A COLOURFUL LEGACY
This orange-painted 1930 Ford Model A hotrod is a tribute to passionate car guy
Fast cars and hotrods were an important part of Alvin Klassen’s life. He had been into cars and motorcycles since he could walk, Linda Klassen says about her husband, who died last year.
“I met Alvin when I was 17,” Klassen of Calgary says. “He was always working on or building something and that meant we always had something fast in our lives.”
That included a 1962 Chevy II he had built and equipped with a 454 Hemi engine and a roll bar. But for as long as Linda can remember, Alvin had dreamed of owning a 1930 Ford Model A.
For decades, the Calgarian worked as a mechanic at Courtney Automotive, a family owned and operated full-service garage that’s just west of the downtown. It was there in 2011 that Alvin met Wesley McRadu, a local car builder who pulled up to the shop in a 1930 Model A hotrod. McRadu has made a name for himself as a sheet metal worker and spent his career involved in the auto body trade. In his spare time, he has constructed some 50 hotrods, including his latest, the John Cassidy Model T tribute car.
It was McRadu’s 1930 Ford Model A that captured Alvin’s attention. According to McRadu, he had found an original, all-steel Model A body for sale in Medicine Hat. It was in rough shape, and the seller thought it too far gone for him to restore. But to McRadu, the Model A body was a hot rodder’s delight.
“I chopped the roof two-anda-half inches and channelled the body over the new TCI frame I’d bought for the project, and ran a 1934 Ford truck grille,” McRadu says. “My idea was to build a first-rate car with a 401-cubic inch Buick Nailhead engine and nine-inch Ford rear end. Cascade Vans & Interiors did a full leather interior, it had a wicked stereo in it, and plenty of parts were chrome plated.
“I called it Rat Poison, and had a couple of Rat Finks painted on the cream-coloured paint job when it was done.”
According to Linda, “Alvin just came home with stars in his eyes and was like a kid who’d just left the candy shop after he saw that Model A.”
McRadu was moving on to another project and the car was for sale. Alvin scraped together money to put a deposit on the Model A. As soon as he bought it, Alvin and Linda began driving the car. They also made a few changes from the McRadu specifications, including swapping the wire spoke wheels for aluminum rims and tires that are fatter and more radical looking. To increase the driving range, the Klassens’ son, Andrew, bought his dad a spun-aluminum gas tank that Alvin mounted in front of the radiator.
“We drove it every year to the Radium car show, and we drove it to Spokane to the Good Guys car show in 2012,” Linda says. “We’d put on an Alan Jackson CD and away we’d go. We had so many good times in that car.”
Unfortunately, although he’d never been sick a day in his life, early in 2016 Alvin was diagnosed with cancer. Just before the diagnosis, however, Alvin and Linda had been talking about getting the car repainted a colour that would make it stand out even more.
Orange is Linda’s favourite hue, but no progress was made on a paint job until Alvin was in the hospital. That’s when a group of the Klassens’ friends, headed up by painter Gord Mackay, got together. They took the Model A to Mackay’s shop, dismantled it, sanded it down, painted it and put it all back together in less than a week. It was driven up to the hospital and Alvin was wheeled down to the parking lot.
“He got to see it done up in orange, but he never got to drive it orange,” Linda says.
Alvin died 28 days after his diagnosis.
Now, the Model A is Linda’s car. She drove it to car shows, including those in Radium and High River, in both 2016 and 2017.
She notes that there’s still some room for improvement.
“I do want to put in a bigger gas tank so I can drive even farther, and I’d also like a larger radiator and all new glass. It’s going to Courtney Automotive in January for that work.”
While at one time she wanted a 1970 Dodge Challenger for herself, Linda won’t be letting go of the Model A. Ever.
“It’s a legacy car,” she says of the Model A. “It’s Alvin on the street, and a Challenger would have no meaning to me like this car has.”