The 1941 Chevrolet Story

                                                          The My 1941 Chevrolet Story

                                                                          1955

                                                    A 100% true story of my first hotrod                    

                                              Written 1/20/2011 and Re-written 5/12/2016

                                                                 Howard Yasgar

                                      

      In 1955, when I was fifteen years old, and living in with my parents at 101-1/2 Davis Street in Westville Connecticut.

     Westville, was a suburb of the City of New Haven, and that’s when this story took place.  

     We lived in a typical middle class two family New England style home, the house was hemmed by two other similar looking houses. We had a long blacktop driveway that ran all along the right side of the house, leading into our fenced in back yard.

     In our yard at the end of the driveway, was a two car garage.

     The garage usually empty as the folks who were living on the first floor of our house didn’t own a car, and my dad, preferred parking out on the street in front of our house.

     Our entire back yard was fenced in on both sides by a four foot high linked wire fences which

served to separate our yard from the neighbor’s on both the left and right side.

     Since our two car garage was always empty, it  of became our clubhouse for us kids, and

that’s where Ritchie Andrade, my best friend,  and a few other guys hung around.

     The empty garage was a place where we could all sit on the concrete floor and read our hot rod magazines.

     I became friends with Ritchie Andrade because we both sat together in back of  our home room  at Sheridan junior high school.

     Ritchie was year older than I was so he already had his driver’s license. That meant he could borrow his brother’s car for us to use.

     Ritchie lived several miles away from me on Springside Avenue in New Haven. In Ritchie’s back yard was his fathers garden and a garden shed. Behind the shed and under a tree Ritchie had parked a 1936 Ford coupe. It was just an unregistered old car that had been given to him by one of his neighbors.

     That old car became our secret place when we weren’t in my garage. It was there that we read our hotrod magazines.

     Back in the 1950's, hot rodding was probably the number one topic that most of us guys were interested in, I think it was all we ever talked about.

     The neighborhood girls were way down at the bottom of our list of important things, we  all just thought hot rods were far more interesting.

     Sometimes saw the girls walking by my house and looking up the drive way at us, but we always pretended we didn’t see them.

      The 1950’s was a special time, it was when the carmakers in Detroit were starting to produce big cars and very powerful overhead valve V8 engines.

     As the big engines became more common, all the hot rod guys were using them to build drag racing as well as custom cars.

     California had become the leader of  a hot rod and custom car industry.

     Lots of speed shops and custom car shops were opening up across the country with California being the leader.

     In the magazines we read, it appeared like everyone was building a hot rod with “Souped up high powered V8 engines”.

     The magazine racks in all the stores were loaded with lots of hot rod magazines.

     Sometimes we kids had enough money to buy a magazine or two.

     We loved reading them, over and over.

     The magazines not only had color pictures in them, but lots of “Do it Yourself” stories about how easy it was to build hot rods.

     Those magazines became our bible, they showed us how easy it was to just take an old car, and replace the motor with a big V8.

     The magazines said everyone was doing it, kids like us were converting their older car into what they called a street hotrod.

     So at the time, Ritchie and I spent every dime we had buying magazines. We read them over and over until they were worn out.

     We saw that all you had to do was take out your old motor from your car and replace it with a big V8 overhead valve engine.

      According to the magazines, building a hot was a cinch, and the more we read the easier it appeared, anyone could see that.

     We determined that all we needed was an old car and a V8 engine to install in it.

     We saw that the job of removing the old engine and replacing it was done in only three or

four magazine pages. So we knew it was easy to do.

      Ritchie and I had studied each page carefully until we knew exactly how they had done it.

      As I said, Ritchie had a drivers license, but I didn’t, also we were both still going to junior high school, also neither Ritchie or I had regular jobs, or a source of income, so that meant we really couldn’t do anything except read the magazines.

     It didn’t stop us from talking about what we would do if we ever had the money.

     One day Ritchie said that he had heard that after the Christmas holidays, one of the local cemeteries was paying kids to take apart floral grave blankets.

     I didn’t know what a grave blanket was, so we drove to the cemetery and that’s where I learned that every year families placed decorative grave blankets on the graves of loved ones, but a few after Christmas, the cemeteries hired kids to pull the flowers and pine boughs out of the grave blanket frames, it was so they could be re used again by the florists.

     It turned out to be a fantastic job, we were paid twenty five cents apiece for each frame we cleaned.

     After three weeks Ritchie and I were flush with money, we had earned about one hundred and sixty dollars between us.

     Now with the cemetery job over we had cash in our pockets. So Ritchie borrowed his brother’s car and we drove out to see a friend that I had met. He lived in a small upscale town of Orange Connecticut.

     I had  met the fellow at a Boy Scout meeting, and he had invited me to come visit him at his home.

    When we found his house, we were very surprised to see that he lived on a big estate. They had a swimming pool, and several acres of nicely manicured pasture land.

     Well, once we told my new friend that Ritchie and I were planning on becoming Hotrodders,

he said he already had a hot rod.

     He said, that up in one of the pastures behind his house, there was an old 1937 Ford coupe with a V8, 60 horse power engine in it.

