Latest / BREAK/FIX the Motorsports & Vehicle Enthusiast Variety Show / A Slow Drive Across a Fast Country (Tom Cotter)

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A Slow Drive Across a Fast Country (Tom Cotter) · BREAK/FIX the Motorsports & Vehicle Enthusiast Variety Show

0:00
Welcome to Automotive History Live, where the stories drive us.
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From the grand lawns of Concours to the icons that shape the road
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ahead, we celebrate the machines, the makers, and the moments
0:14
that define automotive history.
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And we're gonna be joined by a man who knows how to turn a simple road
0:22
trip into a full-blown adventure in American automotive heritage.
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Tom Cotter set out across the United States in a restored Ford Model T,
0:29
tracing the country the way early motorists actually experienced
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it, mile by mile, town by town, and on the original highways, like
0:36
the Lincoln Highway and Route 66.
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In a slow drive across a fast country, Tom shows us what happens when
0:42
you trade speed for story, and his journey reveals the character of these
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historic roads, the people who still, uh, live along them, and the way a
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century-old machine can reconnect us with the roots of American motoring.
0:52
Please welcome Tom Cotter, the barn fine hunter, as he takes us on a slow
0:56
drive that tells a fast country's story.
1:05
This is a trip that I wanted to take, I don't know, 30, 40 years maybe.
1:09
Like, what a stupid idea, driving a Model T across the United States.
1:12
And it was actually Elon Musk that kicked me in the rear end and made me do it,
1:16
because I heard an NPR story that Elon Musk was being quoted, this is probably
1:21
15 years ago, that he was gonna take his family out on a cross-country trip in a
1:25
Tesla and never touch the steering wheel.
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And I said, "Son of a gun. We've reached that age where now you don't
1:32
even have to drive a car to drive a car." They've taken away shifting
1:35
with automatic transmissions.
1:37
They've taken away manual brakes by putting in power brakes.
1:40
They've put in power steering, intermittent windshield wipers,
1:43
power windows, and now they've taken away the actual driving function.
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I say, "So I have to do something about that. I have to be the last
1:50
guy." It rolled around my head for a while, and I was racing my Corvette at
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Summit Point Raceway in West Virginia.
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I was working on my Corvette between race sessions, and a
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guy would come to the track.
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He'd go home, come back with a different car, go home in the evening, come
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back the next morning with a different car, go home for lunch, come back.
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"How many cars do you have?" He said, "Well, after the track closes tonight,
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I'll take you up my house." He just lived a mile up the block in West Virginia.
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He was a Porsche race mechanic.
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Dave Coleman is his name.
2:18
Son of a gun.
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I mean, he had Porsches, Mustangs, Falcons, all V8 stuff.
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He had a, a Hudson Hornet, original engine, turbocharged,
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five-speed manual gearbox.
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I mean, he was a crazy man.
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And as we were leaving, I saw this yellow Model T. And just happened to
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mention to this guy I had just met, "You know, I've always wanted to drive
2:38
a Model T across the United States." And he said, "So have I." "Really?" Yeah.
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That was May 7th, 2016.
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It took a year to put the pieces together, but on May 7th, 2017,
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we hit the road in a Model T.
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In that Model T, and actually that book, which is now sadly out of print,
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but you can still get it on eBay I'm sure, that book is a result of the trip.
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So there we are in New Jersey, getting ready to leave for New-
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Manhattan, which is on the other side of the Hudson River there.
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Why?
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Because the road we took, the road that goes, like, just a couple of miles
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from here, was the Lincoln Highway, Highway 30, developed by Carl Fisher.
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If you're from Indiana, you know what Carl Fisher did.
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He started Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
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He developed Miami Beach, and ultimately lost his shirt trying to develop Montauk
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Point on Long Island, and he died a poor man, which is sad, because he did a lot.
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But he didn't actually invent the Lincoln Highway.
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He just put together a series of roads that went east,
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west, and they connected them.
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Okay, if we go this way north, this way south, we can connect, connect, connect.
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So the Lincoln Highway was something that was always evolving.
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If they found a new road that would shorten the trip a little bit, that's
3:48
what became the new Lincoln Highway.
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So we drove most of the last Lincoln Highway on this trip, but
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on a few spots, we touched on the very primitive Lincoln Highway.
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So this is in Manhattan.
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Brad Phillips, who some of you may know, is right in the middle with a vest.
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He worked for Hagerty.
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He's a dynamo car guy.
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He said, "Oh, I can get you the Manhattan Classic Car Club as a
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gathering spot for that Sunday morning."
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So I knew that the Beatles got 59,600 people at their concert at Shea Stadium.
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I knew I'd have a group about that big meeting me and sending me off on
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this grand journey across the United States, and I was only off by 55,990.
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We had 10 people.
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They said goodbye, and so we hit the road in Manhattan on a Sunday morning at 9:00.
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What's wrong with this picture?
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I mean, like, when was the last time you saw a Model T Roadster in Manhattan?
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This is the start of the Lincoln Highway.
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Who would imagine that at 42nd Street in Times Square, there's a
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sign that says the Lincoln Highway?
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This was the eastern terminus.
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And, you know, in doing research for this book, and I read all the Jack Kerouac
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and all the cross-country books that were out at the time, On the Road, Travels
5:00
with Charlie, read all those books.
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I didn't take nearly as much heroin as those guys did when they went
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on their cross-country adventures.
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But the Lincoln Highway started in Times Square, and m- my research showed that
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Times Square was called Times Square why?
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Anybody know why?
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The New York Times is based right there.
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That makes so much sense.
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I've spent 70 years of my life talking about Times Square.
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Finally find out why it's called that.
5:24
And you see there's an HM sign in the background.
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I'm not sure that was there 100 years ago.
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A couple years before this, I was president of a Formula 1 association
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based in Manhattan that was trying to bring a Formula 1 race to New Jersey.
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So we're right on the other side of the, uh, Hudson River.
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This is in Weehawken, New Jersey, and this was supposed to be the road course to
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bring our roa- Formula 1 race to America.
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So the race would be held in New Jersey, the Hudson River in the middle, and
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the New York skyline in the background.
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It was fantastic.
5:52
It was an amazing year living in, in Manhattan, working in the Chrysler
5:56
Building, but we were 100 million shy.
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You know, it just never happened.
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And this is the road course.
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I said, "Guys," Dave Coleman, who was my co-driver, Michael Allen Ross,
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who was driving a support vehicle.
