By: Jon Stalnaker AKA The Studebaker Dude
My dream of owning a sports car came to fruition when I bought a Fiat 124 Spyder. I had fun driving that car on the Pacific Coast Highway and it satisfied my desire to own a sports car. It wasn’t very practical so eventually, I got rid of it in favor of a more practical car. But I still pined for a convertible, preferably a Cadillac, more specifically a long and low boat of a car, a 1960 was my favorite. It would be another couple of decades before I could make that happen.
I was getting close to retirement and so I was focusing my dreams and attention on trying to figure out what I was going to do with my time. I was driving around Stockton California with my second son who was approaching the age when he would be driving. I saw this rusty old 1951 Studebaker Champion in a driveway with a for sale sign on the windshield. My Thoughts immediately went to my teenage years and my desire to build a cool car with my dad. I stopped and knocked on the door, but nobody was home. We looked at the car, but my son was not really interested in it. It’s just as well, I suppose, as his mother and I had divorced, and he lived with her. It probably wouldn’t have worked anyway. It was my dream and not his. I drove away and couldn’t get that car out of my mind. I told my wife Carlene about it and the next time we drove past Stockton; I made a detour to show Carlene the car.
We were looking at it when the owner came out of the house. I thought he looked familiar, and I asked him where he worked. He laughed and told me he was long ago retired from the post office, but I looked familiar to him too. It all came back to me in an instant. He was one of the senior carriers that I worked with when I first started carrying mail in Stockton. Furthermore, I remembered him driving this old car to work. This was back in the late seventies, but the car was already a rusty old car by that time. He had inherited the car from his wife’s father who inherited it from his father, who bought it new. A total project car but with an interesting history, some of which I remembered from my past. Carlene was on board, and we negotiated a price and he agreed to drive the car to the post office in Dixon where I was postmaster. He told me it was drivable so I figured if he could drive it to Dixon, about an hour away, that would convince me that it was indeed a drivable car.
He showed up at my office a few days later, I gave him the money, and he gave me the title. It did run, but just barely. That was fine with me as my intention was a complete rebuild anyway. It sat in my driveway for many years while I waited my turn for a local mechanic to take it apart and resurrect it with shiny and new parts. My father had long ago passed away so that ship had sailed. I was on my own now. It was 2002, and the plan was to get it on the road for some fun when I retired. My builder, Roger, told me that was doable. I would find out during the next eight years that Roger was good at telling me what I wanted to hear but not being too concerned about deadlines. In the meantime, I had plenty of time to decide what I wanted done with this car. This was the dream I’d had since I was a young boy. Just deciding what color to paint it was agonizing enough. More specifically, do I restore it to its original condition, do I customize it, do I upgrade to modern running gear? There were so many options. I worked up a list of what I wanted but that had changed several times before he finally got to work on the car. Many years would go by, and I had a lot to think about as my life was changing. This was it, soon I would no longer be a car guy wannabe, but the real thing.
