I Hate Trailers

I hate trailers.

Yet, here I am again, carting a Crosley behind my Toyota, on my way to the annual West Coast Crosley Club meet. This time, at least I have a good excuse...

2015 Orange Blossom Special - Fillmore Spring Meet

Back in the good old days (in this case the mid-eighties) shortly after the West Coast Crosley Club first got going, the powers that be decided to try having two club meets per year - the big meet in September, plus a smaller, more low key meet in the Spring.  Trouble was, there weren't that many members back then, so the Spring Meet never really caught on.  No one remembers exactly when they gave up, but sometime before 1990 we were back to one meet per year.

Twenty-five years later (more or less), we decided to try again.

Yes, That IS a Nice Farm-O-Road on Ebay

No less than four people got hold of me to make sure I'd seen the very nice 1950 Farm-O-Road that popped up on Ebay and was then spotlighted by Bring a Trailer this week. It also made waves over at the Crosley Gang site, so given all the excitement, I figured I should make a note of it.

Power To the People!

Back in the good old days, many sports car folks had the idea of sticking a bigger motor in a Crosley Hot Shot to get a little more oomph out of Powell Crosley's racing roller skate.

Ebay Watch: Woodland Farm-O-Road

It's unusual to see any Farm-O-Road for sale, given that there were less then 500 made - and it's even rarer to find one 30 miles from home - but that's what happened to me this morning when I spied this Yolo County driver listed on Ebay.

I don't know anything about this particular car - it hasn't been to any of the West Coast meets in the 15 years that I've been going, but it appears to be straight and fairly original.  The seller says it's had one repaint.

Farm-O-Roads were available with all kinds of options, including plows, well drillers, and this car has one of the coolest options: a hydraulic dump bed.

You might have noticed that the dump action grazes the seats... those are stock Crosley seats, but I don't believe they are correct for the Farm-O-Road.  Those appear to be seats from an earlier Crosley (a '46 or '47); by 1950 Crosley had moved to a more square-backed seat.  I'm still not 100% sure that the dump bed would clear the later seats either, but that's a question for the new owner.

Sure looks like a nice car, and I wish I'd had the opportunity to see it up close at some point.  The price is climbing - it's currently at $4,100 with reserve not met and eight days left on the auction!

Crosley Postcards

I'm a total OCD collector/hoarder type, but I do my best NOT to collect everything with a picture of a Crosley car on it.  I do pretty well when it comes to newer stuff, but I can't seem to stop buying old magazines with the occasional Crosley photo.  I do manage to pass up most postcards for the simple reason that I can save scans that look almost as good as the originals.  I thought I'd share a batch of stuff I've saved up... enjoy!

A Fine Car parked in front of a Superb Motor Hotel.

Crazy 'Art Car' that started out as a '51 or '52 Crosley.

Promo postcard for the 'Dashing' Crosley HotShot.

Prewar Pickup.

 A portholed super Sports... and then of course you need a stamp:

Crosley Road Trip: 1950

If I spent half as much time in my garage as I do surfing the net for Crosley tidbits, I'd probably have at least one running Crosley right now.  But, then I probably wouldn't find stuff like this:

These days Denny Moore is more of a Ford fan than a Crosley guy, but he's probably logged more miles in a Crosley than even most diehard Crosley fanatics.  In 1950 his dad loaded the whole family into their robin's egg blue Crosley sedan and set out for Berea, Ohio - 500 miles away.  Denny, then five years old, still remembers the trip:

"The back seat in the Crosley was hardly more than vinyl covered plywood. After a few hours back there, you hurt all over and couldn't get comfortable. My mother held my crying baby brother on her lap all the way there and back. My sister wouldn't stay on her side but there wasn't much side to stay on. My father was frustrated and tried to ignore everyone."

"Another family tradition was to stop at state lines and photograph everyone with the car. That way, you didn't need dates or locations on the photos.  When my father pulled over and my mother said 'PICTURES,' we had to climb out and line up unless we were sleeping. Sometimes we just pretended to be asleep. My mother never told me if she did that just to keep us quiet in the back seat on long trips."

I stumbled across these pics on the Hokey Ass Message Board, a site for vintage hotrod devotees that I've mentioned a few times before.  Denny had posted the photos on an incredible thread called 'Vintage Pictures of Days Gone by.'  It's one of the best threads on the HAMB- it has 1258 pages of vintage photos.  I emailed Denny to ask about the trip and he got right back to me.

