Wink, Booger & Crosley

Recently bought this 1948 snapshot of "Wink, Booger and Crosley" - with an annotation like that, how could I resist?

VOTE!

Vote, people.

It's Election Day here in the US. We all kvetch and complain about our choices, and most of us take this right for granted, but let's remember that less than half the people in the world have any real say in how they are governed, and less than 20% live in a true democracy. We are lucky.

Photo found somewhere on the web - I believe this was taken at the Hershey Swap Meet a couple of years ago, but don't know more than that.

Incredible: Putt Mossman's 1949 Crosley Thrill Show

Just noticed this INCREDIBLE photo of a Crosley Stunt Show: Jimmy Leach and His Death Duckers' Thrill Show of 1949 - 'The Show That's Alive With Death!'  Some lucky soul parted with $42 to win one of the coolest Crosley pictures I've ever come across.

A quick internet search turned up zero about Jimmy Leach and his Death Duckers, so I don't know how 'alive with death' the show was, but it seems to have been alive with Crosleys, including a pair of sedans, one of which is airborne over what looks like an uber-rare Crosley Sport Utility.  Seems like the Sport Ute should have had fabric doors, tho, so maybe this is just a cut-down wagon.  Whatever - this whole package is COOL.

The daring driver of the leaping sedan appears to have been Orren 'Putt' Mossman, a stunt driver best known for his motorcycle escapades.   By 1949 Mossman was a thrill show veteran, having been jumping, burning and wrecking two and four-wheeled vehicles for decades.  Despite a penchant for poor prep, and thus, severe injury, Mossman lived to a ripe old age, dying in 1994 at the age of 88.

Crosley Factory Photo, 1946

Don't know where The Old Motor got this picture, but it's a good one: a whole line of 1947 model sedans on the line at the Marion, Indiana plant.  The photo is dated October 1946; that sounds right - these sedans don't have the Crosley script that went on the bumpers of the very first postwar Crosleys, and they lack the running lights of the slightly later cars.  Neat!

Cruikshank the Crosley

"Cruikshank the Crosley" by Andrew McWhiney is probably the single best article about Crosley ownership ever written.  Originally published by Road and Track in their July 1952 issue, "Cruikshank" perfectly captured the absurdity, novelty and charm of Powell Crosley's pint-sized econobox; McWhiney's experiences still rang true when I read them nearly 50 years later.  Ironically, the article was published just about the time Crosley halted production.

Below are some high res scans of the whole original story, along with some other nuggets from the same issue...

Ebay Watch: Ultimate Clown Car?

Fresh off his Zero comments, Minnesota Crosley nut Fred Syrdal tipped me off to this Ebay listing for a 1951 Crosley sedan formerly owned by world-famous clown Emmett Kelly!

Original Photograph

I missed out on this vintage 8X10 of a Crosley auto wreck on Ebay yesterday.  My $20.50 bid just wasn't enough.  If you bought this picture I'd sure love to get a high res scan WITHOUT 'Original Photograph' stuck on top...  let me know!

Vintage Picture: Kid and a Crosley

Today we've got a great vintage pic of a kid checking out the air conditioning on a CC (1946, '47 or '48) Sedan.  Sharp-eyed Cros fans will note that the car has the rare in dash radio, which makes sense since it's also sporting an antenna.  Crosley nut Doug Cottis bought the pic off Ebay and posted it in his 'Crosley Automobiles...  Fun Little Cars' Group on Facebook and gave me permission to share.

Thanks Doug!

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.