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I said, "I have to drive one complete lap of this course before we leave."
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So just imagine, you know, a McLaren or a Mercedes-Benz
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ripping around this circuit here.
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It would've been an amazing course Traditional and also something
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I like to do is somehow include water on my cross-country trips.
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When we did the Route 66 trip in my woody wagon from Chicago to LA, I had
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a bottle of water that I got in Lake Michigan, and we poured it out at the
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Santa Monica Pier in the Pacific Ocean.
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I was th-- I thought I was gonna get arrested by somebody saying I'm polluting
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the Pacific Ocean or something, but we wanted to dip the wheels in the
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Hudson River at the start of this race.
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It was baptizing the car.
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And so this was at Liberty Park in New Jersey, just across
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the water from Manhattan.
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In the old days, the Lincoln Highway took a ferry boat across
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to New Jersey from Times Square and started the trip from there.
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Now that ferry runs to Weehawken, New Jersey, but it's a passenger ferry.
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So we took the Lincoln Tunnel, which was easier.
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So there we are.
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To go on the Lincoln Highway, you've gotta shoot south from New Jersey
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down to Philadelphia, which was so congested, so terribly congested.
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But then once we got to Philadelphia, you get on the real Lincoln Highway,
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and oh my goodness, it was fantastic.
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This was a funny scene here.
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I mean, a-as you can imagine, there's a lot of Quakers and
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Amish, whatever, in Pennsylvania.
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So we went to get gas.
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We didn't have a gas gauge.
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We had a dipstick.
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We had already run out of gas twice that morning.
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This is on day one.
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And I went in to pay for the gas, and it was something because there was an,
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an Amish young man driving this vehicle.
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We've just followed him into the gas station.
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There's a convenience store.
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And so he was a young man.
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He was probably twenty-three, twenty-four, and he had, you know, the hat with
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the big brim and, and the beard and black clothes, and it was a Sunday.
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He probably went to church.
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And he was in front of us, and the girl behind the counter was about
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exactly the same age as he, and she had purple hair and tattoos.
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What a different world these two kids come from.
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They were just across the counter from each other.
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He bought a pack of Marlboro.
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I didn't know, you know, Quakers smoke Marlboro, whatever.
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But I paid for my gas and got a Gatorade and kept going.
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This was Gettysburg.
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It was starting to get cold.
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This is day one.
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Beautiful scene.
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It's starting to get cold.
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We're on, we're on the Lincoln Highway, and I just had to stop.
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Now, I didn't take any of the pictures.
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Michael Allen Ross, who I've done seven books now, he was my photographer.
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He took this picture.
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But we started out, it was drizzly.
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It started to rain in New Jersey, cloudy in Pennsylvania.
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We're in Gettysburg now, and it's starting to get cold.
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Probably 35 degrees or so in the mountains.
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The deal was we wanted to stay in special places, if at all possible.
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And so this was the, the Lincoln Motor Lodge, and it was in Manns Choice,
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Pennsylvania, the Lincoln Motor Lodge.
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Built about 1970.
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Cabin, cabin, cabin.
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What I didn't know is there's one hot water line that runs from the lady who
9:02
owned the place, her office, and runs all the way down to the last cabin.
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She gave us the last cabin.
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So to take a hot shower that night, took about 20 minutes for the water,
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which is underground, the hot water to come all the way to our, to our cabin.
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She let us look around.
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This is the honeymoon suite.
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She showed us this.
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It's all, you know, knotty pine paneling and old Life magazines
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and newspapers on the nightstand.
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Really quite nice.
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It's, uh, $85 a night.
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Pretty good deal in a very period location.
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To me, the whole thing is about human interest stories.
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So, you know, I could, I could tell you about sheet metal or camshaft angles and
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stuff, but to me, it's all about people.
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And she told me that she and her husband bought this place 30 years earlier.
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They were hippies.
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They lived in Washington, DC, and she said, "We were very, very close to
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getting in serious trouble, and we decided we had to leave Washington."
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So they took what little money they had, they bought this rundown place,
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and she said, "It's been a great life. I raised two daughters here. One went
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on to… works for NASA, and the other one teaches, uh, in elementary school,
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and my husband and I have a great life." So just a, a neat lady, a neat family.
10:08
You know, world's largest ball of twine.
10:11
You know, these, these are things you see when you go cross-country.
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These were all in Pennsylvania, around Bedford, Pennsylvania.
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So, you know, you'll see the corresponding teapot for this in just a minute.
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But you had to get something to get people off the road and into your parking lot.
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This was a great gas station.
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It's Dunkel Service Station in Bedford, PA. It's all ceramic.
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That was built in, let's see, 1937.
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The guy who ran it, and sadly, he just passed away and,
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and it's, it's now vacant.
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I guess if you wanna buy a cool old gas station, it's available, I'd say.
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But his father started it in 1937, built this building,
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and it's never been modified.
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They had one service bay.
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They wash your windows.
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They pump your gas.
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And interestingly, the guy who owns it, his father left it to him, his wife is
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the mechanic, 'cause I walk in the back to look around, she's doing a brake job.
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Pretty amazing.
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And, and sadly, time goes on, and that no longer exists like that Going east on
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30, I never knew it, this is Flight 93.
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This is September 11th.
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This is where the plane went down in that field that none of us kind
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of were quite sure where it was.
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It was in a county.
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It wasn't really in a town.
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And this is one of the most amazing memorials I've been to in my life.
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It's on the par with the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, where very few people
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leave without a tear in their eye.
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This is the flight path that the plane took.
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At that moment, the plane was as high as the top of that concrete,
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and those things go down and down.
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And they found, you know, bits of that plane well in the earth and pieces
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of stuff in people's pockets and instruments or whatever miles away.
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And there's a pavilion there where you walk around, and there's
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no, there's nobody talking.
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You're just in awe.
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And if you bring yourself back to that day, everybody was glued to the TV set.
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Well, they had TV sets on all over playing exactly those news programs as
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if it were happening then, and you, you don't leave without tears in your eyes.
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Just an amazingly powerful memorial.
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This was just a mile or two up the street from the Flight 93 Memorial.
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It's called Walat.
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So we saw a billboard for it.
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W-A-L-A-T apostrophe S. And they were well known for their ham sandwiches.
12:16
Well, wisely, Dave Coleman, my co-driver, said, "Well, I'll
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take a small." I, I want a large.
