My Favorite Ride: It took some digging to save this classic car from a horse stable

Larry Kennedy and Harvey Brewer got acquainted back in the 1970s when both worked for IBM. Kennedy was an installer and Brewer a field engineer known for his ability to troubleshoot problems back when computers were young.

"The old IBM 360 mainframe computers didn't have good diagnostics, and he would be the one to figure out what to do when something went wrong," Kennedy said.

Brewer was transfixed by computers and was a genius in that regard, Kennedy said. He liked old cars as well.

"He had several Hudsons," Kennedy said, referring to the automobiles manufactured by the Hudson Motor Car Co., founded by Detroit department store owner Joseph Hudson and seven other men in 1909.

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One of Brewer's Hudsons was a rare 1950 Hudson Commodore Six convertible that he bought in the early 1970s. It was more than 20 years old and had just 19,000 miles on the odometer.

"He saw the car first and bought it," said Kennedy, who would have purchase the old Hudson had his friend Brewer not beat him to it.

"Harvey had a Victorian house in Knightstown, so when he got this car, he put it in the stable building behind the house," Kennedy said. "He was going to restore the car and he was going to restore the house, but neither ever happened."

The car sat parked in the former horse barn for a long time, two decades, Kennedy said, from 1973 to 1995.

It was about that time that Brewer's health took a downturn. He developed congestive heart failure exacerbated by a lifetime of smoking cigarettes, Kennedy said. He decided to move to Arkansas, and sold Kennedy his collection of nine cars, six of them Hudsons.

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There was more — a semi trailer filled with assorted obsolete Hudson automobile parts and pieces Brewer had purchased through the years when Hudson dealerships and repair shops, about 25 of them, closed for good.

Hudsons weren't made after 1957, so their numbers dwindled after that. Finding original parts got to be a struggle.

Kennedy had room to store the parts and at least one car in a 50-by-100-foot building on his property. He and a friend did some digging to free the mired vehicle from the stable and put it inside the building, The other cars got towed and dropped in the weeds.

Brewer had bought some of the cars that were sold to Kennedy from a man named Tommy Miller in Virginia who "collected Hudsons in the 1960s when no one else wanted them," Kennedy said.

He focused his time and attention on the 1950 Hudson convertible, working on it "a little at a time," until it was finished in the spring of 2000. He didn't need much help.

"I started working in my father's body shop when I was 12, and I'm 69 now," Kennedy said this week.

He started driving the car on short trips and entered it in some shows. In 2004, the perfectly restored Hudson won the "Best in Class" award at the Monument Circle Concours show in Indianapolis.

The picture of he and his wife driving the car past the judges is still the wallpaper on his cellphone after all these years.

Kennedy put about 7,000 miles on the car before storing it away in 2007. It hasn't been on the road much since. "I drained the fuel out of it, ran it till it quit and put it under a car cover. I keep it set aside, mostly."

This spring he decided the old Hudson had been under wraps long enough. He refilled the fluids, charged up the battery and took the car out on a sunny dry day.

And he drove it from Indianapolis to Bloomington for a Hudson show at Tim Lloyd's place a few weeks ago. It may have been the most beautiful car there.

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.