At 89, collector puts his 130 cars on the block
Some big hobbies start small; this one began in the early 1950s, when Len Schmidt bought his first old car.
“It was a 1927 Model T Ford that I bought for 10 bucks at an auction sale. It had been cut into a pickup truck.”
Now the 89 - year - ol d wants to sell off his collection of about 130 cars. He’s already sold one of them: a 1959 Oldsmobile with 60,000 original miles. With the Olds gone, Schmidt has a bit more room in his garage for his 1937 Packard, a 1966 Oldsmobile Toronado and a 1934 Packard fitted with wheels that go on train tracks — it was used as a railway inspection car.
Most of the other cars, which aren’t running, are sitting outside on his farm in White City, just 20 kilometres east of Regina; a dozen or so, going back to a 1917 Gray-Dort, are inside a shed.
He’s been a car buff since he was a kid, and even considered being a mechanic.
“I was working on engines when I was about 10 or 12 years old. My dad had a 1927 Chev, and if something went wrong with it, then I would make it my business to take it apart and fix it,” Schmidt recalls.
He was a founding member of the Antique Auto Association of Regina in 1962. After 35 years in accounting, Schmidt retired in 1987. But his car hobby never slowed down.
“On my days off and on weekends, I would drive all over Saskatchewan, and also Manitoba, Montana and Alberta, looking for old cars. I was buying some of them for five or 10 bucks. Most of them were just for parts. Then my three brothers and I would go out and pick them up,” he says. “I was into Corvettes for a while — the 1963s, especially. I found one in Portland, Oregon, bought it, and drove it home.”
Before long, Schmidt had 150 cars and needed a place to park them. “My brotherin- law had a service station, and we would store them there. Then he sold the place, so I bought a piece of property east of Regina and we put them out there.”
Many of his cars and trucks are from the 1920s, ’30s and ’ 40s; some are from the ’ 50s and ’60s, and there are a handful from the 1970s. Except for one British- made Standard Vanguard, all of the vehicles were made in North America. So how does a person accumulate that many vehicles?
“I don’t know; sometimes I really can’t fathom it myself,” he says and laughs.
Eventually, it grew to become one of the largest car collections in Saskatchewan. But, he admits, “It’s time to let ’ em go. I’ve run out of steam. I want to sell all the cars, because we want to move into Regina and I won’t have a place to store this many,” he explains.
Most people have a story or two about their worst car, but he says, “I always appreciated every car I got. I had a lot of enjoyment from the hobby. I’m mechanically inclined and I like fixing things; whatever needed to be done, I could get done. And I’ve met some interesting people over the years. It was fun, but there comes a time, you know.”
Schmidt looks back fondly on his lifetime of buying, selling and fixing cars.
“I’m sorry that I got so old that I can’t work on them anymore,” he says with a smile. “But I just can’t do it anymore.”