COLLECTOR CLASSICS
Love for his first car leads man to purchase rare 1959 Canadian Pontiac Laurentian
Rekindling a teenage crush
Gary Meyers remembers taking noon and after-school walks with his first girlfriend. But one particular day stands out. They turned into an alley and there, sticking out into the lane, was a big yellow fin. It belonged to a rusty Canadian-built 1959 Pontiac Laurentian sedan that looked like it had been parked a long time.
“I loved the cars of the ’50s with all the chrome and fins,” he recalls of being 14 years old in 1980. “I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.”
He would walk by the derelict and rusty old car every day while trying to summon the courage to knock on the door. When he finally did, the woman who answered said he would have to talk to her husband about the car and he wasn’t home.
Meyers brought his Grade 8 shop teacher to look at the car, but he discouraged him, saying it needed too much work. However, he had kept up a friendship with Grade 5 teacher Abe Peters who offered fatherly advice: “He told me to think about the purchase carefully and then helped and supported me as I moved forward,” Meyers recalls.
When Meyers finally connected with the owner of the car, the man was very brusque and didn’t take the youngster’s hope of purchasing the car seriously. But young Meyers was determined and went back almost every second day with his offer. “The owner finally gave in — probably just to get rid of me,” he says.
He paid $50 of his earnings from an afternoon job at a radio repair business and had the car towed to his workplace, where it could be stored and tinkered with. “It was the happiest day of my life,” he says proudly.
However, his single mother was not at all happy or in favour of the purchase when the Pontiac eventually arrived at their home, despite the fact that he worked on it every day. Peters gave him a hand as he rebuilt the brakes, carburetor feeding the six-cylinder engine, did a tune-up and changed a faulty starter motor. The old Pontiac finally coughed to life with some gasoline and a battery borrowed from Peters’ 1970 Buick LeSabre.
“Mr. Peters supported, encouraged and helped me until the old 261 engine sputtered to life. He was and remains a huge part of my life,” Meyers says of the teacher with whom he still keeps in touch.
He couldn’t contain his excitement once the old Pontiac was mobile. “I used to steal the licence plates off my mother’s Mercury Bobcat and siphon some gas to take the car for a drive. I was very careful as I learned to operate the clutch and shift through the gears. I never got caught although my mother wondered why her little Bobcat was using so much fuel.”
His constant companion was the family cat, who was very interested in the car and insisted on riding in the passenger seat while the 14-year-old was illegally piloting the Pontiac around his neighbourhood. But a move to live with his father in Vancouver and his mother losing her storage for the car led to the old Pontiac being towed to the junkyard.
“I was devastated,” Meyers says looking back on what he says was the worst time of his life. “Had I known, we could have worked something out, but my Pontiac was gone forever.”
Marriage and a year working in Lisbon, Portugal, a subsequent move to Vancouver and the birth of his two daughters dulled the memories of the old Pontiac, but Meyers never forgot his first car.
Canadian-built Pontiac cars of the ’50s are much different than their U.S. cousins. While the larger American Pontiacs share main structures with Buick and Oldsmobile, Canadian models rolled down the same Oshawa assembly line as Chevrolet models and they shared almost everything except for styling differences. Without corrosion protection, the Canadian Chevrolets and Pontiacs didn’t last very long, with rust taking a toll within a few years.
After becoming a manager of Sony service for a Vancouver company specializing in camera and video equipment, Meyers pursued his interest in all things old. He bought and repaired radios dating from the mid-1920s and televisions as old as 1946 models. And the lineup of classic cars began to grow in the driveway of his Mission home. Large Lincoln Town Cars and a 1975 Ford station wagon are there along with a 1962 Hillman Minx with a complicated automatic transmission.
He was always looking online to see if a Pontiac similar to the one he bought at 14 was available. Then one day he typed “1959 Pontiac Laurentian” into his browser and up came a shiny red and white model just like the one he had owned. It was for sale in his hometown of Winnipeg. It even had the same powertrain, a six-cylinder engine mated to a three-speed manual transmission. He called the telephone number of the dealer in the advertisement. Research showed the used car dealership had a five-star rating, but it was January in Winnipeg and the city was undergoing a cold snap. When his mother and stepfather finally went to see the car, they reported that the car was “beautiful.”
Meyers offered $7,000 on the $8,450 asking price. The two parties settled on $7,450. The car was transported to his mother’s home in the farming community of Teulon, an hour north of Winnipeg.
The original General Motors warranty book found in the glove compartment showed that Teulon Motors had delivered the 1959 Pontiac Laurentian new. “I couldn’t believe it,” Meyers says.
He intended to wait until late summer and drive the Pontiac to his home outside Vancouver. But a slipping clutch nixed that idea and he hired a vehicle transport company to do the job.
It was another happy day in his life when the remarkably wellpreserved, 90,000-kilometre Canadian Pontiac rolled out of the truck at his home in Mission.
“I like the car so much that sometimes I come home tired from the work week and just grab a coffee and sit in the car,” he admits. “All the memories of my first car come back. It’s so nice to drive it legally.”
Alyn Edwards is a classic car enthusiast and partner in Peak Communicators, a Vancouver-based public relations company. aedwards@peakco.com