When Grandma Was A Little Girl - #48

My parents had a 1949 Plymouth. It looked very much like the picture above.

I think my parent's car color was a light green. My brother Doug was 17 years old at the time and could drive. He was probably a junior in high school. My dad let him drive that car around. He wanted to make a hot rod out of it and my dad let him do it. The car wasn’t running top notch and it was old and my dad just let him have it to do whatever he wanted with it.

My dad said that the ’49 Plymouth had some kind of engine trouble and they couldn’t fix it but the car did run. My brother Doug said that cars back in those days did not last as long as the cars today. Back then after 80,000 miles you had to replace the car or overhaul the engine. My dad had bought my mom a little Studebaker so they weren’t driving the ’49 and let Doug have it. That car had a wind visor across the top of the windshield. It was a four-door car.

My dad had his own welding machine. It was a Sears Craftsman. Doug cut the roof off the top of that old coupe and then it looked more like a convertible. The problem was that being a four-door car the roof supported the doors so they would open and close. Doug welded the doors shut and that solved that problem. Then he took spray paint and painted the car black and he also spray painted ‘oval’ shapes over the white wall tires. It was so funny to look at when the car was going down the road because the wheels looked like eggs rolling over end-to-end and it looked crazy! It was funny! People would stare at it going down the street.

One day the town sheriff came by and asked my dad to take the car off the streets. It wasn’t safe driving a car around without a roof and the wheels were a distraction to people on the road. He thought it would cause an accident from people not watching where they were driving due to looking at the funny wheels on that car. It wasn’t running really great so Doug so just parked it. Later it was hauled off to the junkyard. It sure was a lot of fun seeing that ‘modified’ Plymouth driving around!

(*I called my brother Doug and he told me what he remembered about this car and I have incorporated his comments in the above story.)