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So he got the one on the left, which was actually edible.
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I got the one on the right, which is like … It was family sized.
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They cut those slabs of ham with a knife, and they're like a quarter-inch thick.
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So you look, look at that thing, and it's like, it's like half
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a ham on there, and it's folded over so it's double the height.
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It was a place that everything was sticky.
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You sat at a bar.
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You know what I mean?
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One of those bars that's always sticky.
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You know, you walk to the bathroom and, ooh, boy, you better
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wash your hands in this place.
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People went there every day for lunch, and we met a lot of them.
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Everybody was glued to the TV set, and it was The Dating Game,
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like 50-year-old TV program.
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Everybody was like, "Oh," and they go back and watch every day, The Dating Game.
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Like, I stepped into the wrong century.
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So here's corresponding to the coffee pot, a teapot, which has been there since 1938.
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So we got to East Canton, and there was a, a police radar.
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And I said, "Oh, this is too cool.
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I gotta see how fast … " I mean, the Model T is something
13:15
that you can't speed in.
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It could be nailed to the floor, and you can't speed it
13:20
no matter what the speed limit.
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I'm being facetious.
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So there's Dave posing, you know, getting a ticket.
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This police officer was a cool guy.
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Well, Dave and Michael went inside the restaurant next door and had
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breakfast, but I sat in the police car and talked to this police officer.
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His name is Derek Blake, and he turned out to be a cool guy.
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Besides being the chief of police of a small department, I said, "Okay, you
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have a radar gun." And he let me play with it, you know, and I could put my
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hand in front of it and see how fast I could make my hand move and whatever.
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All the things that you've dreamed about doing your whole life, I was able to do.
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I said, "So okay, the speed limit here is 35." "How fast are you gonna allow people
13:55
to pass you before you pull them over?" He said, "I've given all my deputies a rule.
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If anybody's going slower than 50, let them go 15 miles an hour.
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I said, "Could you write that and notarize it for me? I'd like,
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I'm … I'd like to have this in my wallet for the rest of my life."
14:13
Uh, it turned out he drag raced a, a Vega, you know, with a
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big block in it, so he got it.
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He was a pretty cool dude.
14:19
This is Ohio City, and it was s- site of the one of the first automobiles
14:24
ever built, but it was the site of the first automobile accident.
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I mean, what's the old saying they tell you?
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What happens when two cars, first two cars are made?
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They got hit in an accident.
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Well, this one, it hit a tree, so we're standing, leaning against the
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post where the tree was in 1891.
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It made big news, you know, around Ohio City.
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But s- site of the first automobile wreck.
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But right next to that tree, you know, down the road, there
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was an old brick factory, and that's where the cars were built.
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So we stayed at a Hampton Inn that night, and a Model T marks its territory.
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This is Dave every morning, the guy that built and owned the car.
15:03
Every morning he would have to, you know, I felt so bad.
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This was a brand-new Hampton Inn.
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That concrete was, like, a month old.
15:09
But there was quite a, a ritual he had to go through every day, adding oil,
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greasing the suspension, greasing the drive shaft, and once in a while taking
15:19
off the front wheel bearings and greasing those, and a lot of lubrication going on.
15:22
But interestingly, this car still had the original main bearings in it that Henry
15:26
Ford put in almost 100 years earlier.
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It's a 1926 Ford, by the way.
15:32
Where is this place?
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It's where I am right now.
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This is the Studebaker Museum.
15:36
I called Andy.
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I said, "Andy, Highway 30 goes right through, miles from your place."
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He said, "Oh, good." So I had four TV stations here.
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He said, "This is the first time four TV stations showed up to an event at
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the, at the museum right here, the Studebaker Museum." There's Dave.
15:52
Dave, a lot of, all the women that were there rides around in the
15:55
parking lot in the Model T. I talked to, I guess it was the three, NBC,
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ABC, CBS, and public television.
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And I'm wearing my McPherson College shirt, which got attention.
16:06
And, you know, inside here, you know, I've been here many times.
16:09
You guys have all been downstairs.
16:11
This is the car that intrigued me the most.
16:13
I'm still infatuated with it and all the variants of it, which is the
16:16
Porsche-Studebaker collaboration.
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This thing's got a Porsche 356A engine in the back.
16:22
It's downstairs in the basement.
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Amazing.
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I, I wanna write a story one day about it.
16:26
We went that night to Fiddler's Irish Pub.
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We had ate, and we drank, and we were merry.
16:33
And a guy comes up to me, and I thought he'd be in this room, Dan VandenHeeden.
16:36
And so I met him.
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He said, "Oh, yeah, I like your YouTube video series, Barn Find Hunter, and I've
16:41
read your books, whatever. And I saw your Facebook post that you're looking
16:45
for interesting places to stay. Well, my kids are going to college, and so
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we've got a couple of spare bedrooms." He lives in Niles, Michigan, next door.
16:52
He said, "You're welcome to stay over at our house."
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Oh, that's cool.
16:55
He said, "Well, I have two bedrooms. One's my son's, one's my daughter's,
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and I have Volkswagen vans." Really?
17:01
They're campers.
17:02
Really?
17:03
So Michael took one bedroom, Dave took the other, and I slept in this camper
17:07
that night, and it was, uh, lightning and thunder, and I kind of lived the Woodstock
17:13
experience I never actually lived.
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I lived that night with lightning and thunder, and I wanted…
17:17
I was channeling Jerry Garcia.
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Uh, pretty cool.
17:20
So he's a, a unique guy.
17:21
He has several of these.
17:22
He's restored them.
17:23
He's shipped some to Europe for vacations.
17:26
I mean, he's, like, he'll ship this one to Europe for a
17:29
vacation, then ship it back again.
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Unbelievable.
17:31
He's been from Key West to Alaska.
17:33
I've never stayed in a Volkswagen Camp before, and, and now I can say I have.
17:38
So the next morning, a couple of South Bend's finest sheriffs met us at The
17:43
Fiddler, the Irish pub, and offered to give us a police escort out of town.
17:49
"Oh, we don't need that. No one has speed."
17:51
"That's okay. We'd like to do it for you." So we posed for the picture, and there
17:54
they are giving us an escort out of town.
17:56
It was like, imagine people going the other direction, "Honey, what's going on?
18:00
That car's being pulled over." You know?
18:02
The Model T Boy.
18:03
It's like we were like Hells Angels.
18:04
Like, I can't imagine what people were thinking.
