Chapter 19

Not long after that school got under way. I had a new group of Auto Shop II kids every year, and some of them were better than others. I knew every one of them, since they'd all been in the Auto Shop I class a year or two years before. This year most of the kids in the class had already helped me out on the 2-car project, picking up parts, sorting them out, stripping the car down, and that sort of thing. I won't say the car was in a basket, but it was in a pile of parts in the back of my pickup when some of the kids and I hauled it over to the Auto Shop room at the high school.

Really, rebuilding the car wasn't that big a deal – building a street car from a pile of parts like that would have been a lot more work. A midget, even an MMSA midget, is built to be a minimal vehicle. There just isn't anything more there than is absolutely necessary. In fact, a real purist would say that a MMSA midget was loaded to the gills with accessories that just added extra weight – things like a clutch and a transmission, which you don't often see on regular midgets, even though there was a good reason they were on the MMSA midgets. The cars were designed to be easy to build, easy to maintain, and easy to fix, so really it wasn't a difficult project for my kids. We only actually worked on the thing one or two class periods a week, and it gave me the chance to demonstrate some things along the way.

The rebuilding of the 2 car was simplified even more by the fact that I didn't have an engine for it. I did have the old cracked V8-60 block that we'd scavenged from Frank's uncle's barn. We could use it as a template to see how things would have to fit, but unless I could come up with a good one, the car was going to be a long way from running. I had hopes of finding an engine that needed a rebuild, along with enough parts to do the job, but as we got along into the fall it was getting more and more clear that it was going to be a second-semester project if I could find the stuff I needed at all.

But, I wasn't finding it. There just wasn't any '30s Ford stuff to be found in junkyards by 1964. Oh, there might have been the odd rusted piece here or there that had escaped when stuff had been loaded on a truck to be hauled off for scrap, but that was the exception, not the rule. I can tell you that's the way it was because I'd spent a lot of time in August visiting junkyards within a hundred miles or more of Bradford, but not one stinking V8-60 engine could I find, repairable or not. I wasn't the only one looking, either; both Don Boies and Phil Sharp were in that Auto Shop II class, and between them they hit a lot of junk yards too, and came up just as empty handed.

Oh, you could find them, but you had to go to places like Hemmings Motor News to turn one of them up. They were antiques now, and worth a bunch more than they had been ten years before – and scarce as hen's teeth, to boot. You might easily find yourself paying five hundred or a thousand bucks for a piece of junk that you might have paid ten dollars for ten years before.

But I wanted to restore the 2 to a running car, not just a roller, so I kept my ears on while we worked on the rest of the car. Things went pretty well; there was a lot of stuff there that we could use, most right from the 2 car with some straightening and bending. A lot of car restoration, especially outside the engine, is just tedium. You do it because it has to be done. Parts had to be cleaned, and not just washed down, but paint and grease removed, occasionally rust to be wire brushed, and metal to be replaced in one way or other. At least I had a lot of cheap if untrained talent to do it, but the point of my having the untrained talent was to turn it into trained talent, so it worked out pretty well, and progress was steady.

It turned out that my appearance out of virtually nowhere at Frank Blixter Ford back in the summer got a lot of old-days yarning going, and Vivian, of all people, got the bug worse than most. It was a little surprising because she didn't know some of the old MMSA guys all that well since she'd only rarely traveled with us, but she turned Sherlock Holmes on us to try to track down the more-or-less regulars who had been lost along the wayside. Since a lot of the people were still involved in racing in one form or another, she decided that the only time for a reunion could be in the dead of winter when everything was pretty well shut down. Working with old notes and pay stubs, she managed to turn up several people who had been missing for years, like Sonny Ochsenlaager and Woody Vanderlessen, although how she did it I'll never know. One day along in the first part of November she called me up to chat a bit, and announce that Squirt Chenowith and Scotty Lombard were even planning on driving in for our reunion the first weekend of December up in Livonia.

I suppose that was what got me off the dime more than anything else. I'd just figured on taking a roll of snapshots of the reconstruction project to show around to the gang, but when I mentioned it to the class the general agreement was that they could have it presentable if they put off the other classwork until after it was done. Since I figured it would be more fun to take the whole project with me, even if it was just a roller, I let them talk me into it.

