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Discover Mid-America — April 2007
Antique truck came a
long way from Kansas
After a restoration in Canada, a little antique Chevy pickup from Kansas got some well-deserved recognition — at a car show in Florida.
The 16th annual Cape Coral Car Show was presented by the Edison Antique Auto Club of America. Held at Jaycee Park on the bank of the Caloosahatchee River in Cape Coral, FL, the show featured a trophy competition divided into 11 classes, based on date of manufacture, with separate classes for Corvettes, Thunderbirds and modifieds. The mid-January Saturday was sunny with temperatures in the low 80s, bringing out a large and enthusiastic crowd.
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More than 300 cars were in the show, most of them true antiques and not street rods, in short, a purist’s dream.
The 1930 Chevrolet roadster “delivery vehicle” was proudly displayed alongside its more elegant brethren: Lincolns, Cadillacs, Buick Skylarks, even a Rolls Royce. But the Chevy, decked out in royal blue with teal trim and gleaming whitewalls, attracted its share of admirers. Setting it apart was its canvas top, giving it the look of a “convertible pickup.” One of the few pickups at the show, the 1930 Chevy’s pickup bed looked a bit anemic compared to contemporary trucks. But in its day it was considered a practical hauler.
Powered with its original 194-cubic inch, six-cylinder engine, the Chevy is no “trailer queen,” according to its owner, Paul Baster of Ontario. However, he made an exception for this show in southwest Florida.
Baster bought the Chevy in the spring of 1998 and finished it in the fall of 2002. “I did all the restoration myself,” he said, “except for the paint.”
“The fellow I bought it from goes down a lot of back roads and visits a lot of farms,” Baster said. “I’m not sure exactly where he found the Chevy, all I know it was in Kansas.”
What shape was the Chevy in when Baster got it?
Baster smiled before he answered. “The bed was perfect. The rest was total garbage. You know how these old Chevy’s are all made of wood? Well, the wood was all rotted and falling apart. Every piece of wood in the vehicle had to be replaced. The driver’s side door was missing altogether.”
Baster used the other door as a template and made the driver’s door from it with some help from a friend. “We got it put together in one afternoon,” he said.
“The fabric top is removable, but not convertible. Most people think of these cars as roadsters, but they’re not. You could drive with the top on or off, but it wouldn’t fold up.
“On the pickup, the construction of the roof was about price not style,” Baster continued. “It was all about building a cheap truck. We tend to think of a convertible as sporty. That wasn’t the reason Chevy used the fabric top.”
He pointed to a separation line running vertically just back of the door. “Back to here, it’s a roadster,” Baster said, “the cleanest roadster they built. The truck plant built the parts back of the driver’s compartment. Other models had rear ends that sloped down like a roadster, with a ‘rumble seat’ in the back. Fisher Body would build the front of the vehicle back to the doorpost then turn the job over to the truck division.
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“Chevy built 10,400 of this model,” Baster went on. “It took the company three years to sell it, and it was a bad deal for them. They tried to beat Ford by having a half-ton instead of a quarter-ton. But there were too many other problems.”
Like other automakers, Chevrolet was a victim of the Great Depression, which began in the fall of 1929 and deepened over the next few years. The 1930 cloth-top pickup of Baster’s was an example of the company struggling to sell cars in a tight-money market.
To its credit, Chevrolet had developed an overhead valve 6-cylinder engine with cast iron cylinders and a non-pressurized lubrication system in 1929 that they continued to use in all their commercial vehicles for several years. Their marketing campaign referred to the engine as “a six for the price of four.” Called the “cast iron wonder,” the engine developed a remarkable reputation for durability.
In his History of Chevrolet Trucks, Don Bunn states that the company’s development of the 1929 engine was a “home run with the bases loaded” for Chevrolet, and put them in a strong position over their competitors, who relied on 4-cylinder engines. He also asserts that the wood and fabric construction Chevrolet used on its “roadster pickup” in 1930 gave way in 1931 to a one-piece steel roof.
“The former structure of wood and fabric was history,” Bunn writes.
Ken Weyand can be reached at kweyand1@kc.rr.com
> Traveling with Ken Archive — past columns
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