My Favorite Ride: Convincing dad to buy a 1953 Chevrolet for 60 bucks

This week’s column comes to you courtesy of John Simon, a Bloomington man who, when he was a high school junior back in 1968, bought a 1953 Chevrolet.

For $60.

The floorboard on the driver’s side was rusted away, but the interior looked pretty good, and the engine fired right up.

Sold!

“A friend of mine told me his brother had an old 1953 Chevy for sale out at his farm on the outskirts of Fort Wayne,” Simon recalled. “I talked with my dad, and he agreed to go look with me. It was rusty.”

He got inside and turned the key. “I started it up and the six-cylinder straight-line engine ran like a gem. I asked the owner what he wanted for it and he said $60. I couldn’t believe it.”

Even his skeptical dad, “known not to be an easy push-over,” approved the purchase.

He got the car home, washed it, cleaned up the blue exterior paint and used a rubbing compound to shine up the chrome on the bumpers. When he took to the road,  the vintage car stood out.

“I drove it to school every day for months and loved the attention it received from my classmates. During the sectional basketball tournament, I used white shoe polish to write school spirit slogans on the body of the car.He soon learned the staying power of shoe polish since ghost images of the slogans remained on the paint surface.

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When one of his sisters borrowed the car, it broke down. He had it pulled back home and put it out by the garage. He was no mechanic but diagnosed the problem: The fiber timing gear was nearly toothless.

He ordered a new gear, from an auto parts store, not Amazon. Then set out to fix the car himself. “I borrowed a book from the library with details and illustrations on the placement of the timing gear,” he said, recalling the process.

“I started underneath, removing the oil pan, and worked my way up to the camshaft. I more or less beat the old gear off the shaft (he didn’t have the required arbor press.) I hammered the new gear, thinking I had the gear in the right position. I reassembled everything, finishing with putting the oil pan back in place.”

He poured in new motor oil and, barely able to contain his excitement, started the car up again. Smoke and exhaust fumes poured out of the carburetor.

Oops. The timing gear was 180 degrees from its proper place. “This meant I had to disassemble and remove the gear and put it back on. By the time I pounded it off and pounded it back on, the gear was so destroyed that it would not engage.”

That was that. He sold the old Chevy to a friend for $25 and towed it out of his farm.

Is it, I wonder, still out there? Poison ivy creeping through the window frames and trees growing out of the engine block?

Have a story to tell about a car or truck? Contact My Favorite Ride reporter Laura Lane at llane@heraldt.com or 812-318-5967.