Back to the Past...

The Cars on Display at Guptill's Arena

This weekend deserves to be documented. It all began several months ago when I was notified that the Lincoln Zephyr Owners Club was planning to conduct a meet at Latham, New York.

I have been a member of the LZOC since the early 1970's. For several years, Margo and I were the membership chairmen of the club, and I developed and maintain the club's Web site. On that Web site, among other features, I have for several years included a calendar of events that might interest members of the club. For any major club event I usually create a special Web page describing the details with links to the host hotel, a map of the area near the site of the meet, a link that permits the user to print an application form, and a schedule of activities. So I was not simply being notified that a meet was going to take place in Latham, near Albany, New York. I was also being asked to create the Web page that would publicize it to our club members who use the Internet.

Coincidentally, I was born and raised in Schenectady, New York, so I saw this as an opportunity to not only attend a national meet of the club, but also to visit my old “stomping grounds.” I had lots of frequent flier miles stored up from my recent years' travel, so I talked it over with Mary Ann and decided to go to the meet. She had to stay at home to keep the gift shop open, but she encouraged me to go. It had been several years since I had attended a club event and I also saw it as an opportunity to renew some old and very dear friendships.

I planned to fly to Albany on Friday morning as early as possible so I'd only have to use one day of vacation. I knew that the Concours d ‘Elegance and judging were planned for Friday afternoon. My hope was that I would arrive in time to get a few pictures at that event while the cars were on display. I made it in time. My flights to Atlanta and from Atlanta to Albany both arrived early. I picked up my rental car and dashed up the road to Guptill's Arena, a 1950's-era skating rink in which I skated as a kid.

The front parking lot of Guptill's was the site of the car display. What a perfect setting. And as I expected, I started seeing a lot of familiar faces – John McAdams, one of the founders of the club in 1968, and his lovely wife Ellen; club President Jerry Emery and his wife Roz; past club president Al McWade and his wife Charlotte; Jerry and Mary Richman, Carolyn Henderson (the Chief Judge of the club), Tom Brunner (club Treasurer), and many more.

After we returned to the hotel, the technical seminar proceeded, hosted and presented by Ed Spagnolo, of Color-Ite Refinishing Company of Bethany, Connecticut, a car restoration business of long standing. Ed and his associates probably have more experience with high-quality restorations of Lincoln-Zephyrs (1936-1948) and the early Lincoln Continentals built on the Zephyr Chassis than any other restoration shop. He came equipped with a computer full of PowerPoint show-and-tell presentations of restorations, unique problems and solutions, and great personal stories. The audience really appreciated his sharing of experiences.

Friday evening was concluded with a social hour at our host hotel, the Century House Inn, a delightful buffet dinner, beautifully presented, and our traditional parts auction. Jerry Richman was his usual entertaining and fund-raising self as the auctioneer. Fines were levied for talking, laughing, and other innocent behavior. Ultimately, through the generous contributions of the Lincoln Motor Car Division of the Ford Motor Company and many club supporters, we raised over $2,000 for the club’s treasury.

Saturday morning’s activities opened with a “poker run” in which participants drive to five predetermined locations to gather playing cards. At the end, the best poker hand wins a prize. I was asked to staff one of the locations, so I drove to Schuylerville, New York, to the residence of General Philip Schuyler, a revolutionary war hero. His residence is now maintained by the National Park Service as part of the Saratoga Battlefield National Historical Park. I handed out cards to each of the club members who drove to my location. It was thrilling seeing these wonderful vehicles being driven and enjoyed.

The Philip Schuyler Home, Built in 1777

After the last car had visited my site, I decided to take the guided tour of the Schuyler residence. The park ranger who escorted me through the house, Joe Craig, was exceptionally well informed and the hour flew by. Then I headed back to the hotel where a bus was to take us to a private collection of very early cars that are located in Schenectady, my home town. Traffic was very heavy. I made a couple of wrong turns. By the time I got back to the hotel, the bus had left.

Fortunately, Debbie Schneiderwind, one of the club members hosting the meet, was still at the hotel. She very graciously took me to the location of this incredible automobile collection. Amazingly, as we approached the site, I realized that it was within a block of one of the schools I attended as a kid. Small world!

The Gerald Sichel collection is made up almost entirely of automobiles from 1915 and earlier. As I entered the building, I knew I was in a very special place. To top it off, when I met the curator and caretaker of the collection, it turned out to be Bruce Armer, a fellow whom I had known 50 years ago when we were members of the Automobilists of the Upper Hudson Valley, a local car club. Bruce and I exchanged reminiscences and I had a chance to savor these magnificent cars. Then it was back to the hotel to get ready for the Awards Banquet.

Some Scenes from the Sichel Collection

I had a couple of hours to spare, so I gathered up my cameras and headed back to Schenectady. I stopped to pay my respects at the cemetery where my brother Richard, sister Ann, mother, and maternal grandparents are buried. Then I proceeded to the neighborhood where I grew up. I took some photos of the house I lived in for 18 years, the garage where I worked and pumped gas, and some of the neighboring streets. Then it was back to the banquet.