"The Crosley adventure was sixty years ago and most of my recollections were that of a 5-year-old who felt like being shut in a running clothes dryer for days. The Crosley ran great and we had no trouble on the two-lane highways of U.S. 20.   It might take ten minutes to climb a hill in the Crosley, but this was before interstates." 

He says they made it back to home base, Oneonta, New York in one piece, too.

The Crosley was the Moore family's 'second' car; they also owned a 1938 Plymouth.    Denny's dad spent WWII in the Navy, much of that in the Pacific, where he once survived having a ship torpedoed out from under him.  He made it through the war and was doing pretty well in the late forties - well enough to afford a 'second' car.    The picture above was taken right after they bought it - when it was still green; Denny's dad is on his uncle's Indian!

"It was used and bought for my mother.  I think the original color was a faded green. My mother found a can of robin's egg blue enamel in her father's barn and with brushes, she let me help paint it."

Denny graciously allowed me to share his memories and pictures.  Thanks much to him, and of course, to his dad, who risked everything, but thankfully came back to his family in one piece.  These kinds of stories are one of the things I love most about being a car nut - cars are cars; it's the people make them special.

2010 West Coast Crosley Club Meet

 

The 2010 West Coast Crosley Club Meet has come and gone.  The meet was last weekend (September 11-12) in Buellton, just north of Santa Barbara.  We had about a dozen cars show up this year.  That's a bit low for turnout, but the members more than made up for it with quality- the Crosleys on hand included some of the nicest cars in the country. 

Heading that list was the latest issue from club treasurer Ronnie Bauman's garage: an immaculate 1947 coupe.  Bauman has taken the Crosley resto-biz up at least a couple notches with a series of incredible builds. He always starts with solid cars (cars that most would consider 'finished'!) and then makes everything better than new.  He'll spend more on paint and body than most people would have into the entire restoration, and the engines are always fully dressed with period speed equipment.   

 

The end results are stunning.  He's decided that this one had to go up for sale - this is the kind of car I could see going for ridiculous $ at Barrett Jackson.

 

Another car that was new to the meet was Charles Latty's two-tone CC.  Latty lives in tiny Pacific Grove, California- also home to founding club member Mike Bainter.. meaning that Pacific Grove probably has more Crosleys per capita than any city in the state! 

 

Not new to the meet, but still a fresh sight, Fred and Robin Dunner finished a beautiful resto of the Hot Shot they picked up at last year's meet.  The car was nice, if a little tired, when they bought it- now it looks brand new.  The long straight sides on the roadsters can be very wavy... but not on this one.  They kept the clean, custom filled-seam look that the car has had for most of its life.

I contributed another rarely-seen, if not so minty, car to the gathering.  I ended up buying a 'parts' Super Sport at the Sacramento meet a few years ago when Ed Scanlan made me an offer I couldn't refuse.  I already had a '51 SS in boxes and I thought that having one to reference wouldn't be a bad idea since it'd been nearly a decade since I took the other one apart.  truth is that I haven't done anything but move this thing around since I bought it, so I knew it needed to go.  I also realized that I had spares of a lot of the parts that were missing when I bought it, so I added an engine, transmission, radiator, etc to make it an almost complete car.  Apparently I priced it just right because it sold before I even got it off the trailer!

There were plenty of other great cars- Mike and Nancy Bainter brought their 4000 original mile '51 coupe - it looks, runs and drives pretty much like new!  I remember when this car went up for sale about 6 years ago - I thought momentarily about buying it, but immediately realized that it had to go to someone with a better garage than me.  Mike keeps this baby in a fully-climate controlled environment! 

Mike and Robin Stoner brought their funkana-dominating Farm O Road, but had some low-power issues this time out.  The collected Crosley brain trust tinkered with the timing, but no immediate solution appeared.  Even engine guru Lee Osborn (in the passenger seat) was at a loss.  Maybe it was just me, but it seemed like the F-o-R smoked even more than usual, so it may be time for new motor. I asked Mike about it and he doesn't remember where he got the motor that's been in it all these years- just that he dropped it in, fired it up, and off they went!

The West Coast Club has an active racing contingent, including Osborn.  As usual, he brought his 1955 Shannon Special, the same car with which he's been eating Porsches and, lately, even a Jaguar C Type!  I've been trying to catch one of Lee's races for 5 years and I've still never seen him on the track!  I've already got my calendar checked for the Hmod reunion race on October 2, so i'll finally get to see this car in action!

