MY AUNTY MILLIE

I was browsing the May issue and enjoying the move towards classics you are documenting when I saw a car on page 92 that appeared in a feature I wrote for this magazine when I was the assistant editor, way back in the early 1990s.

What’s more, that was my car, a 1958 Dodge Suburban I found in Maitland. It was sans engine when I rescued it and a mate of mine, arch hot-rodder Jannie Visser from Table View, helped me install a 440-cube Mopar V8 in it, complete with Torqueflight three-speed auto. A taller diff ratio was later added. When it left the production line (Atkinsons, I think, in Alberton or thereabouts) in ’58, it was fitted with anaemic flat-head six-cylinder and a threespeed manual gearbox. Before fitting the longer diff ratio with the 7,2-litre V8, it would shift from first to top in about 10 metres!

I wrote a story on the car and its restoration in the November 1992 issue of CAR, titled Aunty Millie. It was named after an aunt who had left me four grand in her will that helped fund the Dodge project. It was a faded Woolworths T-shirt blue when I found it. I had it painted that turquoise colour with the white roof and fitted the widened steel wheels with the full-width Plymouth hubcaps which still adorn the car. What’s more, it had that Rondalia touring club badge on the grille that I note is still there.

Noting the location of the car up on that hoist, Aunty Millie now resides in Somerset West and, interestingly, it was on protea-grower Leon Booysen’s Somerset West farm, Helderberg, that I stored the car after buying it in about 1988 (parking in Glencairn, where I lived, consisted of the pub parking lot in those days). It was also sprayed that turquoise colour in Somerset West. This pic was when it returned from the spray shop, stripped of bumpers, etc.

So, Aunty Millie has returned to her roots and I often wondered what happened to the car. Now I know. STUART JOHNSTON Via email [I clearly remember reading that Aunty Millie feature back then, Stu. It’s great to discover the interesting lives that old classics have lived. Thanks for the update – editor]