The club President, Jerry Emery, asked if I could act as the official photographer, so I flitted around taking pictures as the awards were made. I didn’t envy the judges who had to decide on best this and best that since there had been so many gorgeous cars presented at the meet. At the end of the evening, I was shocked to hear my name as the host, Harold Schneiderwind, presented me with a beautiful desk clock in recognition of my service to the club. It was a total surprise, and a very considerate gift.

At the end of the evening, I think everyone agreed that this had been an exceptional weekend. Harold and Debra Schneiderwind did a terrific job of preparing for and hosting the meet. The hotel staff had been superb. The accommodations and food were excellent. We all considered ourselves fortunate to have participated.

Ed & Pam Avedisian's "Best-in-Show" 1940 Lincoln Continental

The Great Lincoln-Buying Expedition

In 1965 I was sent by the Navy to Naval ROTC instructor duty in Norman, Oklahoma. One of my faculty colleagues at the University of Oklahoma was Major Gene Basden, USAF, who taught in the Air Force ROTC. One day as we were having coffee, Gene found out that I had an interest in antique and classic cars. He mentioned that in 1957 he had bought a 1948 Lincoln Continental convertible that he hoped someday to restore. He invited me to join him and his wife Jo for dinner and to look the car over. He wanted advice as to whether to restore the car and how to proceed.

That invitation started a long friendship. I visited the Basdens and was very impressed with the overall condition of their car. I volunteered to help Gene and for the next couple of years I spent many evenings at their home, often working on the car until late at night. We also made excursions on weekends looking for unsold parts for the car at Oklahoma Ford, Lincoln, and Mercury dealerships. Gene and Jo were devout Presbyterians, averse to accepting charity, and often offered to pay me for my time, an offer which I steadfastly rejected. After all, these were friends, not employers.

While this was going on, my brother Bill coincidentally had purchased a 1948 Lincoln Continental coupe from a gentleman named Les Parisek in New Haven, Connecticut. One evening in late March, 1969, my brother called me to let me know that Mr. Parisek was selling his entire collection of Lincolns and Packards. He had sold his house and the cars (all 37 of them) needed to be gone by the following Friday. Bill said that if I ever hoped to own one of the classic Lincolns, this might be the perfect opportunity. This took place just as I had gone back to school. I really didn't have either the time or spare money to buy a car, but as a car guy, I did the natural thing -- I called Mr. Parisek.

After a couple days of haggling, Mr. Parisek and I agreed on a price for two cars -- a very unrestored 1948 Lincoln Continental Convertible (properly described as a "cabriolet"), and a very used and very tired 1947 Lincoln sedan. My idea was to fly to Connecticut carrying a bumper-mount tow bar. Once there, I would hook up the Continental (which had no installed engine or transmission) behind the sedan. I would drive the sedan, towing the convertible, from Connecticut to Oklahoma. There were a couple of minor issues -- my savings were tied up in investments that would take several days to access and I needed to find someone to go to Connecticut with me to bring the cars back. I called Gene Basden. Somehow, I convinced him to loan me the money for the deal and to go to Connecticut with me to bring the cars back. It was perfect -- I had the help that I needed and Gene and his wife felt good that they were repaying me for the help I had been giving them.

I was in the Naval Reserve and Gene was still on active duty in the Air Force, so we were both entitled to space-available military transport flights. Thus it was that on the morning of Thursday, April 3, 1969, Gene and I entered the operations building at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma City to begin the adventure of a lifetime.

We waited several hours but eventually got a ride on a KC-135 tanker going to McGuire Air Force Base near Trenton, New Jersey. We probably looked strange dressed in our uniforms but carrying a large toolbox and an automobile towbar. Once in New Jersey, we got a taxi ride to the bus station and took a bus to New Haven. Les picked us up at the bus station around 10:00 PM and took us to his home. He had assured me that the Continental would be ready to start rolling as soon as we got there, but none of the preparation had been done. We mounted the fenders on the car, loaded the engine into the interior of the car, stacked the seats, top mechanism and other parts around the engine. We cut a large piece of plywood to straddle the frame rails under the hood and loaded it with spare parts (I had agreed with Mr. Parisek that we could take any Lincoln parts that were in his shop). The underside of the hood covered a cache of starters, generators, fuel pumps, and distributors. The trunk was full of cylinder heads.

We filled the back seat and the trunk of the tow car with parts as well. We had one good spare tire - the exposed spare on the Continental. This whole operation - assembling the Continental, loading tons of parts, and hooking up the towbar - took until about 2:00 AM. As we were about to leave, Gene spotted a spare Continental cabriolet door hanging on the wall. We took the time to load it on top of everything else, rising like a sail running lengthwise and strapped to each side of the Continental. We looked like a travelling Gypsy car-dealing operation as we pulled out of Les's driveway at 3:00 AM on Good Friday.

Within ten minutes we were pulled over by a man in blue on Interstate 95. A little background is in order. Before I left Oklahoma, I had gotten a license plate for the Lincoln Sedan. Under Oklahoma law, I didn't need a tag for the Continental. It was neither a car (it had no installed engine) nor was it considered a trailer. The tag agent in Norman had told me that I didn't need to get any tag for the Continental until I planned to drive it.