18:06
Anyway, didn't have to stop at red lights, didn't have to stop at stop signs.
18:10
They just escorted us right out of town.
18:13
Well, they gave us a warning at the county line.
18:15
They said, "Okay.
18:16
Well, good luck, boys.
18:17
I… You know, you got a long trip going to California.
18:19
W- Whatever you have to do, don't go through Illinois.
18:23
If you have to drive 600 miles out of your way "Don't go through
18:27
Illinois." And they were serious.
18:30
"Why?" "It's too boring." Anyway, if I made another 600 miles on that trip,
18:36
I might still be on that trip, so we didn't need to add another 600 miles to
18:39
it, but they were, they were super cool.
18:41
So this is one of the earliest sections of the Lincoln Highway.
18:44
Railroads always chose the path of least resistance, meaning
18:48
less inclines, whatever.
18:50
This is one of the original pieces of unpaved Lincoln Highway, although
18:53
it's not the current Lincoln Highway.
18:54
The current Lincoln Highway is 100% paved.
18:58
This is one of the pieces of highway that's never been paved, but it's
19:01
nicely groomed, farm fields on the side.
19:03
And so railroads and Model Ts and cross-country trips, I just thought
19:07
they kinda went s- hand-in-hand, so we took a few pictures from here.
19:10
This is our, our rock album photo if we were gonna ever do a rock
19:14
album about standing, like, tough, and it's all black and white-ish.
19:18
That's the three of us on the railroad tracks.
19:20
And then Dave wanted to see if he could do donuts in his car, uh and try to … So
19:25
I thought he was gonna flip it over.
19:26
You can see there's, you know, a water gully over there, so thankfully
19:29
he stopped before he got there.
19:31
By the way, let me tell you about this car.
19:32
1926 Model T Roadster.
19:35
The top has been chopped two and a half inches.
19:37
Fenders removed, of course.
19:39
Raggio overhead valve conversion, Fish carburetor, headers, carbon
19:44
fiber transmission bands, Wilwood disc brakes in the front, which, you know,
19:49
like, if you're driving a Model T cross-country, probably a good thing.
19:52
A- if you know about Model Ts, if you break that little keyway in the
19:55
transmission, there's no brakes.
19:58
You see a glass pack hanging off the back there.
20:00
So it, it was, it was a neat little car.
20:02
As I found out, Model Ts don't have heat.
20:04
They don't have thermometers, you know, temperature gauges.
20:07
They don't have much of anything, and I learned all this on the run.
20:10
I had not driven a Model T until I was on this trip.
20:14
Dave did most of the driving.
20:15
When you're writing a book, you always have to write, and if I'm driving, I'm
20:18
not writing, so I had, you know, those college kind of composition books.
20:22
Everything I saw, everything I talked about, the guy at the gas
20:25
station, the conversation Dave and I had, just write it down, write
20:28
it down, 'cause you might need it.
20:29
Three months later when you're writing the book, you can't bring it back.
20:32
So, you know, just, uh, uh, one of the signs along the highway.
20:35
You can see New York is 999 miles from here.
20:38
Everybody asked about Frisco, and they, there's really no place called Frisco.
20:42
People thought it was San Francisco.
20:44
That's probably what it was.
20:45
It was just a, a nickname for San Francisco, I suppose.
20:48
But th- this is in, oh, it's near Clinton on the Lincoln Highway.
20:52
And this is in Clinton, and this is Ronald Reagan's house, the one he grew up on
20:56
just a block off the Lincoln Highway.
20:58
and we're about to cross the Mississippi River.
21:00
Again, we stayed at a Hampton Inn there.
21:03
But what's one town south of Clinton is LeClaire, which is where American Pickers
21:08
are from, so we had to pay a visit there.
21:10
So that's their store.
21:12
And I have to say that I'm, I'm a little depressed about what I came
21:16
across because, you know, here's a show that's made its brand about authentic
21:20
old Harley-Davidsons and old cash registers and real old American stuff.
21:27
And you go in there, it's a bunch of T-shirts made in China, and it's Mike
21:30
Wolfe's leather apparel, vests, and belts, and stuff like… Either there's
21:35
a cool Indian motorcycle hanging from the ceiling that says not for sale, or
21:39
it'll be a rusty piece of crap something or other, and it'll have a price of what?
21:44
Like a tricycle.
21:45
You want $900 for a rusty tricycle?
21:47
So they sell the sizzle, not the, uh, steak But this was interesting,
21:51
and it happens to be a Studebaker.
21:53
Met this guy in the parking lot.
21:55
Now, we met lots of people in the parking lot at American Pickers.
21:58
Somebody from Alaska, a woman who she and her husband were in the
22:02
American Diplomatic Corps, and they were, they lived in Turkey, and they
22:05
were on a vacation back at America, which is where they were from.
22:08
And they said, you know, all their neighbors in Turkey
22:10
watch American Pickers.
22:12
Wow.
22:13
And we met this guy.
22:14
He drove in from Oregon in this Studebaker wagon.
22:19
It had an R1 Avanti motor in it.
22:22
He built this trailer.
22:24
He didn't build the trailer.
22:25
He bought a utility trailer, but there's a bed in there.
22:27
There's a little refrigerator, dresser.
22:29
So he built his own little camper, canoe on the roof.
22:31
He's got a very small motorcycle in the front, fifty cc or seventy cc.
22:36
In the back here, he picked up, he believes, an old motorcycle motor.
22:40
Got it from a cousin's farm in Vermont.
22:42
Now, he was on-- When we saw him, he had seven thousand miles on this trip.
22:45
He saw the Yankees play, the Red Sox play, all through New England.
22:49
He went to Florida, and now he was kind of working his way back towards his
22:52
home base in, in the Pacific Northwest.
22:55
And if you know the Wagonaire, the Studebaker wagon had a
22:58
roof that slid back and forth.
23:00
Well, he had his own herb garden growing back there.
23:02
So on, when it rained out, drizzled out, he opened the roof, and it
23:05
would get rain on it and sun.
23:06
And then when it got too much sun, he just closed the roof.
23:09
I'm not sure if it was herbs you'd eat or herbs you'd smoke, and I didn't want
23:13
to ask him that question, but neat guy.
23:16
And so he brought this motorcycle engine there, probably something from,
23:19
like, nineteen oh four or nineteen oh five, to show Mike Wolfe because
23:23
Mike is a motorcycle enthusiast.
