For us automobile enthusiasts, Father's Day weekend represents a sort of annual voyeuristic high season. Out on the West coast there's the huge L.A. Roadster show. Closer to my midwestern home, there's the even huger 10,000+ car Back to the Fifties show in St. Paul (Mr. Lileks has some terrific photos today from the scene). Normally you will see me headed west on I-94 for BTT50s, but this year I took the eastbound ramp for Detroit and the annual Eyes on Design charity car show at the Edsel & Eleanor Ford Estate on the shores of Lake Huron.
An amazing selection of cars and motorcycles from just about ever subphylum you can imagine. One of the special emphasis categories this year was Hudson. Here is the rear end of a Hudson Italia, the company's heroic but ill-fated deathbed sports car. Behind, a Hudson Hornet (for you younger folks, the Paul Newman character in "Cars")
Another special category this year was "Family Vacation," offering 30 or more of the finest station wagons I have ever seen. I think my favorite was this lil' Nash Rambler.
As one might expect at a car show at Edsel Ford's house, there were a few Ford Edsels like this '59 '58 (h/t: Kurt in Denver) Pacer. Edsel had nothing to do with his namesake model, having died many years earlier. The trademark vertical center grille was officially called a "horse collar" but it prompted one wag to say the car "looked like an Oldsmobile sucking a lemon." Others likened it to X-rate anatomical parts.
There was a true ocular feast of period speedway / board track cars... Millers, Offys, etc. The stunner was this 1915 speedway racer built by the two greatest Iowans of all time, Fred and August Duesenberg. This was one of the brothers' first racers built after the demise of their first venture, the Des Moines-based Maytag-Mason car company. Racing success propelled them back into luxury auto manufacturing, which gave our language the term "it's a doozy."
As expected there were more classic coachbuilder age luxury cars than you you could shake various sticks at... Cords, Auburns, Packards, Duesenbergs. Among all of them the one that stood out to me was this gorgeous 1932 REO Royale. REO stands for Ransom E. Olds, of Oldsmobile fame. His buyout agreement with General Motors had a non-compete clause preventing him from starting another company with the Olds name, so he cranked back up as REO. His new company specialized in heavy duty trucks (including the REO Speedwagon, which became the moniker of a noteworthy midwestern mullet band), but he briefly aspired to compete in the Great Depression luxury car niche. The Royale seen here is reportedly the very first production car to be design-tested in a wind tunnel, giving it an incredible flowing form.
On the other end of the spectrum, a fascinating display of mini and micro cars from the 30s through the 70's. Lest you think tiny, lightweight electric cars are a brand new high tech brain fart: here's the Red Bug, a production electric car built New Jersey in the 1930s.
From the disco era gasoline crisis, the endearingly ungainly one passenger Freeway:
Contrast with the Bertone Stratos Zero concept from 1970:
My humble heap was assigned to be petal in a lovely daisy ring of rods and customs. A Canadian TV reporter from nearby Canadia asked me to describe it, and so I told her it was a "Ford Model, Eh."
Thrill for the day was being parked next to the SoCal-Haas Racing 553. This '34 roadster has a 2.0 liter 4-cylinder GM Ecotech mill producing 750+ wheel HP, and has scorched a few 210+ mph class records at Bonneville. When the crew saw 13-year old Hawkspawn's SCTA hat, they invited him to try the cockpit on for size, and get a lesson in the emergency shutdown protocol.
Car show over, on the way back home we had a chance for a short Detroit decay tour along the post-apocalyptic Mad Max moonscape of Michigan Avenue, including the old train station and Tiger Stadium.
Swell time was had by all, and we escaped with nary an exit wound. More photos here.
