A couple of weeks ago, I shared with you the four collector cars I wanted to drive home from Arizona Auction Week. As a matter of review, they were: from Barrett-Jackson, the 1959 Cadillac Coupe de Ville restyled by Raymond Lowey; from Russo and Steele, the 1948 Tucker 48 convertible; from RM, the 1954 Mercury XM-800 concept car; from Gooding & Co., the 1948 Cadillac Series 62 cabriolet with coachwork by Jacques Saoutchik.

 

Of course, I’d selected those cars after reviewing only the auction catalogs. I’d yet to see the more than 2000 collector cars available in the flesh – well, my flesh and their sheetmetal – and thus I reserved the right to change my mind. Which I have.

 

After hours of walking the tents at Barrett-Jackson, Gooding, and Russo and Steele (and in the later case first while those tents were up and then after a storm took them down), and after several trips around the parking garage where cars are kept during the RM auction, I’ve revised my list.

 

My choice from Russo and Steele, however, remains the same. I’d still want that Tucker convertible, even though I don’t necessarily believe the story that it was a secret project started within the Tucker factory. Arizona Republic reporter Peter Corbett tracked down Preston Tucker’s daughter-in-law, now 82 years old and living in Scottsdale.

 

“There never was a convertible,” she told the newspaper. “All the cars were the same, just different colors.”

 

But whether the idea for a convertible came from within the Tucker factory or years later when someone found a leftover chassis and some body components, the car is unique, appears to have been very well assembled, and comes with something every collector car should have – a story – in this case, a delightful mystery that likely will never be solved to everyone’s satisfaction.

 

My choice from RM turns out not to be the Mercury concept car – though it is amazingly gorgeous, and unlike General Motors or Chrysler, it was rare for Ford to build full-scale concept vehicles in the 1950s. Much to my surprise, the two cars at RM that sparked my desire were the 1934 Brewster Ford Town Car and the 1930 MG M-type boat tail speedster.

 

That neither car approaches the Mercury in value isn’t important. The XM-800 sold for nearly half a million dollars. The Brewster went for $77K and the MG for $31,900. But it’s heart strings, not dollar signs, that draw us like iron filings to such sheetmetal magnets. That little MG with its boat tail design is, well, just so sweet, and the design of the Brewster Ford, especially the way its heart-shaped radiator sweeps down and forward into the bumper, makes the car look like its in motion even when it’s parked in a dark garage.

 

O.K., if I can have only one, I’ll take the Brewster, not only because I like the way it looks, but again, because of the story of how Brewster and Ford got together in the first place. The Brewsters were building carriages as early as 1810, but after the turn of the century they started creating bodies for motor cars, especially Rolls-Royces. When the Depression struck, Rolls retreated to England and Brewster needed a new client. Fortunately, former Brewster designer Eugene “Bob” Gregorie had been hired as head of styling for Ford and, well, the rest, as they say, is history.

 

As to my choice from Gooding & Co., as much as I find the streamlined Saoutchik Cadillac exotically attractive, the car I want from the auction is the one that was parked just behind it in the pre-auction display area – the 1937 “Tommy Lee Speedster” created by Frank Kurtis. This one had me at “hello,” which in the case of this seductively long and low, Offenhauser-powered and teardrop-fendered roadster was the moment I saw how the four exhaust pipes emerge through the bright metalwork that wraps around the car’s hood and how those exhaust tubes flow into a single tailpipe that runs all the way back along the side of the car.

 

With a car such as this, it’s no wonder Tommy Lee became such a Hollywood playboy.  And we won’t even get into the fact that the fenders could be removed so the car could be raced against other hot rods on Southern California’s dry lakes.

 

 

And now, my choice from Barrett-Jackson: Yes, I really like the Loewy Cadillac, and again it’s a car that combines style and story. But, let’s face it, people go to Barrett-Jackson not for elegance but for entertainment. It’s the greatest show on four wheels, and thus my choice is full of whimsy. It’s the 1926 Hudson Speedster “Grapes of Wrath.”

 

Now there was nothing whimsical about the Joad family and John Steinbeck’s Dust Bowl tale about the Grapes of Wrath. The whimsy didn’t arrive until Gary Wales got his hands on the ’26 Hudson Super Six that had been modified by Twentieth Century-Fox for the movie portrayal of Steinbeck’s novel. Wales found the car in a garage after termites had spent decades consuming the Hudson’s wooden components. He knew he couldn’t restore the car to either its factory or movie specification, and besides, that’s not his style anyway. Wales likes to redo cars in a way that preserves them for posterity but entertains at the same time.

 

He’d long liked photos he’d seen of early racecars with long tails that provided a convenient place to carry spare tires like donuts on a dowel, so he and master mechanic Andres Aranada gave the Hudson new life as sort of a racecar recreation.

 

When I saw the car with its bright red paint and donut-style spare mounted on its finned tail cone, I thought of my grandchildren, and of grandchildren everywhere – and of their parents and grandparents – who would delight at seeing the car parade through the streets of every small town that still celebrates holidays and centennials and victories by the local high school sports teams with parades and picnics.

 

In 1960, at the age of 58, John Steinbeck and his dog, Charlie, drove across America. As Steinbeck put it in Travels with Charlie, they undertook the trip to hear and smell and see the land and its people first hand.

 

Wouldn’t it be great to spend the summer – Memorial Day to Labor Day -- retracing that trip, and meandering off the route as whimsy strikes -- in this Steinbeck Speedster?

 

-- Larry Edsall