23:24
Maybe you can help me identify what it is.
23:26
Mike was not there.
23:27
They were out filming, so he just was going down the road, kept going.
23:31
You know, one of the more iconic spots on the Lincoln Highway is not
23:34
even on the Lincoln Highway anymore.
23:35
Like I told you, it evolves and changes.
23:38
It moves.
23:39
And so this part, which was on the Lincoln Highway, is no
23:42
more, but it's such a cool spot.
23:44
And Michael took his life in his hands because this is a high-volume traffic
23:49
area, and standing there with only one car and not getting hit was a, was a feat.
23:54
And we stumbled across this place.
23:56
It's in Colo, Iowa, and it's called the Reed-Nyland Corner.
24:00
This was built at the intersection of the Lincoln Highway and the Jefferson Highway.
24:05
The Jefferson Highway is kind of the equivalent of the Lincoln
24:08
Highway, but it went from Canada, Winnipeg, down to New Orleans, and
24:12
it was named after Thomas Jefferson.
24:14
So this was an intersection of these two, at the time, major roads.
24:18
It was a hotel, which is over there with the red roof.
24:21
We stayed there overnight.
24:22
It was a restaurant, and there was also a gas station.
24:25
And a really ambitious lady who had been a schoolteacher
24:28
for thirty years ran the place.
24:30
She said, "You know, I don't wanna run a restaurant. I don't wanna run a
24:32
hotel, but I'm a historian, and I love working here and meeting the people."
24:37
So that's the gas station next door.
24:39
That's all restored.
24:40
It's so authentic.
24:41
It's so cool.
24:42
And this stuff has all been there a hundred years.
24:45
So really, really cool place.
24:48
So I had been getting messages from a guy named Mark Anderson on YouTube.
24:52
Mark said, "You gotta stop in Boone, Iowa. I got this guy I want you to meet, and
24:56
he likes Model Ts, and he's got a Model T speedster, and it's got a Rajo head
25:00
like yours does, and he's really neat."
25:02
And I said, "Ah, you know what?
25:03
I bought my return ticket for 15 or 16 days later, and if we have a problem,
25:08
I'm gonna miss my flight coming back from San Francisco to Charlotte." Uh,
25:12
he, "Ah, come on, you gotta meet him just a little whi- Anyway, you know what?
25:14
Yeah, this book is about people.
25:16
It's not necessarily about the car or driving.
25:19
It's about meeting the people that live off, off the grid.
25:22
Pick any interstate highway, any exit, all the same stores.
25:25
There's Petco, and there's Applebee's, and there's Walmart.
25:28
And they're like, it doesn't matter where you are, California or Vermont, every
25:32
exit's the same on an interstate highway.
25:33
So we were off the highway, and it was so neat to meet
25:36
people who lived off the grid.
25:38
There's Mark Anderson on the left side.
25:40
They're the younger guy.
25:41
And the two other people, Daryl and Rosie Krause, just amazing people.
25:46
They had a huge tractor collection, and barns and barns filled with
25:50
old implements like this that he's been collecting his whole life.
25:53
He's a farmer.
25:54
He had a Model T speedster, which is the red one right there with a Rajo
25:58
head, and he built that himself.
26:00
He built the body himself.
26:01
A lot of people used to do that back in the day, not use the original body.
26:04
So they said, "Oh, look around, look around." So he had cars, trucks, tractors,
26:09
and most of them were either in really nice condition, unrestored or restored.
26:13
I saw some Oliver tractors there, which I guess we're right, right in
26:18
the heart of that Oliver country.
26:19
And he had this Harley Davidson, and I started to ask him about this
26:22
Harley Dav- These are in other barns.
26:24
Other barns.
26:24
He had an old, you know, Piper Cub, things like that.
26:27
He'd fly around his field.
26:28
So this Harley is a, it was a '46, '40- '48.
26:32
'48 Harley.
26:33
His father bought himself one.
26:36
They bought Daryl one and Daryl's brother one.
26:39
So they bought three at one time, all exactly the same, brand new.
26:43
High school graduation present.
26:45
Have fun, you know, and they'd go out riding together, the two sons and the dad.
26:48
There's a '39 Ford with '49 plates on.
26:51
He had it a year.
26:52
Somebody ran a, an intersection and clobbered him, boom, down on the ground.
26:57
So the same man you saw leaning against that tractor wheel, that's him as
27:00
an 18-year-old, no, 19 right there.
27:02
He had a compound fracture of his, of his finger.
27:05
Not on a bike for a while, but they fixed up that bike.
27:07
The dealership, the local dealership, wherever that
27:09
was, fixed up that motorcycle.
27:12
As you can see, there it is.
27:14
He still has it one owner bike.
27:16
Neat people.
27:17
I mean, that's him.
27:18
Amazing man.
27:19
And I budgeted two hours to visit these people.
27:23
I could have given two days to them, 'cause he said, "Oh, come on down.
27:25
I got airplanes. Yeah, we'll take you for a ride." Uh, now instead
27:28
of farming, turned the farm over to his daughter, who rents out fields.
27:33
So the family is not actively farming hands-on anymore.
27:37
Now they're renting out fields for other farmers.
27:39
Probably the wiser thing to do.
27:40
So here we are at Speedy Bill's Museum in Lincoln, Nebraska, and if you
27:44
haven't been there, you should go there.
27:46
I had never been there before, but somebody who had been following our
27:49
Facebook posts every day, he was president of the Lincoln Land Model T Club.
27:55
They were celebrating their 50th anniversary, their 50th birthday party,
27:59
at Speedy Bill's Museum in Lincoln.
28:01
He said, "I'm not gonna tell anybody you, you know, you're coming, but if
28:03
you wanna come." So they opened the door in the middle of their dinner.
28:07
We drove the Model T in, and we just had a, an amazing time celebrating with them.
28:12
So a 50-year-old club.
28:14
Speedy Bill's Museum has cars.
28:16
They have the most amazing engine collection you've ever seen.
28:19
I hope to do a Barn Find Hunter there.
28:20
I, I'm trying to open the door, because what you see on display is only a small
28:24
piece of what they have in warehouses.
28:26
So far, I have not gotten permission to go into his warehouse, because my
28:29
whole premise on Barn Find Hunter is not showing you things you can see, but
28:32
showing you things that you can't see.
28:34
If you ever see it on one of my programs, I've, I've succeeded in that.
