By Jon Stalnaker
AKA The Studebaker Dude
My childhood was okay, I didn’t get everything I wanted, but who does? I didn’t get to build a hot rod car with my dad, but I got to watch him do plenty of that stuff. He even taught me a thing or two about cars and taking them apart and putting them together. I got to build cool cars in miniature and had shelves in my room full of model cars that I built with my own two hands. Some of them were custom-built requiring cutting and puttying and making something that was not in the instructions. I don’t mean to lead you to believe that I was somehow mistreated or left psychologically tormented in some way. But I was left wanting more and now I’m all grown up and on my own. The seed was planted; it’s up to me to make it grow.
Cars at this point in my life are about transportation. I used them to get to work and to go shopping and take the kids to the doctor, etcetera. Money was used to provide a home and a life for a family. This left little for something unnecessary, like a hot rod car. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I could still dream about such extravagant things, but it was way low on my priority list. I could, however, choose something cool to drive within those parameters. But my definition of cool leaned towards the avant-garde.
My Saabs are a good example of that, and I did own two of them. I had a wife who had a job at the post office carrying mail on a rural route. It was a good part time job but using your own vehicle was required. They did provide a vehicle equipment allowance but that was barely enough to cover the expense of keeping a vehicle safe enough to handle such a brutal job. It was an opportunity to fix up a car that was unique and fun while being functional. Oh and yes, you had to drive it from the right-hand side of the car. The Saab, although it was a stick shift car, was easy to drive from the passenger side. Being front-wheel drive, it had a flat floor, and the pedals were almost in the middle of the firewall so you could work the clutch easily enough. The gear shift lever was on the column, so it too was out of the way. While it was certainly possible to drive it this way, it wasn’t ideal and surplus right-hand drive postal jeeps were made available. I fixed up a couple of these, which was fun, but they weren’t ideal either.
I found a right-hand drive Scout pickup that was used for mosquito abatement. It was bigger and I could make that one look really cool. It turned out to be the vehicle I could fix up with my dad and we made it awesome. Take that item off my bucket list. We did all the bodywork together and I had it upholstered nicely then put a roll bar on it with warning lights on top. It was cool enough to enter in a car show and was the first souped-up car that I got to show. I’m hooked now. Life went on and it would be several decades before I got another chance to have a car worthy of a car show again. I still looked, but the opportunity to do that again would have to wait.
I still didn’t feel like a true car guy at this point in my life. I would say I was more like a car guy wannabe. Work, kids, marriage, divorce, job changes were the name of the game for that period of time. I still played with the idea of fixing up a second car, but I would have to wait until closer to retirement before I could do it right. Just before I was able to retire, I was ready to go all-in with this lifelong car guy dream. I still didn’t have a lot of disposable income, but I had good credit and wanted to make the kind of car that I always dreamed about. A car worthy of a magazine cover. I found the Studebaker of my dreams with a for sale sign on it. More about that next week.
