COLLECTOR CLASSICS
Rusty memories never sleep
Ed Thiessen sees his dream car every time he walks by the carport at his Abbotsford home.
His once beautiful 60-yearold Pontiac convertible has a thick cover of dust and is largely hidden by storage boxes and old construction material.
The 81-year-old retired mechanic has been meaning to do something with the car since it was last licensed in 1980, but hasn’t got around to it. That said, it still represents the best Christmas present he ever gave himself.
He recalls Christmas Day 1956 spent with his brother Jack in Oshawa, Ont., meeting with strangers — a train ride far from their Abbotsford home. They were picking up a very special present — a brand new Sierra gold metallic and adobe beige 1957 Pontiac Laurentian convertible. And they would drive it out of the showroom at the General Motors plant where the luxurious new flip top had just rolled off the assembly line.
Ed and his brother had been working in dam and pipeline construction camps, usually seven days a week, logging overtime hours every day, when 20-yearold Ed visited Abbotsford’s John McGowan Motors in October 1956 to order his new car.
“I wanted the American Star Chief model, but they had to be specially imported from the U.S. and cost a lot more than the Canadian model,” he recalls.
His trade-in on the new $5,300 Pontiac was a yellow 1947 Buick Roadmaster convertible in mint condition. The two brothers had saved their money and planned to take a bit of a side trip before heading home in the new convertible.
That trip would take them in a circle around North America.
“I planned to have a continental kit installed on the car by General Motors, but it was a lot more expensive than buying it myself,” Thiessen recalls.
“I also wanted the Wonderbar signal-seeking radio, but it was only available on the American Pontiacs. So I got the serial number for the radio, ordered it and installed it myself.”
His car was equipped with power brakes and the high horsepower “power pack” engine option that included a four-barrel carburetor and dual exhausts. Power windows weren’t in his budget.
Once they picked up the car, the two brothers — who had never been outside of Western Canada — headed to Toronto, then on to Quebec City and Montreal, where they spent three weeks visiting friends. They headed back through Ontario, crossing into the U.S. at Buffalo, where sub-zero temperatures and winter storms had them heading straight south.
“There were severe storms all the way to Georgia,” Ed recalls. “So much ice built up around the front wheels on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, I couldn’t steer the car.”
After experiencing extreme, freezing temperatures, they went through Florida and then as deep into Mexico as they could, driving in temperatures reaching 120 degrees. They still drove with the top down.
When plans to load the convertible onto a train heading to Guatemala in Central America fell through, the brothers headed back through Mexico, spending three weeks with relatives. Staying far away from the tourist centres, they tried to visit the most remote villages, studying Spanish from a phrase book as they drove. On more than one occasion they had to wait up to a day for gasoline to be delivered to service stations that had run out.
“We lived cheaply and planned to keep going until the money ran out,” Thiessen says.
In Corpus Christi, Texas, they met up with Wayne Tessaro, an acquaintance from Abbotsford who was stationed on the Gulf Coast as a U.S. Navy navigator on fighter planes.
The three headed for Tucson, then San Diego and Tijuana, before travelling up the coastlines of California, Oregon and Washington states toward their home in British Columbia.
The trip had taken four months, ending 60 years ago in April 1957. The new Pontiac convertible had racked up more than 20,000 miles and proved very reliable.
Thiessen had worked as a mechanic since he was a child in the Clearbrook Garage owned by his father since the early 1940s. He did his first valve job on a Ford Model at the age of eight, was picking up parts with the shop truck at 12 and had his own stall in the shop of a local car dealership at 14. He was prepared to fix anything on his new car.
The only mechanical issue was a differential whine that, when the mechanics at the local dealership couldn’t fix it, General Motors sent two factory-trained experts to fix the problem without additional charges.
Ed rebuilt the engine himself with 245,000 miles on the odometer. When he parked his car 27 years ago, it had travelled 440,000 miles.
“I used to start it up and drive it every year without any problems, but I haven’t done that for the past eight years,” he says, adding he always thought his car was good for another 150,000 miles.
“I wanted to drive it one more time to see if I want to keep it,” he says. “That just hasn’t happened.”