28:37
So after this little party was over There was a group of
28:41
students from McPherson College.
28:42
This was at the end of the school year.
28:44
So these kids, young guys, young people, had finals.
28:48
And so it was a seven-hour drive or eight-hour drive from
28:51
McPherson, Kansas, to Boone, Iowa.
28:54
One of the professors drove, and all these guys were studying, studying,
28:57
studying, because when they got back on, uh, I guess Monday, they had final exams.
29:01
And so there's Dave leaning over, showing these guys, you know, the
29:05
gradual overhead valve, whatever.
29:07
But they did a full tune-up for us, a complete tune-up,
29:10
adjusted the transmission belts.
29:12
The only problem we had with the car is that a headlight burned out, so we had
29:15
to find a six-volt headlight, you know, some old auto parts store in Lincoln.
29:20
And they adjusted the air pressure of the tires and, you know, did an alignment.
29:23
It became like a, a class study on the road, and then as soon as they
29:27
were done, they hit, hit the road and went back to McPherson College.
29:31
Let me put out a few words about McPherson College.
29:33
If we're worried about the future of our hobby, the future
29:37
of our hobby is right there.
29:38
Those students are the future of our hobby.
29:40
I meet students when they go in as freshmen.
29:42
"Oh, I'm gonna, I want to restore muscle cars.
29:44
I want to, you know, build rat rods.
29:46
I'm going to open a shop in California." And four years later,
29:48
I meet them and they're like, "No, I'm, I'm into brass era cars now.
29:51
I'm going to work for a shop in Maine that restores Stanley Steamers."
29:56
Like, they completely change their emphasis when they're exposed to it.
30:00
It's just an amazing thing they have to learn.
30:02
Besides all the regular college courses, metal shaping, painting, upholstery,
30:07
engine building, babbitt bearings.
30:09
They have an annual show.
30:10
It's the first weekend in May.
30:11
If you are anywhere in the area of, uh, McPherson, Kansas, I'd
30:15
say you should probably go there.
30:16
Great, great school and a great car show This is the halfway
30:20
point for the Lincoln Highway.
30:21
That tar strip and the different colors of concrete, I was on the phone with,
30:25
uh, the guy that wrote a, a book about the history of the Lincoln Highway.
30:29
I said, "Okay, the metal container's right there?
30:31
Yep, that's it.
30:31
High grain.
30:32
Yep, that's it." And so that's the halfway point.
30:35
So our trip was 3,307 miles from New York City to San Francisco.
30:40
I'm not a math whiz, but whatever half of that is, that's the point right there.
30:44
The name of the car was Something Special.
30:46
All old race cars, speed cars back in the, you know, teens
30:50
and '20s, they were special.
30:51
It was Something Special.
30:52
Well, this was the Something Special, not the Red Ball
30:55
Special or anything like that.
30:57
This little girl was cool.
30:58
Riley Smith, she was nine years old.
31:00
She raced go-karts around Cozad, Nebraska, and she said, "My favorite
31:04
driver is Danica Patrick." I mean, she was so, mm, determined, like, oh, okay.
31:08
Well, I'll tell Danica next time I see her that she's got a big fan out here.
31:11
Wyoming is a scary spot because the Lincoln Highway becomes Interstate 80.
31:15
And so the Lincoln Highway, which is this cute little road that goes 45 miles
31:19
an hour across most of the country, becomes an 80 mile an hour interstate.
31:23
Before I made the trip, I called the state troopers.
31:26
I said, "What's the alternative route?" And they said, "Well, you'd
31:29
probably have to go 400 miles out of your way to eliminate Interstate 80.
31:32
You'd probably be on a road that nobody would find you if you had a problem
31:35
for a long time." So I said, "Well, okay." 80 mile an hour speed limit.
31:38
It's a four-lane road, two eastbound, two westbound, and there's double and
31:42
tractor trailer trucks that are going 90.
31:44
So Michael is behind us in a Ford Escape with emergency flashes.
31:48
His eyes are, like, this big as he's looking in the mirror, and there's
31:50
trucks, with their brakes trying, because he had to go our speed to
31:55
protect us, so he was our rolling bumper Thankfully, it all worked out okay,
31:59
but it was, it was pretty frightening.
32:00
So this is where things started to get hairy as far as weather.
32:04
The weather had been pretty nice so far.
32:06
I don't know if you live in the country or not.
32:09
In Charlotte, I don't really live in the country, but we're on farmland.
32:12
You could smell the first raindrops hitting a farm field.
32:15
You know, you could smell somebody cutting their lawn or hay being cut, and
32:19
it was such a, a wonderful experience that in an open car you can absorb all
32:24
this, all these things coming at you.
32:26
So you can see the, the weather, you know, to the right and the clear to the left.
32:30
The weather was coming in from the west, and so that's west, that's
32:33
east, that's where we're coming from.
32:35
So it started to get really cold.
32:36
So, you know, you can see we're putting in the side curtains, not that they did much.
32:41
There's no heat in there.
32:42
We put on our heavier jackets.
32:44
We couldn't travel with a lot, obviously.
32:46
Gloves, and just kind of hunkered down as low as we could in that
32:49
car to not be in the draft.
32:51
But it was in the 30s at this point, and that night it went even colder.
32:54
So that night we stayed in a hotel, and we had been running
32:57
water in the cooling system.
32:59
We went out and got some antifreeze.
33:00
This is not coolant, because it's antifreeze, because it was gonna freeze
33:04
that night if we didn't do it, and we were afraid we were gonna crack the block.
33:07
Dave and I got together well, except this day.
33:10
We were in a hotel in Wyoming.
33:13
There's a storm moving in, was gonna dump a substantial amount of snow,
33:17
and Dave thought we should sit it out.
33:19
The next morn- we woke up, and I said, "Dave, let's get on the
33:21
road." He said, "No, we're staying here." I said, "Dave, if we stay
33:24
here, we're gonna be here for days.
33:26
We can't drive this car on slick roads," whatever.
33:29
So we had it out in the, in the lobby, not fighting, having a, an argument.
33:33
So we went out and drove.
33:34
The wind was huge.
33:36
Big headwinds coming our way, which is the way the storm was coming from.
33:40
Anyway, I wound up winning, and we wound up taking off, thankfully,
33:43
because there was a big dump, and we had skirted that issue.
33:46
So, you know, further down the road, it was getting warmer
33:49
again, took the side curtains off.
