A Cautionary Tale

It took my friend Dan Ditullio a little over twenty years to restore his Cord 812. The result is well worth the time and expense, but he learned a few things in the process, some stories worth retelling. This, friends, could happen to you.

He purchased the 1937 Beverly, the more upmarket of Cord's two sedan models, from a co-worker in the spring of 1981. The car looked better than it really was - it had been on the road in 1968, but the paint covered up a surfeit of poor body work done for some previous owner. The Cord doesn't have a frame, per se, so "body-off" doesn't apply. You have to hoist the whole car up and go in from underneath.

The car had experienced some fender damage, and in the process of fixing it one headlight had been installed higher than the other. It took Dan and his friend Charlie Reynolds quite some time to get the alignment just right. When finished, the Cord could say "peek-a-boo" without squinting.

Cord instrument panels are marvelous, an impressive array of instruments and airplane-type controls mounted on an engine-turned background. Dan's had suffered over the decades, so restoration was essential.

Dan had attended to his engine and re-installed it in the car. It sat for a while as the new interior and trim were installed. All restorers know that a dormant engine should be rotated periodically to keep its parts moving and lubricated. One day Dan began to do just that, cranking the engine with the starter with the spark plugs removed. A large dust cloud arose from one side, accompanied by a loud "crunch." Disassembly revealed the problem: mice had crawled up the exhaust pipe and stored seeds inside the engine. Cranking it over had punched the seeds clear through one of the aluminum cylinder heads.

All's well that ends well. A set of modern reproduction heads put the engine right, and patient finishing had the car ready for showing the next summer. It received a well-deserved "First Place Primary" at the 2002 Auburn Cord Duesenberg Festival in Auburn, Indiana. At this writing, the car has received a number of other awards, including a senior trophy at the 2004 ACD Festival, driven the 1,600 miles there and back while achieving about 20 mpg at 65 mph.

Dan's advice to fellow restorers: If you're going to let your engine sit for months, make sure you seal your exhaust pipe and carburetor intake tightly with duct tape!

I Love a Parade

Doesn't everyone? Of course, a parade must have marching bands, baton twirlers, fire engines and celebrities riding in parade phaetons. What kind of parade phaetons? Well, didn't Chrysler build the best parade phaetons?

One of the best known is "Famous Fanny," a Crown Imperial built by Derham Body Company of Rosemont, Pennsylvania for New York City in 1940. In this photo, General Eisenhower receives a hero's welcome from New Yorkers in 1945, as Mayor LaGuardia soaks up some of the limelight. The 1941 LeBaron-built Newport dual cowl phaetons are parade-worthy, too, though with smaller passenger cockpits.

Perhaps the most celebrated parade cars are the three Imperial phaetons built in 1952, and later updated to 1956 appearance. One each was supplied to New York, Los Angeles and Detroit (more history available at the Imperial Web Pages). New York and LA still own their cars; the Detroit phaeton passed through several private collections and is currently owned by the Petersen Automotive Museum.

The 1962 Imperial at the top of this page is somebody's attempt to make a parade car: coachwork by Sawzall. It sat for some months at roadside in Groton, Connecticut, where its crudely-made tonneau cover doubled as a fishpond. When last seen it was headed out of town on a trailer.

Parade phaetons have become a figment of the past. The assassination of President Kennedy in a Lincoln in 1963 spelled the end of open-topped presidential limos. The current White House Cadillacs are as unattractive as they are secure. The general rarity of large convertibles has affected parades all across the nation. In my town, the grand marshal always rides in the same 1967 six-cylinder Plymouth Belvedere.

Don't Blame it on Reo

John Katz passes this Reo tow truck each time he returns home from Baltimore. It sits beside the northbound lane of I-83 between York and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Athough it will take centuries for it to rust to dust - Reo, after all, was the "World's Toughest Truck," according to its manufacturer - John would like to see it better loved. That doesn't mean, however, that he's likely to take it home.

Reo was, of course, Ransom E. Olds's second automotive venture. Leaving his Oldsmobile, and his name, behind, he applied his initials to a new firm, the Reo Motor Car Company, in 1904. His Reo cars sold well - third place in 1907 and almost always in the top ten - and were joined by a line of commercial cars in 1906. A subsidiary, Reo Motor Truck Company, was formed in 1910. Despite coining the name "Speed Wagon" in 1915, Reo trucks were pretty conventional, upright and stodgy right through to 1929.

Reo ceased car manufacture in 1936 to concentrate on trucks. The truck designs became more stylish, following the fashions of the day, and Reo supplied a line of rebadged light trucks to Mack, to be sold as Mack Jr. Further restyling for 1938 portended that Reo would become a trendsetter.

Emerging from bankruptcy in 1940, Reo didn't exactly start a trend, but the trucks made their mark. Called "Moreload," for their cab-forward design, they were like nothing else on the market. The bold front end leapt forward, its front axle pushed back. Reos were built in sizes from 1-1/2 ton capacity up to 68,000 pounds GVW, and offered a choice of gasoline or diesel engines. A few pickups were built, big he-man pickups, not the half-ton type they had supplied to Mack. My home town road department used Reo dump trucks and my high school had a Reo bus.

In 1950, the Reo prow was squared off a bit, and in 1954 a V8 engine was offered, built in-house, as all its gasoline engines had been. Front end design was blunted still further in 1955.

