Christmas at the Hershey Auto Museum (a slideshow)

[goosenapper]

[goosenapper]

[waaytoomuchintothis]

Couple of old friends in there. I wish they had more captions about some of them. One of them had a photo of Alan Ludden in it, he was married to Betty White. He was a game show host from Password (1960s). If it hadn't said that was Betty White, I never would have known her from the picture.

The car labeled "El Catalina" is in fact, a Flower Car, a shallow pickup version of cars that carried wreaths to funerals behind the hearse in really big funerals. They were popular in the Northeastern US, particularly for mafia funerals. Every one was hand made, one at a time, at two shops, Superior Coachbuilders, and M&M. Unfortuately, there are very few of them left, as the rust belt salt ate them up. There were a number of very hot welds that seemed to suck up any salt in the area and they rusted in the same spots every time. I only ever found one, in Shelbyville, TN when I was messing around with collector cars. It was a Buick, but of course most of them were Cadillacs. As far as I know, they were all GM products. I'd drive that Pontiac version as a daily driver. Its gorgeous.

[waaytoomuchintothis]

A guy in grad school bought one, and when he drove it home, it was chugging and rough and sounded awful. I got under the hood and found that two of the ignition wires had been swapped. It ran like a sewing machine after that. Of course, a few months later, parts of the body started falling off, and eventually most of the electrical system shorted out.

[btaylor]

[waaytoomuchintothis]

I bet that's a thing to behold. I never came across Fischer as a builder. That will be fun to look up. One of the terrible cars I had when I started college (that's pre-Beetle that I still have with 500,000+ miles on it), was a an ambulance/hearse that I shared ownership on with two other imbeciles (it was 1969). It was a '59 Cadillac (think Ghostbusters), a faded blue monster with a white leather interior, that had been a county vehicle in Yalobusha County, Mississippi. We bought it for $75 at Superior Coach Sales on So. 3rd St in Memphis. It did double duty for the county as an ambulance (flip the casket rollers over and they become wheel chocks for the stretcher), and as hearse. We picked it from a 3 story tall storage stack (like the ones for boats), and it was delivered to us by forklift. It had only been out of service for a few years, so very little had to be done to get it running, and we drove it home. The biggest expense we had was two tires- they cost triple normal tires because it had 17 inch wheels. Everything on that car was scaled up version of the Cadillac, 2.5 feet longer, giant wheels, huge windshield, etc.

When I drove it home to visit, my father made me park it around the corner so no one would know it had anything to do with the family...

[goosenapper]