(Pete Madsen sends us the fruits of his recent junkyard hunt)
It’s time to try my hand at a piece for Curbside Classics, wrecking yard division. I thought that this particular dismantler might still have some older cars on hand, since I sold a 1958 Plymouth parts car there a couple of decades ago. I showed up on a cool, cloudy, but dry December day, camera in hand, and asked if he might still have my old Plymouth. He waved his hand toward the back door and invited me to have a look for myself.
The first thing I saw was this red Cadillac ambulance. The storage building behind it definitely adds some ambiance.
Then this 1971 or 1972 boattail Riviera appeared. It’s still all in one piece, but I’m not sure that it matters.
This red 1983 RX-7 caught my eye next, because it reminded me of my own white car. Look at the body on that – nothing wrong with it at all.
It looks as though the entire interior went into another car though.
Not far from that was this Mazda 929. It’s been under the trees for a good while and has lost its passenger-side front door, but the driver’s door still opened and closed like it did when the car was new in the showroom.
Again, interior pieces seemed to be the main stock in trade of this car.
There were a few Panthers too. Here’s the Town Car end of the row.
Now I’ve found my way to the back corner of the lot where some of the older vehicles are. In general, General Motors vehicles are predominant. Here’s the pickup row,
and here’s an old L-100 International. I think all the pickup boxes had odds and ends piled in them.
This 1957 Lincoln has a straight body but looks like it sat abandoned for a long time before it arrived here.
The 1941 Chrysler sedan is the oldest car I saw. You can see where the weeds brushed against the bottoms of the primered doors when it was still in a grassy field.
Here are a 1956 Buick and a 1950-1952 Cadillac sedan.
This 1956 Cadillac 2-door hardtop has been pretty well picked over.There’s a red 1964 Oldsmobile behind the Caddy’s tailfin, and if the weather had been clear the Olympic Mountains would be visible in the background.
This poor old 1951 or 1952 Packard sedan ended up as the parts car to something else, judging by how little is left of it. Note the jury-rig taillight.
I was surprised to see any vehicles that old in a wrecking yard in these days when everything seems to turn over at a more rapid pace, and with the present high scrap prices it’s possible that they won’t be here much longer.
Cool shots but that’s not a Caddy ambulance, it’s a hearse. A ’67 Superior-Sovereign Landau to be exact.
Hey, I know that yard, been there many a time, its Belfair Auto Wrecking a couple miles from Bremerton on the Kitsap Peninsula . I looked through that International the last time I was there. Another cool yard is Horseshoe Lake Autowrecking, a mile or so closer to Bremerton, right across the street from the drive in movie theater. Last time I was there they had 3 Nash Metropolitans, a Lancia, and several 50’s era cars.
External door hinges would make that L-100 (edit – L-110) a ’51 or ’52 model. If the front grill is dent- and rust-free, it’s one of the more commonly sought-after parts for these trucks.
Great pictures!
Minor nitpick – the vehicle in the first picture is a hearse, not an ambulance. I owned a 1969 Miller-Meteor 42″ (rear headroom) combination that was set up as an ambulance and painted red and white from the factory. It had windows in the rear quarters as most ambulances did, but with curtains in the windows which is probably why everybody called it a hearse. This always got under my skin more than it should have!
And those vehicle are getting extremely rare – Cadillac only made between 2500-3000 commercial chassis per year which were split up among a number of commercial body manufacturers (Superior and Miller-Meteor were the two biggies for a long time). I’m pretty sure that the one pictured above was made by Superior. Great road car if you ever get a chance to drive one!
I remember growing up in the 1970s, our family travelled through rural Western WA on a 200-mile car trip to the grandparents’ about once a month, and one of my time-passing activities was to spot as many old cars as possible. It was amazing how many unofficial junkyards there were, primarily in brushy or wooded corners of some field. 1940s and 50s cars as shown above were plentiful, albeit rusty on the outside and extremely moldy inside.
Completely disassembling and sandblasting a 1941 Chevrolet Special Deluxe sedan while in high school dashed my starry-eyed dreams about how much fun it would be to restore one of these hulks. The epoxy-coated car pieces sat underneath a cover alongside my parents’ house while I went through 6 years of college, and 3 years after graduation I sold off what I could and scrapped the rest. I really would have liked to have finished the project, but even as a young college graduate (with no house, and no garage to work in), I realized that a full-time job and auto restoration didn’t mix well. Now with the family, I’m lucky to even wash my car once or twice a year!
