I can’t tell you the exact day, month, or even year I realized this – but pretty much from the beginning, I realized that my Dad liked cars. The origins of his fascination with classic automobiles can certainly be traced back to his childhood. But my childhood knowledge of his vehicular obsession can only be traced back to about 1975 – when he made his first classic car purchase during my lifetime: the blue 1949 Super-Six Hudson.
My recollection doesn’t stretch to the point of remembering when the car came into our lives, only that it was suddenly there…and then we got another Hudson (a black one) and Dad became known to some of my friends as “the guy with the two old cars”…and then the blue one went away and we only had the black one. The blue one wasn’t as nice as the sharp, shiny black one, which we held onto much longer than the blue one. Once we had the black one, the blue one sort of lost its luster and became more noticeably a somewhat run-down old car, while the black one was of showing class, bordering on luxurious.
In reality, my Dad now tells me, that he purchased the car for the sum of $625 around September of 1975 with the intent of restoring it. Since we only had the one-car garage at the time, he used the garage of his cousin John Shirk, who was coincidentally living at our old house on John Glenn, to store the Hudson. Later on after the initial stages of restoration began (getting the bumpers re-chromed), he happened upon a different 1949 Hudson that he liked better around the Summer of ’76. It was slightly pricier at $1000, but promised to be a bit easier to restore.
Having already had the bumpers chromed, he used them on the new 1949 – the black one – and applied its old bumpers to the blue one. He decided to focus his attention solely on the black one and so soon sold the blue one to a man from Bucyrus, who was so anxious to take posession of the car that he drove it home with no license plates.
Although he didn’t take a lot of photos or slides in 1975, Dad always loved taking pictures of his cars. So as a result, here are a few slides of the blue 1949 Hudson taken in our driveway on Echo Hill. Obviously, these were intended to be pre-restoration shots, which although interesting, are not quite as captivating as some of the scenery out the car windows.
The Hudson in front of 3574 Echo Hill
Another angle
With Rex’s house in the background
The front view
The rear
Step inside
The inferior interior
Dad’s Ford truck and Mom’s AMC Hornet, our other cars at the time
The Venaas and Ferrenberg houses out the rear window
It wasn’t the black one, but it was nice and I remember it fondly.
1975 will continue…
Click here to see the black one…
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