In 1954, Reo Motors, as the company had become in 1940, was acquired by Bohn Aluminum and Brass Corporation. If Reo in the 1930s and '40s had been poor, it now became a stepchild. By 1957, White Motor Company owned Reo, and the following year bought Diamond T. What followed was a line of Diamond Reo trucks aimed at the top of the truck market. They had trouble staying there. Diamond Reo Trucks, Inc. was sold in 1971, and went bankrupt four years later. Loyal Osterlund, a D-R dealer, bought the rights and tooling, and he and successive owners struggled on through the late 1990s. Diamond Reo finally petered out in 2001. Ironically, it is the Diamond Reos that are best remembered by today's youth, along with REO Speedwagon, the band.

That leaves us with the task of identifying the Reo spotted by John Katz. It doesn't appear in the spotter's guides, but Reo authorities Bob Ebert and Jim Neal figured it out. What John saw is a World War II Reo 6x6 wrecker, of a style built for the U.S. Army. Bob and Jim have, with Tim Fijalkovich, written a book, The World's Toughest Truck: The Reo/Diamond Reo Story, to be published by Driveline Publications, a subsidiary of Antique Power, Inc. It should be out later this year. Until then, Reo restorers will find kinship in the Reo Club of America.

Elegant Design

The cars headlining the CarPort are seldom elegant. That in itself is reason to take a breather from the rusty and underloved cars you usually see here and indulge in a full week of elegance. There's no better example of elegance than this Siata 208S spider.

"Elegant," to engineers, means no more complicated than necessary to perform its intended function. That sums up the Siata, a truly simple sporting machine, so basic that it has no speedometer, only a tach. Under the skin, though, it's not so simple, for it has a Fiat 8V engine, a two-litre 70-degree pushrod V8 that makes a glorious noise. It was one of some 300 cars exhibited this past weekend at the Greenwich Concours d'Elegance in Connecticut.

This was the tenth annual Greenwich Concours, conceived and chaired by Bruce and Genia Wennerstrom and held at water's edge in scenic Greenwich Harbor. Not all cars had the simple elegance of the Siata. Saturday's best of show, a 1929 Hibbard and Darrin-bodied Stutz, held high its distinctive Woodlites, and Sunday's best, Jack Thomas's Ferrari 375 America, built for Gianni Agnelli, looked less Ferrari-like than the Siata beside it.

There were Packards galore, including a yummy butterscotch 120B victoria with body by LeBaron and a 1935 Super Eight 7-passenger sedan recently unearthed by movie car mogul Nick Pagani (seen here with his namesake car brought by another exhibitor).

There were cars of personalities, like Ernie Kovacs' 1951 Bentley Mark VI and Henry Crane's own Crane Simplex. Mrs. Crane thoughtfully took time from her reading to tell us about the car, as did Master Tomko for his father's 1912 Buick, once in the Dick Teague collection.

Spectators could see engines, and automotive spectacles, like a Kaiser doffing its top. Celebrities included veteran race driver John Fitch (being interviewed by Bob Long for Motor Trend Weekend radio), who brought his one-off Phoenix, and pioneer female racer Janet Guthrie, signing copies of her new autobiography A Life at Full Throttle.

A circle titled the "Best of the Best" highlighted winners from earlier years, like Brian Beni's 1935 SS1 Airline coupe and Sam Mann's Dodge Firearrow. Recently liberated from New Europe was a Tatra T613, contrasted by a meticulously-restored "Frog Eye" MkI Austin-Healey Sprite.

The Greenwich Concours d'Elegance benefits Americares, a non-profit disaster relief and humanitarian aid organization. It is held each year on the first weekend in June at Roger Sherman Baldwin Park in Greenwich, Connecticut. Put Greenwich on your itinerary for 2006.

Ingenious Yankee

Philip Worthington Foster was born 95 years ago today. Never what you'd call a "car guy," he was endowed with that inventive cleverness we call "Yankee ingenuity." Mark Twain's hero in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court describes it best: "...if there wasn't any quick new-fangled way to make a thing, I could invent one -- and do it as easy as rolling off a log." That was Philip Foster, always inventing new ways to do things.

He didn't own all that many cars, perhaps a dozen over his near-90-year lifetime. But, like all his chattels and tools, he cared deeply about every one and took faithful care of them. His first car was a half interest in an Apperson Jackrabbit (not the Model T in the photo; the Apperson's behind it). At age 20 he bought himself a Model A Ford Standard Roadster. In 1948, he presaged today's sport utility vehicle craze by buying a new Willys Jeep. Almost within the year, however, he realized that a Jeep was not the ideal family car, and supplemented it with a 1949 Mercury. The car atop this page is the Triumph Ten, an Americanized version of the British Standard Ten, that he drove during the 1960s.

A native of Newark, New Jersey, he became a naturalized Yankee, settling in Falls Village, Connecticut, in the Litchfield Hills where he had spent summers as a boy. Like the ingenious Stanley brothers, makers of the Stanley Steamer and with whom he shared a birthday, he continually taught himself new skills: photography, woodworking, metal work, and offset printing. Without knowing it, he all but invented desktop publishing in the 1950s. Because he was usually the face behind the camera, there are few photos of him at work. A rare shot shows him flushing salt water from his outboard motor, typical of his care for machinery, at Cape Cod.

From working with my father I learned countless skills: carpentry, darkroom technique, sharpening a drill by eye. From his example I absorbed a strong work ethic and sense of honor. From him I inherited many useful tools and not a few automobiles. The Model A and Jeep are still with me, as are his Bantam trailer and Simplicity garden tractor. Philip Foster's son, like his father, does not let go of his chattels lightly.