Kip Fjeld and Don Baldocchi will also be running at the Hmod reunion, Kip with the Miller special pictured here, Don with the '53 Nardi he's been tearing up tracks with for a couple of decades.  Kip inherited this car from Hmod great Joe Puckett who got Kip into racing when he was still a teenager!  Kip also scored the buy of the day, picking up an NOS steel stroker crank for probably less than a standard steel crank would go for!
 I didn't get any good pics of the swap meet area- but there was more stuff for sale this year than at any meet I've been to.  You can see incoming club pres Rick Alexander picking up some Crosley magazines from retiring president David Brodsky.  David also sold off a big batch of hop up stuff including the Braje pan, cam cover and exhaust manifold you can see on the table.  Rick brought a Uhaul trailer full of stuff including an intact tin block motor assembly along with a mountain of other stuff.  I picked up an extra speedo, some magazines and a neat license place topper from a Minnesota Crosley dealership!

And beyond the actual swap meet vendors, we had several folks show up with motors! Don Rausch showed up with a truckbed full of V Drive and generator motors (pictured above with Ronnie Bauman), and a young microcar collector from LA yanked ANOTHER V Drive motor out of his trunk a few minutes later!  I'd never seen a V drive motor until Saturday and suddenly I'm looking at three of them!

Longtime club member Gary Loomer brought a matched Crofton and Cushman. he's trying to break up the set- the Datsun-powered Crofton is currently for sale.  if you think a Datsun powered Crofton is unusual, that's nothing... Gary used to have the world's only racing Skorpion!

When the time came for the Funkana, Pat Askren let me be the co pilot in his very-correct CC sedan.  We were fighting a wounded clutch but still managed to take second place!

over half the cars at the meet ran in the Funkana, and the post-competition photo underscores what a nice batch of cars were there.  

Since the meet is so close to Santa Barbara, my sister and her family drove the 45 minutes up for a visit.  I don't get to visit them all that often, so it was a real treat!  best of all was the chance to meet my new grand nephew Cash!  Here he is risking tetanus in my Super Sport.

After the meet I loaded the SS back up (the new owner wanted to pick it up from my house later) and I got a good round of heckling over my trailer.  Yes, its a tiny, rickety POS, but I still managed to haul Frank Bell's wagon all over creation on it last year, and the SS parts car was very secure this year.  Hey, what do you want from a $50 trailer?  
They're just jealous. 
It just so happens that the light is about perfect when we get together for the club Banquet.  I'm usually the last one seated because I'm out shooting pics of all the cars at 'magic hour.'  Above is the 4000 mile coupe.

This is Ardell Johnson's incredible CD wagon.  That interior is original from the factory.. he just touched up the seats with vinyl paint about 20 years ago.  We had a great conversation at dinner about legendary Crosley racer Harry Eyerly who was from Ardell's home town, Salem, Oregon.

 
Here's longtime club member Gary Cochrane's sweet convert.  That custom wood job has been on the car since at least 1956!Just as I was finishing up my shots I noticed other people taking pictures too... and then I realized that one of them had hopped into David Brosky's 'vert to pose for her boyfriend!  This really underscores how differently people perceive Crosleys... can you imagine a stranger hopping into any other restored vintage car and not thinking they were going to get a punch in the snoot?!

The banquet was fun as always, even though we ended on a bit of melancholy note... David Brodsky founded the West Coast club over 25 years ago, and has been elected and reelected President ever since.  He announced that he wanted to step down a couple of years ago and he made it official on Saturday.  He and his wife Aileen have done an amazing job of keeping the club going - and fun - for more than a quarter of a century.  I'm sure Rick Alexander and Ronnie Bauman will do a great job, but it will be strange to think of David not being at the head of the table.  The Crosley Club is one of the only organizations I've ever belonged to, and is by far the one I'm most attached to. Much of that is thanks to David and Aileen, and I can't thank them enough for everything.

At dinner Shirley Bell reminded me that she had brought some of her late husband Frank's Crosley t shirts for me- we're about the same size and she thought I might like them.  That was really sweet, and I'm honored to fly the flag - I honestly can't remember seeing Frank wearing a t shirt that didn't have a Crosley logo on it!  After the dinner I had a beer with Rick Alexander and former TBT designer Mike Blackburn who offered me the spare bed in his hotel room.  I had spent Friday night cuddling with the Crosley motor in the back of the pickup, so a bed and a shower sounded pretty darn good.  And the next day he absolutely refused to let me chip in for the room.

As always: Crosley people; they're the best.