     He said we could all get into the car and take turns driving it real fast just like a real hot rod, he also said that driving fast in the pasture was just like being on a race track, so off we went.

     He was right, we soon learned that we could drive that 1937 Ford really fast, it was just like a hotrod, we could drive it in big circles in the pasture, with the car sliding all over the place on the wet grass.

     After a while the grass became muddy and slippery, we would see who could drive the car the fastest without having the car tip over on us.

     By afternoon we had dug up pretty much all the grass a little on  the pasture.

     So by mid afternoon when my friend’s father came home he had a few issues with his son regarding ruining the pasture.

     The moment we saw that happening, Ritchie and I left before my friend’s father hurt us.

     On our way home to Westville, we drove through the town of Milford Connecticut, passing by a big junk yard.

     So Ritchie parked the car next to a Texaco gas station and we walked down behind it into the junk yard with no one seeing us.

     We found several guys turning cars over and cutting them up using cutting torches.

     It was all an amazing sight to us, as here we were standing right in front of a huge pile of potential hotrod engines.

     Many of the V8 engines seemed to be just what we needed, to make our hotrods.

     As both Ritchie and I were standing there mesmerized by the sight of so many V8 engines, one of the junk yard owners snuck up and scared the hell out of us.

    He yelled, “What are you guys doing here, this is a restricted area.”

    We were scared and didn’t know what to say, so I said, we want to buy two engines to make hot rods.

    As soon as I said that, his tone quickly changed, and within ten minutes Richard and I were the proud owners of two old used V8 engines, and they only cost us fifty dollars each, which included delivery to my backyard on Davis Street.

    The next morning, Ritchie and I waited at my house until a tow truck showed up with the two, greasy and dirty V8 engines chained on back of the truck

    The driver undid the chain and expertly backed the tow truck onto the grassy area in my back yard.

    But to do it he drove over my dad’s perfectly trimmed hedges. As he did it, he slammed on his brakes and the two engines unglamorously fell off the back of the truck and onto the ground.

    When the driver pulled away, he pulled  out three more of my father’s hedges with his tires.

    The rest of that day, Richard and I spent our time studying those engines. They were both really big, and really dirty.

    One engine had a tag saying it was out of a 1949 Oldsmobile and the other was some kind of old Chrysler V8.

    We studied each one, and then we discussed about how we were going to soup them up.

     I went upstairs into my house, and I found all my mom’s old rags, as well as a couple of my good white tee shirts, so with the rags and a using a water hose we wiped as much dirt and grease off the engines as we could.

     Ritchie and I may have both been young, but we weren’t dumb, we could already identify what most of the parts on the engine were.

     We were now on our way to becoming real “Hot rodder’s”,  and we were going to do it just like in the magazines.

     We flipped a coin and then the Oldsmobile engine was officially mine and the Chrysler engine was Richard’s.

     That evening, I watched out my second floor bedroom window when my father came home from work.

     Luckily it was getting dark and Ritchie and I had already burned in the trash barrel all his uprooted hedges.

     But my dad knew something was different in the yard and then he saw the engines.

     Now I knew my dad was a good guy and he liked mechanical things, but I stayed hidden in my bedroom anyway.

     I heard some loud voices in the kitchen, but after a while it was all quiet, and I think my mother calmed dad down.

     In the morning he asked me, “What’s with all the junk in the yard?”

     I said, Ritchie and I are building a hot rod.

     Dad just looked at me and said, just don’t make my yard into a shithouse, and that’s exactly all he said. So now I felt we had permission, to go forward with our Hot Rod plans.

      Richard already had his 1936 Ford coupe to put the Chrysler engine in, but I didn’t have a car to soup up.

     We counted all our money and found we had nearly $60.00 left between us.

     We got into Ritchie’s brothers car and headed for all the used car lots that were located on Whalley Avenue, in New Haven, we were on a mission to find a neat car for me to soup up.

     We couldn’t have been luckier, in the first car lot we found a nice dealer, he was a short fat guy with a big mustache and he had a 1941 Chevrolet four door sedan for sale.

      He said that because he liked us, he was willing to part with the car for only $50.00 cash, and he said that it ran real good. He said he would deliver it right to my house in Westville, so in five minutes the deal was done, and we gave him the $50.00 he wanted.

     The following morning, the mustachioed guy shows up in front of my house with the 1941 Chevrolet sedan, someone from the car lot was following him.

     As he drove up Davis Street to my house the car there were clouds of blue smoke coming out of the Chevrolet. There was so much smoke coming out we could hardly see anything and it smelled so bad we could hardly breathe.

     He drove the car into my yard and after a few minutes or so of maneuvering back and forth he managed to get the car pretty close to where we wanted it.

     It was after he left that we realized he parked it next to our neighbors fence, and we couldn’t use the drivers side door, we would have to slide in from the passenger side door.

     Ritchie then got in the car from the passenger side, and started the cars motor up. He said that he was going to drive the car forward, and away from the fence. That’s when we found out that Ritchie didn’t know how the cars vacuum shift worked, but Ritchie kept trying until the cars engine wouldn’t start anymore.

