Car collectors share their stories

    Washington is home to a number of classic car enthusiasts. Among them is Ken Lindmeier, who owns a 1966 Pontiac GTO. Lindmeier said he was surfing the Web about 10 years ago on the hunt for that very model and found one in Marion. After a little negotiation, he purchased the vehicle, fulfilling a boyhood dream.

    ?Back in the day, when I was a teenager, I wanted a GTO,? said Lindmeier. ?I couldn?t afford it, of course. I got out of high school in 1964, and I was interested in cars. I?d see a GTO go by and say ?I wish I had one of those.? It took me a long time, but I finally got one.?

    Lindmeier recalls that he wasn?t the only one in the family who took an interest in automobiles.

    ?My older brother had hot rods and his friends all had ?32 and ?34 Ford Coupes with Mercury V8?s (a type of engine),? he said. ?My oldest brother Gary has a 1940 Ford, which he has had for 50 years.?

    It is not so much the gears and pistons that fascinate Lindmeier but rather the car?s outward appearance and the people who made it look that way.

    ?I?m more interested in the design, why they came to be and who was behind making them,? he commented.

    Mike Williams is another classic car admirer, and has been for as long as he can remember.

    ?My passion for cars goes back to when I was 4 years old,? said Williams. ?I stood on the street corner in Minneapolis naming all the cars driving down the road. I could tell if it was a Buick Dynaflow shifting down or if it was a Chrysler Corporation with an automatic transmission.?

    Williams? favorite car is the one he inherited from his grandmother ? a 1958 Chevrolet.

    ?She took me to the first day of junior high in that car,? said Williams. ?It was an Impala, which is an expensive Chevy. It?s green, and my favorite color is green.? 

    Williams also has a few more modern cars such as a 2005 Corvette and a 2010 BMW, which he picked up at a factory in Munich, Germany. The biggest difference between modern cars and cars of the 1950s is the safety features, said Williams.

    ?We saw federal regulations for seat belts, air bags, five mile-per-hour bumpers, crush zones, amber turn signals and plastic all over the instrument panel,? he said. ?That made the cars heavier, and at the same time, you had to get better gas mileage and fewer emissions.?

Williams commented that emissions have improved markedly since he was a child.

?A car like a 1965 Mustang, just sitting there, is emitting more pollution because of its fuel tank vent than my car going down the road,? said Williams.

    Williams said that, contrary to popular belief, the large cars of decades past are nowhere near as safe as today?s vehicles.

    ?The misconception is that all these old cars are big and heavy and people think they?re made out of thicker metal, and that they?re really durable,? he said. ?But if you?re in a wreck, they?ll bend and you?ll be thrown out. The big beasts are dangerous. A new car will collapse, and the engine will submarine underneath the passenger compartment. The front and back have accordion areas, and they will collapse and absorb most of the energy.?

    Jim Peterson knows a thing or two about old cars. Peterson spent a year repairing and polishing a 1930 American Austin. 

?I got it in September of 2006 and finished it about Thanksgiving of 2007,? he said. ?I worked on it just about every day.?

Peterson remarked that cars of that era were quite different from what they are now.

    ?You had to pay extra just to get the passenger seat,? he said. ?It was a business coupe, so that was normally a cargo area. And there were no Phillips screws in 1930. All of the screws in the vehicle are slotted. They also didn?t have plastic insulation on the wires.?

Peterson said that the car was very rusty when he got it, and needed a lot of fixing. He said he spent a fortune turning the vehicle into what it is today. He spent $1,000 on the interior chrome-plating alone.

    ?I have four bumper bars, the radiator shell and the headlight reflectors, and they cost $1,700 to chrome-plate. I had to take those parts to Dubuque. This is not a cheap hobby.?

For more, see our July 7 print edition.