33:51
But we found pictures in these Henry Ford archives of cars like
33:55
this in front of scenes like this.
33:57
In fact, we think we found this exact scene in black and white.
34:01
It's, it's in my book.
34:02
Went to Bonneville.
34:03
I'd never been to Bonneville, and I was naively thinking that, oh, we could see
34:07
how fast this Model T goes on the salt.
34:09
Well You know, it was still wet.
34:11
It was, at this point it was May.
34:13
And so that water, that lake has to evaporate so that you can run
34:18
the speed trials there in August.
34:20
So it was still very wet, but we got to touch a little bit of it there.
34:23
And we met these kids.
34:24
They're high school kids.
34:25
They were film majors at a local high school.
34:28
They came out to the salt flats to shoot a student video for graduation.
34:33
This poor girl, that's her mother's Toyota.
34:36
They thought they could drive out to, you know, that mountain there.
34:39
It's 30, 30 miles away.
34:40
Well, it was like, it was like wet, like quicksand, and the car just, bloop,
34:44
sunk right down to the, uh, chassis.
34:47
You know, it was a good couple of hundred feet out, and these guys tried
34:50
to dig and dig to get the car out, and it, it's like slick like mud.
34:54
It's like, ugh, like snot.
34:56
It's like, ugh.
34:57
So we had a, a tow strap that Dave packed, and we borrowed another tow
35:02
strap from a camper, and somebody else… So we had two, three tow straps.
35:06
Michael's little Ford Escape had all-wheel drive, and we were able to tow them out.
35:10
It was front-wheel drive, so we just tied that to the rear spoke because you
35:14
couldn't get underneath the car without maybe taking your life in your hands.
35:17
It was so awful.
35:18
You'd be like a pretzel, like a salted pretzel when you came out.
35:22
Anyway, so this lady said, "You know, how am I gonna explain this to my mother? How
35:25
are we gonna pass the course? You know, we can't film this by the end of the year."
35:30
So if you see a, a Toyota with Utah plates used, don't buy it, a gray one, because
35:35
it's, it's gonna rot out prematurely.
35:37
Wendover, the town in two states.
35:40
One state's Nevada, and there's alcohol and gambling and all that
35:43
stuff, and Utah, where there is none of that stuff Interesting town.
35:47
I don't think I'd wanna live there, but this is when you go race Bonneville, which
35:51
I've never done, this is where you stay.
35:53
This is where you eat.
35:53
This is where you drink, whatever.
35:55
But one thing we found that was really cool is this place, the Nevada Aircraft
35:59
Leasing area, and we saw this thing.
36:01
Like, what the heck is that thing?
36:03
Well, it's a gyrocopter, and it runs on a Rotax motor, and it's made in Germany.
36:09
And we met the owner of it.
36:10
He was flying it to Oregon, and we're in Nevada.
36:13
Holy mackerel.
36:14
So a gyrocopter, I learned about this.
36:16
The big propeller on the top that runs parallel to the
36:19
ground is not a powered blade.
36:22
The powered blade is the one behind the cockpit that pushes forward, and as, uh,
36:26
the vehicle pushes forward, both on the runway and as it goes in the air, the big
36:30
blade starts spinning and picking you up.
36:32
So in theory, you could run out of fuel or have an engine failure,
36:35
and you would just coast down.
36:37
I mean, I w- I was wishing so much he had more time because I would
36:40
have loved to have a ride in this.
36:41
And when I got back home, I Googled it.
36:43
The company had a sales outlet in Virginia, and I believe, uh,
36:48
they're not in business anymore.
36:49
So anyway, I just thought, wow, what a contrast in transportation.
36:52
But the more interesting thing about this airport, this is where the Enola
36:56
Gay was housed before Pearl Harbor, and they had been practicing in the desert,
37:02
dropping sandbags instead of a bomb, sandbags out of the bomber doors into
37:08
the desert to see how close they could get to predetermined spots in the desert.
37:12
You know, when the, when that day came, Enola Gay took off.
37:15
And, and after World War II, or I guess after the Korean War,
37:19
probably, they closed this down.
37:20
It just became a, a municipal airport.
37:23
People store old airplanes in there.
37:24
They work on old airplanes.
37:26
There's cars stored there, and that's right in Wendover.
37:29
This is something you see a lot of, ghost towns.
37:32
Highway 50, the loneliest road in America, it goes from Wendover to Ely, Nevada.
37:37
You just see stuff like this.
37:38
There's an old truck.
37:39
There's an old building, little town, couple of buildings.
37:42
There was once probably a silver mine nearby or whatever and, and boom, no more.
37:46
So you can just stop, and it's perfect for photos.
37:48
One photo we wanted to take is this one.
37:51
Yeah, I got a f- a flat tire, and I'm pushing it down the road.
37:54
This is a made-up picture.
37:55
We had no problems with this car except the headlight burnt out,
37:58
and we wanted to have one picture in the book that was a problem.
38:01
And so we jacked it up in the middle of nowhere, and I went down
38:04
the road, and just show business.
38:06
I'd have a long way to go to To find somebody to fix it.
38:10
This is the loneliest road in America.
38:12
We were slightly downhill.
38:13
We had a, a wind behind us, and we went 62 miles an hour in a Model T. Now, you
38:18
understand when we left , when we left Pennsylvania, we were doing 32, 35.
38:26
But as we got more confidence in the car, we'd go, you know,
38:29
40, 45, but we stayed around 45.
38:31
Dave had another engine already on a trailer back home, so if we
38:35
blew an engine, he had a friend that was gonna drive it out to us.
38:37
We'd swap the other.
38:38
We didn't need that, and we're getting close enough to the West Coast, the end
38:41
of the trip, that, well, let's go for it.
38:44
Let's see.
38:44
So 62, pretty good in a Model T. And here's Ely.
38:48
Now, we pulled into town, and there's all these hot cars with numbers on them.
38:52
Well, we just happened to pull into Ely when this Silver State Classic was
38:56
going on, which is where police block off long sections of road, 100 miles
39:02
long, and you can go as fast as you want with any kind of car you want.
39:07
You know, there's double turbocharged AMG Mercedes and Hemi
39:10
Cudas and old cars and new cars.
39:13
There's no speed limit.
39:14
So they have, they have volunteers at any crossroads.
39:17
You know, "You stop here. You can't go down this road. You can cross it
39:20
when I give you the signal, but you can't turn for another two hours."