      After about an hour, all the blue smoke and the bad smell in had dissipated, so  Richard and I spent the rest of the morning taking turns sitting behind the wheel of my new 1941 Chevrolet sedan. We were making believe we were driving it with the big Oldsmobile V8 engine already installed.

      Now I must tell you why I was so happy finding a 1941 Chevrolet to fix up. When I was a little kid my father who was at the time earning seventeen dollars a week as an apprentice electrician, he drove a 1941 Chevrolet coupe.

     Everywhere we went people called my father’s car a shit box, and it was always embarrassing for me to watch my father’s face because he really loved that 1941 Chevrolet Coupe.

     Finally one day some drunk hit him head on, breaking two of my dad’s ribs and demolishing the 1941 Chevrolet. So I thought he would be happy to see I had the same year Chevrolet that he had once driven, I was absolutely sure he would be real happy.

     After taking turns and making believe we were driving, I was just sitting there thinking, and  I had the time to study the cars interior.

     I came to the conclusion that the dash board of that 1941 Chevrolet was way too drab, it needed a custom paint job, like I had seen in the hotrod magazines.

     I knew I could do something like the custom paint jobs that the Barris brothers did in California.

     I wanted to make my 1941 Chevrolet look outstanding, just like the custom car pictures I had seen in the hot rod magazines, If the car came out real good, perhaps they would feature it in a future magazine.

    We went downstairs into my basement to check out the paint in my fathers work shop.

     Luck was with us, we found an unopened pint can of baby blue enamel on a shelf, as well as a couple of slightly used but clean paint brushes that dad had soaking in some kind of paint thinner.

     I knew this was going to be a very delicate project, and I needed masking tape, but there was none so I took several rolls of my fathers black electricians tape.

     In retrospect, perhaps it would have been better if I had spent more time using real masking

tape to prepare the job before we started painted.

     I wiped off most all of the dust and dirt on the dashboard, but because we didn’t have any good masking tape, we used my father’s black vinyl electrical tape, and we found that it didn’t stick that well.

     Also, I now that I think about it, it would have been better if we had used smaller and better quality paint brushes for doing all the detail work.

     Also it wasn’t until we had already started painting when I realized it probably would have been better if we had put some newspaper or a drop cloths on the seats, as well as on the floor of the car.

     After we accidently spilled the can of blue paint once, I determined that it would have been better if we had started with two pints of the same color paint as we were only half way through the job when we ran out of blue paint.

     Well, the baby blue paint job didn’t come out quite as I had expected, but I thought it was a good experience.

     I now realized that in any future custom paint jobs that I was going to do, I should never use cheap paint brushes.

    We could see that as the paint dried, there were lots of streaks in it, and no matter how many brush hairs we pulled out, some white hairs still stuck to the paint.

    Luckily the brush hairs seemed to have stuck mostly just where the paint had dripped down and dried. I mean, it wasn’t horrible, as we got most of the drips out, but I hadn’t ever expected painting to be so difficult.

      Richard thought it must have been some kind of defective paint we were using.

     Also I thought the thinner we used seemed to work pretty good for cleaning the brushes, but it didn’t clean up the paint we had spilled.

     So I now knew that the next time we did a custom paint job, I would have to get the correct kind of thinner. Having the correct paint thinner would have enabled us to have cleaned our hands better, and there would have been far less finger prints on the cars arm rests, and on everything else we touched.

     I had tried to clean up the mess of paint we spilled, using several different thinners and turpentine that my father had in the basement, but very quickly the terrible smell from the paint thinners made it impossible for us to breathe in the car.

    On the positive side, I think the baby blue paint did make the car bright inside, so it was about 5 PM when my father came home from work, and boy did he hit the ceiling.

    “Holy shit” he said, he looked at the car and his face turned a bright red.

    “Who the hell sold you this piece of crap, how much did you pay, god damn it, don’t they know you are an underage minor”, and my dad went on and on.

     He said, “How did you ever buy a car? You are only 15 years old and legally you can’t buy a car,” for a full half hour my father never stopped yelling.

     I looked for my friend Richard but he seemed to have disappeared. It was just as well, as I didn’t want him to see me crying anyway.

     I told my father everything, and about an hour later, the mustachioed used car dealer was in my back yard, and my father was giving him all kinds of hell.

    The car dealer, to his credit, rather than get punched, he gave my father the whole $50.00 back that we had paid him. Then my father helped the guy by jump starting the Chevrolets battery.

    Then with the blue smoke billowing out the exhaust, and a lot of back and forth jockeying, and the car left our yard. My goodness, you should have seen the lawn in our yard it looked like a bulldozer had been there.

     With all this going on, I was surprised that no one ever mentioned even one word about the half painted baby blue dashboard. The dealer guy didn’t even complain about the wet blue paint on the driver’s seat, as he was sitting in it.

     I think every neighbor up and down the entire block was on their back porches watching and listening to what was going on in our back yard.

    The next day my father gave a junkman some money to remove the two engines. I think my dad wanted to hit me, but he never did.

     Now looking back on it, I think l learned a lot of lessons that day about building hot rods.

     Also I would never use baby blue paint again to paint a dashboard.