The 1941 Chevrolet Story

                                                 A 100% true story about my first hotrod                 

                                                          Written 1/20/2011*  1981 words

                                                               By Howard Yasgar

      In 1955, I was fifteen years old and living with my parents on Davis Street in Westville Connecticut.

      Our family lived on the second floor of a middle-class two-family house.

     All the homes on our street were similar in design.

     They all had long blacktop driveways running along their right side, with the driveway running all the way to a two-car garage at the very rear of the yard.

     On the left side of our backyard, was a nicely mowed grassy area with a low hedge that was separating the grass from the paved driveway.

    Both sides of our yard had four-foot-high galvanized fences.

    This separated our yard from the neighbors.

    Since our two-car garage was always empty, it became a nice  clubhouse for us kids

    That empty garage was a place where we could all sit on the concrete floor and read our hot rod magazines.

     At the time my best friend was Ritchard Andrade.

     Richard and I became friends because we sat next to each other in home room # 12 at Sheridan junior high school.

      At the time of this story, Richie was a year older than I was, so he already had his driver’s license.

     That meant Ritchie could borrow his brother’s 1949 Mercury car for us to use.

     Behind Ritchie’s house there was a garden shed, and parked behind it; Ritchie had a 1936 Ford coupe. The car had been given to him by one of his neighbors.

     That old Ford parked behind Ritchies shed became our secret place when we weren’t in my garage, and it was there that we read our hot rod magazines and talked about hotrods.

     The 1950’s and 1960’s was a special time, because all the carmakers in Detroit were starting to produce big and powerful overhead valve V8 engines.

     As powerful engines became more common, we read that guys were buying them to build hot rods.  

     The Hot Rod magazines all had lots of “Do it Yourself” stories about how easy it was to build a hot rod that could be used for drag racing.

     It was then that Ritchard and I determined that all we needed was two old cars, and two big V8 engines to install in them.

     One day, we were sitting in Richards 1936 Ford and he said he had heard about an auto wrecking yard located in Milford Connecticut.

     So off we went to see what they had.

     At Milford Auto Wrecking we were mesmerized by the sight of so many used V8 engines just lying in the mud.

     That was until one of the junk yard owners snuck up behind us and scared the hell out of us.

    He yelled, “What are you guys doing here, this is a restricted area.”

    We were both so scared and we didn’t know what to say, so I said, we want to buy two engines to make hot rods.

     As soon as I said we wanted to buy, his tone quickly changed, and within ten minutes Richard and I were the proud owners of two very dirty old used engines, that only cost us fifty dollars each, and that included delivery to my backyard on Davis Street.

     The following morning, Ritchard and I waited at my house until a tow truck showed up with the two greasy dirty V8 engines chained onto the back of his truck.

     The driver undid the chain and expertly backed the tow truck onto my father’s neatly cut lawn and hedge, where he simply just dumped them.

     As the driver pulled away, he accidentally pulled out three or four more of my father’s hedges.

     The rest of that day, Richard and I spent all our time studying those two engines.

     We were now on our way to becoming “Hot rodder’s”, and we were going to do it exactly  like they did it in the hot rod magazines.

     That evening, I looked out my bedroom window as my father came home from work.

     Luckily it was getting dark, but my dad sensed something was different in the yard and then he saw the engines and missing hedges.

     Now I knew my dad was a good guy and he also liked mechanical things like me, but just in case, I stayed hidden in my bedroom.

     I heard some loud voices in the kitchen, but after a while it was all quiet.

     In the morning my father asked me, “What’s with all the junk in the yard?”

     I said, Ritchie and I are building hot rods.

     Dad just looked at me and simply said, don’t make my yard into a shithouse.

     And that  was all he said, so I assumed that meant we had permission to go forward with our Hot Rod plans.

     Richard had his 1936 Ford Coupe to put his engine in, but I didn’t have a car to work on.

     So, then we counted our money and found we had nearly $60.00 between us

     Flush with cash, we now headed to the used car lots that were located on Whalley Avenue in New Haven.

     We couldn’t have been luckier, because in the first car lot we found a real nice salesman.

      He was a short fat guy with a big mustache and he had a 1941 Chevrolet four door sedan for sale.

      He said that because he liked hot rodders us, he was willing to sell it to us and he would deliver it right to my house in Westville.

      It only took five minutes and the deal was done, and we gave him the $50.00 he wanted.

