This short story began a few weeks ago when my friend Ed decided to delete some pictures from his phone. As he was doing that he came across a picture of an ad that he had take at the 2016 Portland Swap meet. It was for a 1921 490 roadster that was in a million pieces but seemed to be complete. We he initially called the guy to see if he still had the car and the gentleman did but said that he was soon going to load it up and bring it to the metal recycler.
Well, Ed being the curator of other old iron, and knowing I had an interest in the same kind of old iron, he called me to see if I would like to go and look at it. Of course I said yes, so off we went to the area of Redland, OR to check out this “treasure”. Well indeed it seemed to be a complete car as far as we could tell, and we thought surely it was better than having it go to the recycler, so we struck a deal and lo and behold we were the proud owners of this “treasure”.
A few weeks after we had struck this great deal, I hooked up my trailer and off we went to retrieve this awesome deal. The loading process went without any trouble until I went to get the seat cushion which was propped up against some other parts and a not to happy possum stuck his head out with his teeth barred and came close to tasting my hand. We really had no choice but to dispatch him so we could continue our little adventure. We did manage to retrieve all of the parts and got them all loaded on the trailer and in my pickup and headed for home.
When my wife got home from work that evening of course I had to show her what Ed and I had retrieved from the scrapper and she asked me, “What on earth did I save from the scrapper? You should have just let the man do what he was going to do. You actually paid money for that?”
I guess this is just a story that only other people who have this mental condition would understand, so now I have this “treasure” stored in my shop and I have to figure out what to do with it. Anyone out there interested in a 1921 Chevrolet 490 roadster?
Dave Koetje and Ed Gallagher
