Story by Jon Stalnaker AKA The Studebaker Dude
In the year 2017, I received my November “Extra” issue of Reminisce Magazine. It contained a story I had written for the ”Name That Car” feature in their magazine. It was a short reminiscence of how I came to own my car and, without naming it, the reader was supposed to guess the make, model, and year of the car. I expected that most of the target audience for that magazine would immediately identify it as a Studebaker. After all, the bullet-nose design of my car is what many people of my age group think of when they remember Studebaker. Naming the year and model might be the only challenge to the readership. I credited my older sister Valerie with planting the Studebaker seed into my brain at a pre-pubescent age.
My youth revolved around automobiles as my dad was always bringing home a bargain car. Being a body and fender man, he would get the opportunity to purchase cars that were damaged beyond what the insurance companies were willing to pay to repair. He would get them dirt cheap and fix them himself. He had the mad skills to make any car good as new and so having broken down cars in our driveway was commonplace.
When Valerie was a teenager, she was in the hospital with a serious illness and my dad wanted to cheer her up. She was nearly old enough to drive, so he purchased a 1948 Studebaker and parked it on the street outside her hospital room window. He got her out of the bed and walked her to the window to show her the car. As was typical, the car needed a paint job and my dad told her that if she wet sanded the car, he would paint it. After she was discharged from the hospital, she and our cousin Alan spent the summer with sandpaper in hand and a bucket of water. They prepped the car and, as promised, my dad painted it. This was about 1957 so the car was not even 10 years old yet. She loved that car. She drove it to high school and college until the head gasket blew and the car was once again parked in the driveway.
That is when the car cast its spell on me. Although I was years away from being able to drive it, I was old enough to sit in it and fantasize about how I would fix it up if my dad gave it to me. It was a 4-door sedan just like mine with the suicide doors in the back. It didn’t have the iconic bullet nose though. My sister loved the idea that she planted the seed of my passion for Studebakers and I gave her full credit in the short article.
When I first started reading Reminisce magazine, I was attracted to the Name the Car stories. Seeing such orphan brand cars as Plymouth, Edsel, and Pontiac featured, I felt it was my duty to add Studebaker to the mix. And so, I did. The picture used for this story was taken at our hotel layover in Winslow Arizona, on our Route 66 trip in 2015.
Since this story was really a shout out to my big sister, I wanted her to get a copy of the magazine. I ordered her a subscription as a gift. This magazine published every other month, but also had what they called an “extra” issue several times a year. I didn’t know it at the time, but the extra issues required a separate subscription so she was not going to receive this one under the gift subscription I got her. Not to worry, I did get her a copy and send it to her. When I got this in the mail, it was sent as a complimentary copy for my contribution. I subscribed to the “Extra” issues hoping to get an additional copy for her. I was able to get a good enough picture of the page, so she had already seen it and read it. The story took her back to her Studebaker days and she reiterated how much she enjoyed sharing this journey with me and how she was so proud that I had taken this passion for Studebakers to a level that she would never have imagined. I lost my sister the year before I moved to Oklahoma. I miss her very much.
