles, I bid on a car with no opportunity to personally examine it. So $2,687 plus $640 for shipping brought my wife’s Jeepster to St. Charles in July.”
After stripping and examining the 56-year-old car, Jones found that it was not exactly rust free but was remarkably sound and without serious defects.
Records show only 19,132 of the Willys-Overland Jeepsters were sold between 1948 and early 1951, making Jones’ discovery a find worth crowing about.
But Tom Hincz of Kenosha found an even rarer bird: a 1939 Hupmobile Skylark. One of only 300 knocked together between 1939 and 1941, his Hupmobile sat unmoved for 60 years in Milwaukee storage, its odometer reading 2,771 miles.
The mystery here?
Why did the original owner, Evan Edwards, spirit this Hupmobile away in such a fashion?
Hincz suspected he had an extremely scarce Hupmobile on his hands when he couldn’t find a serial number stamped in the usual floorboard and rear-seat locations. An aluminum tag on the engine cowl bearing the designation XAA04 was his only clue.
“I reached out to Eric Johnson of Vancouver, who is a historian and expert regarding the plight of the Hupmobile Skylark,” Hincz wrote. “Mr. Johnson visited Kenosha and spent several days examining and documenting this unusual vehicle.”
The verdict?
“There is no doubt that XAA04 was the first hand-built Skylark, originally named the `Junior Six.'”
Hincz, one of several people who told their tales in a recent call from the Transportation section, bought it from Evans’ estate for $10,000 in 1997, knowing he’d need to conduct a full restoration.
The Hupmobile was only semi-rough compared to a 1955 Porsche 356 Continental Coupe Lake Geneva architect D. Thomas Kincaid found rotting in an unheated Wisconsin barn.
“The coupe had been stored in a succession of barns over the years,” said Kincaid, “but its home for the last eight years was a small barn with a shotgun-blown hole in the roof, directly over the coupe.
“The stall area was quite small, allowing for just walking space around the coupe. There appeared to be a few dents and a little road rust. All but one tire were inflated. The spare had never touched the road. The two bumpers were stored in the car, and the keys were in the ignition. I was informed a bag of `trim’ was somewhere in storage.”
It took Kincaid 3 1/2 years to delicately negotiate a $1,700 sale with a family of owners.
At least Kincaid had most of the parts in an organized state. More than Datu Ramel of River Forest could say when he came across his 1986 Lotus Esprit with a rock bottom price of $5,000.
The catch? Its pieces were strewn about an old airplane hangar.
“I saw an ad and called the owner,” Ramel said. “She’d gotten a great deal on the whole package because the previous owners ran afoul of their mates. One of the men had just gotten married and lost interest in completing the assembly. The other man had just gotten divorced.
“The seller went on to tell me when she bought the car, her mechanic boyfriend was going to get it running. They broke up, though, and the labor she needed to reassemble the Lotus would no longer be free.”
Ramel, his brother, Derrick, and buddies Scott Hurst and Steve Bresnahan and “some of the seller’s police friends,” helped round up 50 boxes of loose parts and pitch them onto a truck, along with the body, engine and chassis. Ramel has spent the last few months cataloging and photographing exactly what he has, while plotting his restoration project.
His enthusiasm remains undimmed. “This is the white Lotus Turbo Esprit,” he emphasized. “The same color and shape as the Esprit S2 that James Bond drove under the waters around Sardinia in `The Spy Who Loved Me.'”
Fellow Bond fan and Brit car enthusiast Pete Conover of Oak Park went the Aston Martin route in searching out a 1957 DB MkIII; only 551 were produced between 1957 and 1959.
“They were the model that preceded the more famous DB4, DB5 and DB6,” Conover said. “It’s the DB5 that James Bond drove in `Goldfinger,’ although in the original Ian Fleming novel Bond had the DB MkIII.”
Conover actually found two 1957 examples–both long in storage and one in need of ground-up restoration. The first discovery sat in Ohio, the other in California. Conover’s Aston specialist Kevin Kay convinced him to buy both.
“After the initial shock wore off, what he had to say made sense,” admitted Conover. “There is an economy of scale to restoring two identical cars at once.”
Here’s where Conover’s good fortune seemed to be strong. He knew he had two quite similar cars. He just didn’t know how similar. “The first one is AM300/3/1380. The second is AM300/3/1391. They’re only 11 chassis numbers apart. And their motors are only four numbers apart. Having the two cars next to each other answers a lot of questions that arise during restoration.
“The two cars have been together at Mark Baker’s Sport & Specialty shop in Durand, Ill., since May. No. 1380, the one that will be completely restored, is now dismantled with body and engine work proceeding. I hope to have it finished in time for its 50th birthday next year.”
Sentiment prompted Tony Ogarek of Oak Forest to search out a 1948 Packard Custom-8, similar to the Packard DeLuxe 8 on which his father learned to drive. He struck gold in March 1998, when he spied a small ad under Antiques & Classic Cars in the Transportation section.
“For years, I’ve listened to my father’s stories about how the whole family would pile into Grandpa’s Packard and drive up to Stevens Point [Wis.] to visit relatives. My father and his brother and sister learned how to drive behind the large steering wheel of that car.
“After pondering the ad for a few days, I decided to call on it. The owner explained the car was all original and had 40,000 miles. I made an appointment and took a look at the car. It had 39,589 miles on the clock! The car had remained on jackstands for 6 1/2 of the seven years this gentleman owned the vehicle. He’d only drive it about 300 miles. He explained he was the third owner. I made an offer–and after two weeks he called to ask if I was still interested. I replied with a resounding, `Yes!'”
Ogarek did a little cosmetic work on the Packard–buffing here, tweaking there.
He hopped into his Custom-8 and drove over to his Dad’s house and “flipped him the keys.”
“I’d swear he was the 16-year-old that just got his license, and I was the grandpa! We drove for hours that night. Dad had memories that came back to him. The only difference between my Packard and Grandpa’s is that mine is light blue and his was black.”
And is he still happy with his Packard almost 10 years later?
“I still have the vehicle and drive it only on perfect clear-weather days. It drives and rides … like a dream.”
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Valuable lessons
The National Automobile Dealer Association valuation guides put some numbers on these “barn finds.” They offer “low retail” and “high retail” estimates: %% CAR LOW HIGH
1948 Packard Custom 8 $6,900 $25,300
1955 Porsche 356 Continental Coupe $23,000 $35,400
1957 Aston Martin DB MkIII $40,500 $80,300
1986 Lotus Esprit $12,500 $25,900
A couple proved vexing so the Kuhns at Chicago Classic Cars in Gurnee helped out.
1950 Willys-Overland Jeepster $5,000 $25,000 %% That leaves the 1939 Hupmobile Skylark, on which Jay Grams at the Volo Auto Museum offered:
“Because there are no comparables, it’s hard to determine a price. With it being the only convertible and a prototype, it might well go into ‘six figures’ at a Barrett-Jackson auction.
–Jim Mueller