I explained this to the officer who had stopped us. He radioed his barracks, who called Oklahoma. My story was confirmed, but this episode took about 45 minutes. Then we were on our way again. This same thing happened to us again on the Cross-Bronx Expressway - another 45-minute delay. We then crossed the George Washington Bridge, planning to travel down the Garden State Parkway and to cross Pennsylvania on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. This was not to be.

We were informed by the attendant at the Garden State tollbooth that we couldn't proceed. There was a restriction on towed vehicles that were incapable of being moved under their own power. Our options were very limited. Interstate 80 was under construction and went in the direction we wanted to go. We decided to take that option, accepting the fact that about half of the mileage across Pennsylvania would be on secondary roads. It was getting much colder and we needed to keep moving west.

To complicate the comfort issues, we had a few "special features" in the Lincoln we were driving. These cars had hydraulic power window mechanisms. There were two rubber hoses that entered each door to carry the hydraulic fluid that drove a piston to raise or lower the window. In our car, on the driver's side, one of those hoses had burst. Not only wouldn't the window stay up, but the hose had sprayed its fluid all over the rug on the driver's floor. The fumes from that fluid made our eyes water and the window couldn't be raised. Another feature was the noise. There was a hole in the muffler. We heard every possible noise that the little V-12 could produce. And then there was the heater -- it didn't work. Discomfort reigned. The windshield wipers were of the old vacuum-driven type that stop when you are accelerating or going up hill. We ran into cold steady rain about halfway across Pennsylvania, so this feature became a real safety issue.

Mechanically, the car seemed sound enough, but our entourage probably weighed close to 9,000 pounds. Neither the drive train nor the brakes on the Lincoln were designed for that kind of load. We had to be very cautious in our driving. And about every fifty miles we stopped to add oil to the engine, alternating between SAE fifty weight oil and straight STP.

We were stopped a couple more times by Pennsylvania troopers because of the lack of a license plate on the Continental. After the second trooper had contacted his barracks and confirmed that we were street legal (not sane, just legal) he wrote us a note verifying our story on an official Pennsylvania State Trooper form. That form saved us untold inconvenience as we used it three or four times later in the trip after being stopped.

By the time we got into western Pennsylvania, the rain had turned to wet, heavy snow. We kept driving. We got to Columbus, Ohio, at about 10:00 PM and our teeth were chattering so badly that we couldn't talk to the service station attendant who waited on us. He made us go inside to warm up and he made a cardboard insert for our driver's side window to keep the wind out. The cardboard had a tiny clear plastic window so we could look at the rear view mirror.

Unknown to us, there had been a drama unfolding on the Pennsylvania Turnpike as we were crossing the northern part of the state. A sniper, shooting from his car, started firing randomly at motorists on the turnpike. He had killed 4 and injured 15 people before being killed by police. Jo Basden, Gene's wife, knew that we were planning to cross the state on the turnpike. When she hadn't heard from us all day (remember, there were no cellphones), she had convinced herself that we were among the victims of this sniper. When Gene called her from Columbus, she was absolutely hysterical. It took several minutes for her to calm down enough to explain what had taken place on the turnpike.

We pressed on, alternating sleeping and driving. We had bought some blankets and more oil and STP. We crossed Ohio, Indiana, Illinois. At one point, who knows where, I was driving through a small town at 2:00 AM. I saw the red flashing lights reflecting off the buildings of the abandoned street on which I was driving (we had practically no rearward visibility). I pulled over and gave the policeman the well-rehearsed explanation, "The car has no engine and under Oklahoma law..." The policeman cut me off and walked back to shine his flashlight into the gaping mouth of the Continental. "For a car with no engine, it sure has a lot of starters and generators! Get on outta here!"

At one stop in Missouri, Gene and I commented that we had both noticed how mothers grabbed their children when we walked by. We looked and probably smelled great.

On Easter Sunday morning, as Gene was driving, we made a left turn into a service station. Gene didn't see the oncoming car that skidded to a halt barely missing the Continental (Remember, this whole "rig" was over forty feet long!). The driver, in his best Sunday finery, jumped out, ran over to Gene's side of the car, and started to read him the riot act. Gene, looking totally bedraggled, with a three-day growth of beard, simply said, "I'm sorry. I didn't see you." The man was totally taken back by this meek response. He wandered back to his waiting family and drove off.

At 1:00 AM on Monday, we crossed a bridge on Interstate 35 with a sign saying "Welcome to Cleveland County." We cried with relief. We were still shedding tears of joy when we parked at Gene's and Jo's.

A few days later, I sold the Lincoln sedan to my brother, who drove it to his home in Louisiana and used it as a second car. His twin boys called it the "Zipper." They had trouble saying "Zephyr." Within a few days I paid the Basdens the money I owed them, but I never could repay Gene for the trials and tribulations of that trip. I still have the Continental, still unrestored (these things take time), and I still have the door that Gene didn't want to leave behind.