President’s Comments…

Memory Lane in St. Louis…

I had to go into my memory recesses and my youth to come up with this month’s article. We are about history in HCCM, so I had to turn on the time machine and travel back a bit. With a little help from Mark Goldfeder, we literally imagined we were in the 1930s, 40s, 50s and 60s. This past Saturday, a small group of members (John Clark and Family, Mark Goldfeder, who was our tour conductor, John Groll, Pat Howk along with Sylvia and I) left the Galleria parking lot and headed out, beginning in Clayton, on a tour of what was once a series of old time auto dealerships. First stop was a rather non-descript shop we often pass by on Brentwood Blvd. - a sort of a landmark of older Clayton…now a medical supply house and previously an interior decorator. Mark showed us that it once was an old auto dealership. He wasn’t sure what kind of cars they carried, but sure enough, you could see where walls had been bricked in and a garage door once was. Upon speaking to the owner, we learned that is was a Hudson dealership back in the 1940s and 50s.

A little further into Clayton was a series of buildings. Again, there were outlines of garage doors and showroom type windows. This was the first home of Barford Chevrolet. Further down, there was another place, still an auto showroom for Mini but the home of one of the first VW dealers in St. Louis – Vincel Volkswagen. Mark then took us to Olive and the site of Chevy’s Restaurant, which was the home of a bus company – Ladue Local Lines. Traversing down Olive, just past 170 was this 50ish style building…one of the first American Motors (as in Rambler) dealerships. Behind the somewhat rundown building was a repair facility that apparently fixed BMW automobiles but it was questionable how many cars really got fixed by the look of the yard filled with cars in various stages of disassembly and repair. There were some restorable relics there…a few old 2002 Tii’s. Further along Olive was an old "Bettendorf-Rapp" that had become Continental Motors, purveyors of British Leyland automobiles (Jaguar, MG, Triumph, etc.) We ventured further north into an area of town not too many folks visit anymore – Pagedale and Welston.

We stopped at this quaint little place that occupied a corner lot. It was a very old painted brick building with the sign "Dawson’s Garage" painted over the top and a quasi-mural of a MOPAR Hemi drag car overhead. We had found buried treasure here. It was surely a time-capsule…the location of the Holly Grail. Looking inside the dusty windows were cars of the late 40s and early 50s. The yard behind the place had an old Corvair and cars much older. The place was filled with memorabilia. It was thought, by Mark, that this had been a very early Pontiac-Oakland dealership. Signage inside indicated such. The caretaker came around and wondered who we were. When we introduced ourselves, he let us in for a tour. Inside were cars and hot rods in various stages of completion…a trip back to the 1950s. Our conversation led to some of the earlier days of drag racing in the St. Louis area and the name, Holly Swindle, came up. Holly, now believed to be deceased, was legendary for his "Back-Up Pick-Up." Indirectly, he’s one of the folks who influenced me getting into the hobby…never even met the man, but the gent I bought the 1928 Buick from was running a 1930 Lincoln that Holly had modified with a modern drivetrain to use as a limousine. Thank goodness he did not modify this historic automobile but merely adapted the drivetrain to fit. We completed this phase of the tour with lunch at another St. Louis Landmark since 1948 – The Goody Goody diner…owned by Richard and Laura Connelly. We ran out of steam and headed home, but I believe the remainder of the group ended up at Mark Sherman’s dealership…still in operation after all of these years. Yes, this was truly a blast from the past and well worth the journey and the images of what things might have looked like in the past as one’s mind conjured up the images.