COLLECTOR CLASSICS
A road trip reunion for the ages
Bill Cameron has vivid memories of leaving Manitoba behind when he was eight years old, with the country in the depths of the Great Depression. The year was 1933 and his father, also named Bill, ran the Red & White store in the tiny farming community of Hartney, south of Brandon. Hartney had fewer than 500 residents and, despite the store selling everything from tinned food to tools, the Cameron family was having a hard time making ends meet.
“Someone talked my dad into moving to Vancouver, “Bill Cameron says. “So he packed up my mother and all six kids and drove west.”
Bill remembers his father hauling old steel bed rails out of the town dump so he could build roof and trunk racks to hold the family’s belongings. “There was a tent and cots on the roof of the car along with a couple of spare tires,” Bill says. “The plan was to camp along the way, but I don’t believe we ever did. We must have stayed in motels.”
His father mounted a big trunk on the back of the two-door car to carry the family’s clothing. The car was a 1926 Essex Super Six, manufactured by the Hudson Motor Company. A photograph of the front of the car displaying a 1926 Manitoba licence plate indicates his father may have bought the car new.
Now, seven years later, the Essex would carry the family of eight across the Prairies to the West Coast over narrow gravel roads lined with potholes and perilous mountain passages.
“I don’t know how we all travelled in that car,” says Bill. “There was my mother, father and six kids all crammed in with our belongings.”
The memories came flooding back when he saw a story on a similar Essex coach originally purchased in 1962 by New Westminster resident Rod Nickel and then purchased again by Nickel 50 years after he sold it.
“When I saw the picture of the Essex in the newspaper, I said, ‘That’s the car we came out here from Manitoba in.”
Arrangements were made to travel to the Mission home of Rod Nickel’s son Mike, where the Essex is stored. At 94, Bill Cameron drove himself with Joyce, his wife of nearly 70 years.
“My father had to sign so I could get my licence at 16,” he says.
“I took my test on the steep hills in New Westminster and passed the first time.”
As a teenager, Bill bought a Willys coupe, then traded up for a 1931 Chrysler before joining the navy at age 18 in 1943. He was awarded the French National Legion of Honour medal for his service as a naval gunner protecting ships and troops landing at Omaha Beach on D -Day.
“I guess we were fortunate coming through that. We had torpedoes running down the side of the ship,” he says of his months aboard a naval corvette guarding convoys against German U-boat attacks. “I never saw so many planes and ships as on that day.”
He regularly received letters from Joyce back home, who sent a fruit cake across the Atlantic that eventually reached Bill’s ship.
“We had our first date at a Grade 8 mixer at Kingsway West Elementary School,” Bill says fondly.
He returned from the war in 1946 and the couple married three years later.
Bill paid $450 for a 1940 DeSoto that had been stored through the war years and delivered to his Burnaby home by a salesman from Johnson Motors in Vancouver. But his fondest memories are of the 1926 Essex Super Six that brought his family to Burnaby, where his father got a job managing a Red & White grocery store on Kingsway.
The Essex was parked in the garage of their home near where the giant Metrotown Shopping Centre is today. He doesn’t believe his father ever drove the car again.
After some years, the car was sold and he didn’t see another like it until the invitation came to look at Nickel’s 1927 model.
“I remember that car like it was yesterday. I’m sure the back of our Essex was more square,” the sharp 94-year-old said while viewing Nickel’s car.
He determined that his family’s car was a 1926 model that was only slightly different.
“It’s fantastic. This is something I thought I would never see again. It brings back so many memories,” he said while sitting in the driver’s seat of the 90-year-old car.
“When you stop to think about it, that had to be a tremendous adventure for my mom and dad, with all those kids, driving to Vancouver in that old Essex.”
Alyn Edwards is a classic car enthusiast and partner in Peak Communicators, a Vancouver-based public relations company. aedwards@peakco.com