     The following morning, the mustachioed guy shows up in front of my house with the 1941 Chevrolet sedan, and someone else from the car lot was following behind him.

     As he drove up Davis Street to my house, there were clouds of blue smoke coming out of the old car.

     There was so much blue smoke coming out we could hardly see anything and it smelled so bad none of us could breathe.

     He drove the car into my yard and after a few minutes or so of maneuvering back and forth he managed to get the car close to where we wanted it.

     It was after he left that we realized he parked it too close to the fence, and we couldn’t use the driver’s side doors.

     Ritchard then got in the car from the passenger side, and started the cars motor up.

    He said that he was going to drive the car forward, and away from the fence.

    That’s when we found out that Ritchard didn’t know how the car’s shifter worked, but he kept trying, and he kept doing it until the car wouldn’t start anymore.

      After about an hour, all the smoke and smell had dissipated, so Richard and I spent the rest of the morning taking turns sitting behind the wheel of my new car.

     We took turns making motor noises like we were racing.

      It  sounded just  like we were driving the car with the V8 engine already installed.

      Now I must tell you why I was so happy when buying that 1941 Chevrolet.

     When I was just a kid my father drove a 1941 Chevrolet coupe, and everywhere we went people called my father’s car a shit box, but he loved that car and I just knew he would love my

41 Chevrolet also.

     So now, Richard and I were both taking turns making believe we were driving, and that’s when I got to thinking about customizing the dashboard of the car.

     Richard agreed with me.

     If the dashboard came out nice, perhaps they would one day feature my car in a hot rod magazine.

     We both went down into my basement to check out the paint in my dad’s workshop.

     It appears that luck was with us,

    We found an unopened pint can of baby blue enamel and a couple of slightly used but very clean paint brushes that my dad had soaking in some kind of paint solvent.   

     So, to prepare for the job before we started painting, I  began by wiping off most of the dust and dirt on the dashboard.

     We couldn’t find any masking tape but we had plenty of black electrician’s tape.

    Now in retrospect, it would have been better if we had used better quality paintbrushes for doing all this kind of fine detailed work.

     After we accidentally spilled the can of paint I realized  that it would have been better if we had started with two pints of the same color paint as we were only halfway through the job when we ran out of blue paint.

     I now realized that in any future custom paint jobs that I was going to do, I should never use

cheap paint brushes. As the paint dried, there were lots of streaks in it, and no matter how many

 brush hairs we pulled out, some white hairs stuck to the paint.

    Richard thought it must have been some kind of defective paint we were using.

    So, now I could see that the next time we did a custom paint job, I would have to get the correct kind of thinner.

    Having the correct paint thinner would have enabled us to have cleaned our hands better, and there would have been far less fingerprints on the car’s arm rests, and on everything else we touched.

     I tried to clean up the mess of all the paint we spilled, using several different thinners and turpentines that my father had in the basement.

    But very quickly the smell from the paint thinners made it impossible for us to breathe in the car.

    It was about 5 PM when my father came home and boy did he hit the ceiling.

    “Holy shit” he said, and when he looked at my 41 Chevy his face turned a bright red.

    “Who the hell sold you this piece of crap, how much did you pay, god damn it, don’t they know you are an underage minor”, and my dad went on and on.

      He said, “How did you ever buy a car? You are only 15 years old and legally you can’t buy a car,”

      For a full half hour my father never stopped yelling.

      I looked around for my friend Richard but he seemed to have disappeared. It was just as well, as I didn’t want him to see me crying.

     I told my father everything, and about an hour later, the mustachioed used car salesman was in my back yard, and my father was giving him all kinds of hell.

    The car salesman to his credit, rather than get punched in the face gave my father the whole $50.00 back.

    Then my father helped the salesman by jump starting the Chevrolets battery.

    With blue smoke billowing out the exhaust, and a lot of back-and-forth jockeying, the car left our yard.

 You should have seen the lawn in our back yard; it looked like a bulldozer had been there.

     With all this going on, I was surprised that no one ever mentioned even one word about the half-painted baby blue dashboard.

    The salesman didn’t even complain about the wet baby blue paint on the driver’s seat, because he was sitting on it.

     I think every neighbor up and down the entire block was on their back porches watching and listening to what was going on in our back yard.

    The next day my father gave a junkman some money to remove the two engines. I think my dad wanted to hit me, but he didn’t.

     Now looking back on it, I think l learned a lot of lessons that day about building hot rods.

     Also, I would never use baby blue paint again to paint a dashboard.