Stored 46 years: Garage Find!

Given that I've been the region's most active Crosley enthusiast for a decade or so now, I was pretty surprised to see an unfamiliar 1948 Crosley wagon pop up for sale on the Sacramento Craigslist a couple of weeks ago.  It was less than three miles from my house in a neighborhood called East Sac.  When I read the ad my hair stood on end.

13 years ago, when I was first on a quest for a Crosley, my guide was Gordon Becher.  I've written about Gordon before- he was an amazing mechanic and a complete Crosley nut.  He still drove the Crosley sedan he'd owned since about 1954 and had a garage full of NOS Crosley gunk - he'd bought out the inventory of his local Crosley dealership when the guy closed the business.

After I'd been looking for a car for months with no luck, Gordon shared a secret- he had a tiny notebook in which he'd kept track of every Crosley he'd seen listed for sale going back a decade.  He shared some of those listings with me, and we even went up Highway 50 to Cameron Park to see a very rough Hotshot that Gordon had looked at years before.  It was mostly there, but a complete mess- I offered the guy $800 and in retrospect I'm probably lucky he said no.

One car that wasn't in Gordon's notebook was a Crosley station wagon that he'd looked at many years before in East Sacramento.  He told me that it had been parked in a garage off Folsom Blvd (a main drag in Sac) for decades and that it was very straight.  Gordon even drove to the area where he'd looked at the car and tried to remember for me which house had the Crosley.  It had been so long he couldn't remember, but he did tell me where it was within a few block radius.  I drove up and down Folsom and its side streets trying to find the house and garage that matched Gordon's description, but I never did find it.  That was 13 years ago, and I've probably driven down Folsom Blvd 500 times since then - and I've thought about that Crosley pretty much every time.

Suddenly, here it was.

I called the number in the ad and of course it was the same car.  The seller's father had bought it in 1964, driven around the block a few times and then put in the garage.  In 1964.  It hadn't seen daylight since.  His father had died earlier this year and now it had to go.  I arranged to go over the next day and take a look. After 13 years (Gordon has been gone for over 10) I would finally see the East Sac Crosley.

It was anti climatic.  You picture a car that's been garaged for 46 years, and you imagine a time capsule- at least I did.  Yes, the car had been put away in 1964... but the owner had started to 'restore' it, meaning that he'd partially taken the car apart.  The engine was completely disassembled in the back, rusty and probably worthless.  The transmission was out,  as was the back glass.  The seats were roached- the back seat had nothing left but the frame.   The paint was mostly spots of different colored primer.  They had no idea where the title was or if there even was one.  The owners were very nice, and were tickled to hear that I'd been looking for the car since the nineties. 

I walked them through the good (the body is about as rust free as I've seen), and the bad (all of the above.) I also marveled at the mileage.  The odometer had over 60,000 miles on it- by far the most I've ever seen on a Crosley.  Neat, but, that didn't bode well for the rear end and tranny- the steering box seemed like it was already shot.   There was a brief moment when I thought of making an offer, and then I remembered my blank bank account and all of my projects at home.  Instead I offered to help them sell it thru the West Coast Club if they didn't get much response to their ad. They liked that idea because they'd prefer to have the car restored rather than turned into a hot-rod.

So that was it.  Thirteen years of mild obsession, over.  After all those years of waiting, I can't believe I had more fun talking to the sellers about their dad  than I did actually looking at the Crosley.  I guess that's just the way it goes sometimes.

Crosley People

Getting back on a year ago now I got an email from a guy I barely knew. Bob Price is in the Crosley Club and I'd spoken with him on a couple of occasions- I knew him best because I once missed buying a nice Crosley wagon that he had for sale by a couple of hours! He got hold of me because he still had a spare Crosley engine in his garage that wasn't much use now that the car was gone, and he wondered if I might be interested in it. Bob had had the engine rebuilt, but the crank got damaged before the engine was put back together, so the motor had never been fired. The top end was still brand new.Last year I was BROKE. Liv and I had been publishing a local magazine for about two years, and had lost money every step of the way. (Wow, can you spend a lot of money putting out a magazine about local arts and culture in the middle of an economic downturn!) We were doing it as a labor of love, so some loss was OK, but when it was losing almost as much as I was making at my day job it really started to hurt. So, when Bob offered the engine at a ridiculously low price (a fraction of the machine work cost) at first I said no, saying I didn't know when I'd be able to pay. Bob graciously offered to hold the engine, and I promised to pay when I got my tax return.

A few months went by, I got my taxes back and Bob and I started playing email tag about picking up the engine. First he was going overseas on vacation, and then when he got back I was going on my trip to Bonneville. As emails went back and forth, he kept finding more stuff in the garage and throwing it in the deal. By the time I left on my vacation he was holding the engine, the back seat for a wagon and a box of assorted Crosley bits.
When I got back from Bonneville I was so busy tinkering with my '62 Plymouth daily driver I didn't follow up right away- I just flat forgot. A couple of months went by and Bob sent an email saying that if I didn't want the motor he'd be OK to sell it to someone else- I was so mortified that I asked him to at least let me send the $ so he wasn't waiting for the cash! I sent a check and we coordinated a pick up. Now mind you, Bob is only about two and a half hours away, but at this point we'd failed to connect for about seven months.
Cut to about a month ago. Bob found me on Facebook (I finally got an account in December) and we ogled each other's pictures of vehicles- including a great shot of Bob in a VespaCar circa 1962. Commenting on one another's FB pages it somehow or another came up that Bob had never cashed the check I'd sent! Given the depressing state of my bank account, I check it as infrequently as possible, so I'd never noticed. At this point I felt so embarrassed I was ready to drive to San Leandro that second to get the parts. Bob wouldn't hear of it. "I haven't been to the Sacramento Railroad Museum in a long time- I'll drop the motor off on the way."
So, long story short, Bob and family stopped by my house a few days later with a couple hundred pounds of Crosley parts in the back of their car. Bob wouldn't take any gas money, nor accept my offer to take the whole bunch to lunch. They helped me unload the engine, seat, box of parts and even a stray radiator, poked around my messy garage and looked at all my decaying Crosley projects and then headed on their way. Bob did at least let me direct them to the best (and cheapest!) Mexican food in a 200 mile radius. For all I know he still hasn't cashed that check.

The weird thing is, that's how it always is with Crosley people.

I've been involved with Crosleys for almost 15 years now, and it has been one continuous stream of interesting, thoughtful, and almost perversely helpful folks from day one. Scott Schultz, the first Crosley nut I ever met, answered my want ad with offers to sell me a car or help me find one, and never stopped offering whatever help he could- without ever wanting anything other than camaraderie. When his health finally made it too difficult for him to work on cars, he called and said, "I got two sheds of used Crosley stuff- come get it." It was over a ton of parts, and he wouldn't take a dime for them. Scott also put me in touch with Gordon Becher, another great guy who couldn't do enough to help me out. When I had trouble finding a Crosley to buy he not only clued me in to secret stashes of Crosleys that only he knew about, but even went and looked at them with me since I really had no idea what I was looking at at that point. And that's just the first two guys I met! I could come up with 50 more people like that and still not mention half the great people I've met through Crosleys.

There's an old joke: How do you tell a Porsche from a porcupine? With a porcupine the pricks are on the outside! You could never tell that joke about Crosleys. There is something about wanting to drive a ridiculously underpowered and inarguably funny-looking half-century old car that seems to attract the best folks- or perhaps just repels the assholes. Whatever it is, I cherish it, and Bob Price is just the latest of the fine folks I've met through Powel Crosley's 'Fine Car'.

Bob Price and his wife Rube