So class time for the next month or so became nothing but shop time. I figured that there was no way we could be all the way done and the thing needed paint if it wasn't going to look like a project under way, but then a miracle occurred.

One of the kids I had in my Auto Shop II class was a kid by the name of Keith Henderson. He was a little squirt, not into sports, and not very popular; I frankly thought of him as being a little on the dumb side. His grades in the class were OK, if not spectacular, and he tended to be a loner. But, one day he came to me when paint was an issue on something or other, and said, "I can paint that if you like, Mr. Austin."

"You sure?" I asked.

"Oh yeah," he said. "That's one thing I do pretty well. I've got some special tools that I like to use."

"Tell you what," I told him. "Bring your tools in, and I'll let you give a try on one of those odd body panels. If it comes out all right, I'll let you do it on the car."

Well, lo and behold he came in the next day with a box of oddball gear I'd never seen before, other than one thing that looked sort of like a miniature paint spraying rig. He set it up like he knew what he was doing, and I gave him a hood panel that had been thrown into what was once Spud's junk pile to see what he could do. Most of the kids were a little amused at this Mickey Mouse stuff – it didn't look much like a regular spray gun, but he settled down, loaded this little gadget up with Candy Apple Red and went to town. It didn't take him long to have that panel looking better than new. There were no runs, no drips, no sags – just a beautiful piece of paint work.

"What the heck is that thing, anyway?" I had to ask him.

"A Badger airbrush," he said. "I don't think it'd be anything you'd want to use for painting a whole car or anything else big, but it really is the berries for doing fine detail work."

Well, I was impressed and the rest of the class was too, especially when he changed the paint in the thing and started doing some further artwork on the hood panel. It took him several changes of paint, but by the time he was done, he had this good-looking babe riding a white horse painted on the red of the panel, using nothing but the airbrush, even for the detail work. I mean, it literallywas a work of art.

"Good grief," I said, shaking my head in surprise. "With that kind of talent it seems like a waste to use it just to put color on a car."

"Yeah," he agreed. "But it'd be a real good looking car."

So I let him do the 2 car, several coats of high-gloss colors, working from some black and white photos of the car that I had borrowed from Frank to get the paint scheme right. The original 2 had been red with a white trim, and Keith stayed with that, but the color was richer and deeper, shining and glossy even before it was waxed. He even did the "Frank Blixter Ford" freehand, and it really looked professional. Back when the car had first been painted I think Spud at least used a spray gun rather than a brush, but it really was never one of the better looking cars. It certainly didn't have a paint job like that. That was just the body work; he also sprayed the frame and suspension pieces. On top of it, I'd sent a few pieces out to be chromed, and I'll tell you what, by the time we got done after pushing to make the reunion it was really a show car, or would have been if we'd had an engine. The busted V8-60 that we had looked so crappy I decided to just show the 2 car without it, as an empty roller at the reunion.

I probably could have loaded the 2 car in the pickup truck, but unloading it at the place where the reunion was going to be held would clearly be a pain in the butt. Fortunately, one of the other teachers had a small flatbed trailer he used to haul a big lawnmower around in the summer, and he offered it to me to haul the car up to Livonia. That meant Arlene and I had to take the pickup truck up there with the car – not a big deal, even though it was cold out for December and the truck's heater left a little to be desired.

It was a little bit of a hassle to unload the 2 car from the trailer and push it into the banquet room of the hotel where the reunion was going to be held. It had gotten a little dirty from being trailered out there in the open on the flatbed trailer, but Arlene and I set to it with some wet rags as people showed up, and we had it looking pretty darn good before long.

Let's just say it got a lot of "ooohs" and "aaaahhs" from people who could easily remember what it had really looked like back in the day. "You sort of got it wrong," Spud told me, his fingers wrapped around a Stroh's. "It never looked that good, even when Arlene had a fresh wax job on it."

"But isn't it sort of like how you would have liked it to look?" I smiled.

"Well, yeah," he said. "But running all that dirt, there was no way it would have stayed that way."

"Too bad you don't have an engine in it," he replied.

"Yeah, that's proving to be a tough one," I agreed, and gave him a thumbnail account of all the hassles I had been through looking for a V8-60. "Keep your ears open if you ever hear of one, I could sure use it, but I'm not about to sign over my firstborn child for it, either."