I’d rather explore a good junk yard than any new car lot.
Hate to pile on but that’s a 73 Riviera. The rear bumper meeting the decklid all the way across the rear is the give away.
That reminds me of the yards we used to have in the area here before the EPA shut them all down. Pick n Pulls just don’t have the character that old yards had..
I love junkyards. Always a bit sad but usually a few cars in there you never see on the streets. Last time I was in junkyard I saw a solid Lada Niva – shame.
The Rx-7 looks to have a solid body – engine probably went out and the rebuild costs are reasonably high for them. Quite a few end up with that fate sadly. I’ve owned two and they are wonderful cars in search a rack and pinion steering rack.
I agree, that’s probably what happened with the RX-7. I lost a radiator hose on mine – they won’t go far when there’s no water in them. I made a couple of calls, found out the scrap value on them was virtually nil, and ended up putting a remanufactured engine in it. Glad I did – I’ve had fun since then with it.
There are a few decent yards like this up in Helena, Montana. I had no trouble finding little odd pieces for my daily driver ’73 Galaxie 500 in 2002.
Which yards? I go there all the time.
What’s really striking about a lot of these is when all the excess chrome and plastic gets stripped off, the body itself really stands out. Especially that ’57 Lincoln all cleaned up, what a gorgeous shape.
Too bad about the 929-I wonder what killed it?
@Redmondjp-
Today’s goth and rat rod crowds seems to have cornered the market on old surviving hearses. Once in a while they show up en masse at local cruise nights.
Is that a red ’65 Oldsmobile I’m seeing behind the ’56 Cad?
BTW- some guy is selling a supposedly straight, rust-free ’54 Packard Patrician sedan, sans drivetrain, for $425. Hmmm.
I believe that the Olds is a 64.
Some nice old iron in that yard, a favourite yard of mine is Horopito in the central North island of NZ its full of old cars dating back to the 20s mostly badly rusted now but theyve never scrapped anything. I need a few bits for my Minx and they have plenty and a walking tour of the place is always fun.Nust take my camera and send the file to Paul.
Someone rescue that Cadillac hearse! Please!
My buddy and I haunted junkyards back in the 1960’s and 1970’s searching out parts all over the St. Louis area – the best ones were across the river outside Alton and Wood River, IL. Most of them disappeared in the 1980’s.
St. Louis suffered an interesting phenomina in the late ’60’s – abandoned, derelict cars. For some reason, people just drove or towed their car to an old neighborhood – North St. Louis was quite the place – and removed the plates and stuff and just left them! You talk about all the free parts you could ask for! Man, that was a fun time in the year before I entered the service. I found all the stuff I needed for my first two cars. Fenders, doors, seats, emblems, trim, even engine parts if at least some of the motor was left in the car – generally the engine and tranny were out.
We lived in the northern inner suburb of Jennings, and so many cars were near there for the picking. My friend and I used to go “bomb hunting” in the evenings and search out parts we needed or could use at a later time.
My parent’s basement was full of junk.
What did I do with all the leftovers I replaced? Put as much as my trunk would hold and take a “Sunday morning drive” to a secluded spot over a railroad track in Illinois in a farmer’s field and dump the stuff.
Apparently others thought it was a great spot to dump as well, for by the time I left for the service, that farmer had quite a collection of discarded, rusted junk!
Well, it’s pretty clear that I haven’t been paying much attention to commercial Caddies. That old red Caddy sat in front of the wrecking yard for several months earlier this year, and my wife and I joked about how the red ambulance would make a good craft show hauler. I suspect the red paint didn’t seem very hearse-like to us. The only one I ever sat in had a non-adjustable front seat, probably to maximize room in the cargo area, and it was too far forward for me at 6′ 2″.
The 1956 and 57 Lincolns did have clean lines, especially the shape of the top – we saw that again on some 1960 and 1961 Ford 2-door hardtops, and the 1957 Mopar 2-door hardtops had very similar top shapes.