How I Became a Car Guy – Part 9

By: Jon Stalnaker AKA The Studebaker Dude

With retirement looming on the horizon, I started thinking about what I could do to keep busy. I knew I wanted to get more involved in the car guy world and I heard about this 18-week class at the Towe Auto Museum in Sacramento (later the California Automobile Museum). At the end of the class, I would be a docent and had to commit to 2 four hour shifts per month where I would give guided tours to visitors of the museum. That commitment was for a two-year period. I timed it so I would complete the class about the time I was officially retired. It was a great class, and I was well versed in automotive history by the time I was ready to give my first tour. There were other opportunities available for docents and I got involved in the monthly Car Club Cavalcade display, where we helped set up the displays for local car clubs. I also got involved with the Road Crew where I got to drive the museum cars in parades and for special events. I was assigned to drive an air cooled 1928 Franklin, it was a beautiful car. I drove other classics as well.
I volunteered to teach the Avanti segment of the docent class and later added the Studebaker segment also. I wrote the history portion that was handed out to the class up front after researching Studebaker and Avanti history at our local library. During the classroom presentation, I put together a photo history of Studebaker and Avanti. Many of the other instructors went through the reading material with the class. My approach was different as it was completely ad lib as we looked at the slide presentation. I figured they could read the written history on their own time. The students seemed to like this approach better as the entire segment was more of a fun question-and-answer period.
My activities at the museum helped keep me focused on cars while I waited for Roger to get around to finishing up my car. It was a long wait and my impatience manifested itself by buying the Cadillac convertible that I always dreamed about. It wasn’t the long and low 1960 convertible but an 80s Cadillac Allante. It rode like a Cadillac and was very cool, but it wasn’t exactly what I had dreamed about. It got the convertible bug out of my system as it was not as much fun as I had remembered in my youth driving a Fiat Spyder. By the way, I bought that Caddy from Jeffrey Osborn. Just like the car George Costanza bought from Jon Voight in a Seinfeld episode, I didn’t buy my Cadillac from the famous Jeffrey Osborn. While Costanza’s Jon Voight was a dentist, my Jeffrey Osborn was an Air Traffic Controller from Napa.
That didn’t satisfy me enough and I was calling myself “the Studebaker Dude” so I needed another Studebaker to hold me over. I volunteered to host a monthly meeting for the local chapter of the Studebaker Drivers Club at the museum, and before the meeting was over, I was their newest member. I couldn’t drive my bullet nose to their meetings because it was now in the custody of Roger who was slowly getting things done a little bit at a time. A neighbor of mine had an old Studebaker truck in front of his house and I would walk my dog past it hoping to find a for sale sign on it one day. Sure enough, one day the for-sale sign was there. Carlene and I walked over to look at it and the owner came out. I was very much interested but didn’t think Carlene would be on board since I already had a project Studebaker that hadn’t gotten finished after four years. Carlene said, “if you want it, you can get it”.
So that’s how I ended up with two Studebakers, a car and a truck. I was just going to rat rod my truck because of how much money I was spending on the car. The truck had a recently rebuilt original flathead engine in it. It ran fine for a 1949 truck, but it struggled to keep up with modern traffic. Try as I might to make do with it, I got carried away fixing it up. The truck would end up giving me my first magazine cover.