So 12/11/2020 marked the Studebaker’s 80th birthday. Car birthdays are tricky. The cylinder head is dated 11/28/1940 but the engine block is stamped 12/11/1940. Oddly that date is also the shipping date shown on the production order. Which means either they built and shipped the car the same day OR somebody fudged the production order.
Unfortunately, I don’t have any pictures of the car before my father started working on it. Here is the earliest picture I could find. It is of my sister and I washing the car in 1982. This was the first time I ever saw the car out in the open. We were visiting for a week so all we did was clean it up and make a list of things we needed to do.
This next shot is a couple years later. After working on the car whenever we visited Dad finally got the car running. This is us looking very pleased with ourselves. Notice the oil dripping up front…
My grandfather got into it at this point and decided to get the car painted. He knew a guy who ran the body shop at a car dealership in Greensburg PA. Here they are during the project
And pictures of the car being painted…
Dad took these pictures on our next visit after the car was finished. It looked amazing. Grandpap looked thrilled. This is the only picture I ever found of him driving the car.
After he passed the car sat for 8 years until my grandmother also died and left it to me. It was a sad sight with years of dust on it.
We got air in the tires, pushed it up the hill, and loaded it on the trailer. This was difficult because it has been parked for years with the parking brake on and the back wheels did NOT want to turn.
At this time my father was building houses and we asked the contractor who graded his lots to help use bring the car home. This trailer usually held a backhoe so the car was no strain. We did have some excitement when several deer decided to cross I-70 and we locked up the trailer brakes getting stopped. I thought for sure we were going to wreck but we did not hit anything and left a really impressive set of skid marks.