39:24
And couple hundred cars there, and they were cool people.
39:27
Ely, on the other hand, is not such a cool town.
39:29
And we stayed in the best hotel in town.
39:32
And remember I told you about a sticky bar?
39:34
Well, everything in that room was sticky.
39:35
I didn't take my socks off that night.
39:37
It was like, ooh.
39:40
Oh, boy.
39:41
This is Austin, Nebraska, and I'm told this was probably a car dealership
39:46
back in the day and, you know, for like a Pissaro or a Packard because there
39:50
was a lot of money in these towns.
39:52
Towns that had 5,000 or 10,000 people now had 300 people 'cause
39:55
the silver mine closed up.
39:57
But at, at one point, these places had a lot of money.
39:59
That's what it looks like.
40:00
I mean, that's it inside the T. And you can see there's not a lot of gauges.
40:05
This little device here is so you can see traffic lights.
40:09
You're sitting on traffic lights here.
40:10
Refracted glass so you can see if you're sitting on the traffic light.
40:15
There's an amp gauge, and that's it.
40:17
There's nothing else.
40:18
So the back of the car, California or bust.
40:21
You see there's a state trooper right there.
40:23
We made it to California.
40:24
I said, "Dave, pull over. We gotta take this picture."
40:26
And Michael's back there taking this picture, and a police car pulls up,
40:30
and he comes up to Dave's window.
40:31
"License and registration." Serious.
40:34
"License and registration." "Officer, what'd we do?" He said,
40:37
"Your car says California or bust.
40:39
Welcome to California.
40:40
You're busted And then he breaks out in the biggest grin
40:44
and he says, "Have a good day.
40:46
I had to do that to you."
40:49
So he stopped traffic in that lane for us to keep going, but where
40:52
the pavement changes in color, that goes to California right there.
40:56
This is the Donner Pass.
40:58
Another person who would follow our Facebook site, Matt Ryan, who
41:02
lives in Sacramento, has got a house, a cabin in G- Donner Pass.
41:06
He says, "You can stay at my house. My girlfriend will make you
41:09
a meal. You can sleep in a real bed." Like, oh, wow, what a deal.
41:12
So we, you know, Michael had filmed a lot of BMW and Porsche commercial shoots
41:16
and editorial shoots at this location.
41:18
So we had to stop there, get the white water underneath the bridge,
41:21
get the bridge in the background, but then we went to this guy's cabin.
41:24
And, you know, his girlfriend, Maya, who's now his wife, made
41:27
us a great chicken dinner.
41:29
He made this Model T Speedster, which is also a Rajo overhead valve conversion.
41:33
He built it as his high school senior project.
41:36
So he got a Model T frame, and he got an engine.
41:39
He built it and, and the body is, he made himself on a sheet
41:42
metal brake as an 18-year-old.
41:44
So the most adventurous trip he took, he built himself his own teardrop
41:48
little trailer and towed it behind this from Sacramento to the Arctic
41:53
Circle and back, pulling it with a Model T. Oh my, that's like, that's
41:58
like my new bucket list item now.
42:00
So this is Scott Pruett.
42:01
He lives in-- He's a s- race car driver, Am- one of America's winningest
42:05
endurance race drivers, twenty-four Hours of Daytona, Twelve Hours of Sebring.
42:09
Now that he's retired, Michael knows him, I know him, he has
42:13
a winery in, uh, Sacramento.
42:15
So we stopped and met him for pie.
42:16
There's a pie store there.
42:18
We had a piece of pie with him, and he said, "Good luck, boys." We
42:21
got a picture of him, so neat guy, real hot rodder, n- a neat dude.
42:25
I've known him for 42 years.
42:27
Here we are.
42:28
We're at the western terminus of the Lincoln Highway.
42:31
The sign that started at the H&M clothing outlet at 42nd Street and
42:35
Broadway ends here at the Golden Gate Park, and that's right there.
42:40
Now, these concrete pillars should be all the way across the country
42:44
at… People didn't have GPS.
42:46
Maybe they had a map, maybe not.
42:48
So you would use these to turn left, turn right to go east and west.
42:51
Most of them were stolen.
42:52
But this one's still there, 3,307 miles.
42:55
We couldn't finish until we wet the back tires and baptized our car
43:00
from Pacific Ocean to complement what we did at the Atlantic Ocean.
43:04
Thank you very much.
43:10
Anybody have any questions?
43:14
How'd you get the car back?
43:14
Did you drive it back?
43:14
I couldn't.
43:14
Dave was going to by himself, but th- there was some reason he couldn't.
43:18
I forget what it was.
43:19
We had to get back home.
43:20
So we all took up a collection and sent it back.
43:23
Haggerty gave us a little chunk of money, and Shell gave us
43:26
some fuel and oil and stuff.
43:28
So that's how we got it back.
43:30
So I mean, I think this is, you know, like the ultimate old car trip.
43:34
I'm an old car guy, but I'm also a road trip guy.
43:37
And, uh, for me, I, I'll never drive another event like it.
43:40
Yes?
43:41
Your style and some of your adventures and all that really kind
43:45
of go with Peter Egan, the writer.
43:47
He's like one of my best friends.
43:49
I was gonna say, I met Peter and his wife, Barb, in Austin
43:53
on our way, motorcycle trip.
43:56
Oh, yeah.
43:58
And him and his wife were driving a Lamborghini.
44:00
Yellow one.
44:01
A yellow … I … They … He stopped at my house on, um,
44:04
when he was on the East Coast.
44:05
Is that right?
44:05
He did a lap of a… He did a lap…
44:07
I drove that car.
44:09
Is that right?
44:09
Yeah.
44:10
So Peter Egan, if you don't know him, he's retired now, but you can still read him.
44:15
I mean, you can get anything online.
44:16
I would encourage you to go Google tonight a story called Cross Country
44:20
Cobra, and that's when I invited Peter to join me when I bought a 289 Cobra
44:25
in California and drove it back to North Carolina, and he wrote a story.
44:29
It appeared in the February 2002 edition of Road and Track Magazine.
44:33
And now somebody has it online, so just Google Cross Country Cobra, and
44:37
you'll read what Peter Egan is like.
44:39
And sometimes you meet your heroes and, and you don't want, and you're sad.
44:42
You meet him and you feel really happy about it.
44:45
Well, thank you so much for having me.
44:46
Have a good day.
44:59
This episode is made possible by the Studebaker National Museum,
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