The Plymouth   

The 1935 Plymouth after it was restored

Grandma's first ride in the Plymouth after it was restored.

My Love Affair

 My love affair with my '35 Plymouth started many years ago.  When I was a young boy of 12 my Grandpa used to let me drive his 1935 Plymouth 4 door touring sedan about 50 feet, from the driveway into the garage where it was always put at sundown each evening..  I always looked forward to this two minute trip with the excitement and anticipation of a boy driving his first car.

Grandpa had bought the '35 Plymouth from the Reed-Reaves Motor Sales, the local Chrysler-Plymouth dealer in Shawnee, Oklahoma on July 31st, 1935.  He had traded a 1929 Graham-Page Sedan for the '35 Plymouth and was allowed $187.50 trade in. (Oh how  I would like to have that trade-in now.)  He wrote a check for the balance of $689.07, of course this included insurance, tag and excise tax.  

Grandpa was an engineer on the Rock Island Railroad and lived about a mile from the yard office.  So this was about the extent of his driving, with an occasional trip to Oklahoma City where we lived, and back to Tennessee for a vacation every three or four years.

Grandpa passed away in 1946, and the Plymouth with 70,000 miles and 11 years old was parked back in the garage, which Grandma locked up.   The garage was to remain locked for the next 40 years, with the Plymouth inside and unseen all those years.  As the years passed I always kept a mental picture of the '35 as it had been when I first drove it, and often wondered what the years, rats and rust had done to it in the old dirt floor garage.  I had tried several times over the years to talk to Grandma about the '35, but she would only say she didn't want to discuss it and the matter would be closed.

Thus the car remained the family mystery until Veteran's Day 1985, which was about a month before Grandma's 95th Birthday.  We had gone to Shawnee to visit and have dinner with Grandma,  I had decided once more to try and talk to her about the old Plymouth.  After several awkward attempts to bring up the subject of the car, I finely asked Grandma outright if I could buy the car and restore it.  After so many times of refusing to talk about the car I was surprised and overcome with emotion when she told me I could have the car.

It was hard to believe that the car that I had dreamed of for 40 years would finally be mine.  Grandma then asked me if I would like to have the papers for the car, I said yes I would need the title, thinking that this is probably all she would have after all these years.  Since Grandma could not get around very well anymore, she asked me to go to the closet in her bedroom and get a small black strong box from a shelf behind the hanging clothes.  This was the first time I had known the shelf was there as it was completely hidden from view.  I found the box and took to her.  She took a small corroded key from her purse and unlocked the box.  This was my second surprise, inside the box was the original Bill of Sale, the Excise Tax receipt and all the Registrations from 1935 until 1967.   It was 1967 when Grandma stopped registering the car every year and getting a tag for it, even though it had been locked up all those years.  She told me the license tags were in the back of the closet also.  I looked and sure enough there was a stack of tags, some still in the brown paper,  just like they had come from the tag agency.  Those registrations and tags made my Plymouth even more special to me.

Grandma went on to explain why she would never talk about the car or let anyone into the garage.  She said Grandpa bought the car and said it was for her, and he wanted her to always keep it.  She promised him she would never sell it, a promise she kept for 40 years.  But she said by giving it to me, she felt like it was staying in the family, so she was still keeping her promise to Grandpa.

The following weekend I borrowed a trailer from a friend and my son and I drove to Shawnee to bring home my prize.  However getting the '35 out of the old garage proved to be more of a job than we had anticipated.  The garage had settled over the years and the doors were about two inches below the concrete drive way and could not be opened.  We had to go to the local hardware store and buy a handsaw which we used to cut the bottom off the doors so they would swing clear of the driveway.  It is hard to put into words, my feelings when we swung open the doors,  It was like opening a tomb.  The musty smell of 40 years hung in the air in the old dirt floor garage.  And there sat the '35 Plymouth, tires flat and covered with what looked like an inch of dust, but to me it looked beautiful.  After using a couple of come-a-longs to winch it up on to the trailer, we finally got a chance to examine it in the sunlight.  The upholstery was in pretty bad shape, it appeared that a family of mice had made their home in the back of the front seat.  The body didn't seem to be rusted hardly any.  We pulled the '35 back home, stopping at a car wash on the way to remove the 40 years of dirt, and backed the trailer into the back yard, leaving the Plymouth on the trailer until I could have a building built to house it.

A year later on Grandma's 96th Birthday, the '35 Plymouth once again made the trip under its own power back to Shawnee, and Grandma rode one more time in her car and reminisced of the trips she and Grandpa had taken in the Plymouth when it was new.  That was worth all the gold in the world,  just for her to ride in it again.

This is the first time the Plymouth had been seen in 40 years.
It was locked in this garage.

Roy Working on the Plymouth

The Plymouth won many trophies and was in many parades

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