If You Look, They’re Still Out There

By Joe Whitaker

I continue to be amazed at the sheer volume of 50, 75 and even 100-year-old car stuff that is still out there in the woods, the desert and stuffed in barns, sheds and garages. I would have thought that pre-WWII sheet metal would just about be all gone because of the aggressive scrap metal drives during the 1940s. But, vintage tin seems to be popping up from everywhere and is easily found with a quick search of the major on-line auction sites. While it is certainly true that all those Chevy’s behind and beside service stations (remember those?) or in your neighborhood junk yard (they are called salvage yards today) are gone, they are still out there in different places than they used to be. So it’s pretty rare to find that hidden treasure parked along the road or via word of mouth (I know a guy that has one of those!) today, right? Here are two recent cases of just that…finding gold the old fashioned way.

Early in 2009, I received a call from a fellow who claimed he had a friend that had stumbled onto a 1957 El Morocco via word of mouth (to find out what an El Morocco is, search  the web and you’ll find the complete history).Yeah, right, I thought, in 2008? There are no more of those out there much less any stuffed in a backwoods shed in Ohio. After all, only 16 of these were built, right? No more than a week later, I received a letter via US Mail that included a shorthand-written note and two really fuzzy pictures. The pictures were indeed what looked like the trunk lid of a 1957 El Morocco and another distant photo of a car in a snowstorm on the back of a rollback. Interesting, but being skeptical (I have been involved in more than one wild goose chase) I kept the pictures and letter on my desk and requested more photos and info from the sender. After waiting a few months, the letter got tossed into a bottom drawer and the thought of a modern-day real El Morocco find went out of my head. Just a few weeks ago I noticed 9-10 emails from one address that all had attachments. I casually opened the first one and there it was! The whole story and clear, sharp, digital photos from every angle of a 1957 El Morocco 2-door hardtop! I think I spent half the day drooling over the pictures and thinking “how lucky those guys are.” Well, those guys are Dale and Jerry Hatton from Dayton, OH and their story and photos appear on page 42 of this issue.  

Though not on nearly so grand a scale as the El Morocco, I do have my own fun find story and this one truly was along the side of the road. My daily 80-mile commute gives me lots of time to look in driveways and ditches and for the most part my trips are fairly uneventful. The occasional classic being driven or trailered in the other direction of my travel is about as exciting as it gets. However, one evening back in August I was headed west on the two-lane that takes me home each night and out of the corner of my eye I saw two go-carts parked near the shoulder off the right side of the road next to a driveway. I went past and the image of a 1963-67 Corvette roadster popped into my head as I continued down the road. Early Corvette go-cart I thought? No, I was imagining things. Another five miles and I told myself “Don’t turn around, it’s really nothing…” and “You’ll just wind up with some junk you really don’t need or have the room for…” and so on. Long story short, I did turn around, I did stop and I did buy some junk I did not need. My junk turned out to be fairly cool, however. After running into several dead ends and asking “experts” what they thought it was and where it came from to no avail, a coworker came in one day and suggested I do a web search for “Corvette promo”, which I had not yet done. And suddenly there it was: a Barry-Toycraft 1963 Corvette promotional car. They were built in very limited numbers for GM in 1963 and sold to dealers to use as giveaways to customers who came in to test-drive new 1963 cars. It is said some savvy dealers even loaded the little electric-powered fiberglass car into the back of a pick up truck, took it to the nearest elementary schools for the kids to test-drive and drool over. As the dealer finished off his show-and-tell, each student was given a card featuring the name of the dealership along with this statement: “Kids, if you can get your mom and dad to come on down and test-drive a new 1963 Chevrolet in the next few weeks, you can enter the contest for this little car and you could win!” Imagine how many kids went home and bugged their parent’s until, just to shut the kid up, they took him or her down to the dealership and maybe even went home with a new 1963 Chevy if the salesman could close the deal. “Why, if you buy this new Chevy tonight I can make you such a deal….” My promo car is really just the body because the original independent chassis and electric motor and other parts are long gone. But, I do like challenges so it looks like another Chevy project has me hooked. They’re still out there…you just have to keep your eyes and ears open!