My Father’s First Decade Of Cars—and the Adventures That Came With Them

Text submitted by Cal Sexsmith.

My father was born in 1930 and passed away in 2020, just shy of his 90th birthday. Between buying his first car in 1950 and selling his last in 2019, he owned 34 cars, trucks, and vans—about one every two years. Most were practical sedans, station wagons, and pickups rather than convertibles or hardtops, but nearly every one came with a story. Together they traced the course of his life while offering neat glimpses of what car life used to be.

After graduating from high school in 1948, Dad enrolled at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon. In 1950 his father accepted a job in Alberta and took the family’s 1949 Chevrolet with him, leaving Dad without transportation while he moved to a rooming house. Grandpa strongly believed that a well-rounded education should include music, so Dad took up the clarinet. With Grandpa away and faced with needing a car more than an instrument, Dad sold the clarinet for $85 and bought a 1928 Chevrolet.

The old Chevy was dependable enough around Saskatoon, but on a trip to visit Grandpa in Wetaskiwin, Alberta, it gave up near Stranraer, Saskatchewan. Dad abandoned it at a nearby farm—I don’t think he ever went back for it—and finished the trip by train.

Once in Wetaskiwin, he complained that he was now without a car. Whether out of sympathy or necessity, Grandpa went with him to Stan Reynolds Ford, where Dad bought a 1935 Ford. It was the same Stan Reynolds who would later start the Reynolds-Alberta Museum.

On the way back to Saskatoon, the Ford soon developed a noisy transmission. A farmer friend suggested packing it with heavy oil and sawdust to quiet it down. Not long after, Dad sold the car to a fellow who planned to use it on his honeymoon. Years later, he admitted he avoided going home for a few days afterward. His advice? “Never buy a used car from me.”

His next purchase was a handsome 1934 Buick Victoria Coupe (could have been a 50, 60, 90 Series), and it became one of his favorite cars. It wore dual side-mounted spare tires and a rear-mounted luggage trunk, and he often said he wished he had never sold it. Saskatchewan winters required ingenuity, and because the Buick lacked a block heater, he regularly relied on ether to start it. One of his roommates, from a well to do farming family, borrowed some ether for his nearly new 1949 Ford one winter day, reasoning that if a little was good, twice as much would be even better. The resulting explosion convinced everyone otherwise.

Unfortunately, the Buick’s beauty came at a price. It was thirsty, needed large tires, and simply cost too much for a university student to operate. Grandpa encouraged Dad to buy something more economical. Dad jokingly “misinterpreted” that to mean Grandpa was the one who needed a small car himself and arranged for a Morris dealer to bring a new Morris Minor over for Grandpa to test-drive. Grandpa was not impressed!

In the end, Dad sold the Buick and replaced it with a 1938 Chevrolet Master Deluxe (probably at Grandpa’s urging, since he had been a Chevrolet man since 1941). He never warmed to it, later dismissing it simply as “that dumb Chev.”

The Chevrolet didn’t last long before being replaced by a blue 1941 Dodge Luxury Liner (The Luxury Liner was the US style Canadian built model, as opposed to the Plymouth based Canadian models, or what we called real Dodges). This was the first of eleven Dodges he would own over the next seven decades, and it marked the beginning of a lifelong preference for Chrysler products. He came by his love of Dodges honestly, as Grampa had owned several in the 1930s while Dad was growing up.

When Dad began teaching in the fall of 1952, he wanted a better, newer car. He hoped to find one of the attractive Canadian-built Dodge fastbacks he admired but settled instead on a 1948 Dodge. It supposedly had a rebuilt engine backed by a warranty—a fortunate detail because the engine blew on the Blackstrap hill not long after he bought it. Although the dealer repaired it, Dad never thought it ran properly again.

Soon afterward, he and Grandpa visited a Studebaker dealership to admire the new 1953 models. Sitting among them was a used 1947 Studebaker Land Cruiser that had previously belonged to a Canadian senator. Dad asked what it would cost to trade in his smoking Dodge. The salesman quoted $300 without even wanting to inspect the trade.

“You wouldn’t be jumping at that price if there wasn’t something wrong with it,” the salesman said.

Once again: never buy a used car from Dad!

That Studebaker became the most important car he ever owned.

During summer school in 1953, Dad and two friends planned to attend a free concert in the park. At the last minute, Dad’s date stood him up, but since he was driving, he went anyway. On the way, one of his friends spotted a young woman from class walking alone and suggested they stop.

It turned out she was headed to the concert too.

She accepted their invitation to ride along and would become my mother.

Dad and Mom married the following year and remained together for nearly 67 years, until his passing in 2020. Without that old Studebaker—and one cancelled date—our family might never have existed.

However, not being overly sentimental about cars, Dad eventually sold the Studebaker, although he always retained a soft spot for the brand. Family rumor says the old Land Cruiser still sits derelict in an abandoned farmyard near Birch Hills.

After becoming engaged, Dad apparently decided that nothing would impress a farm girl more than a pickup truck, so he bought a maroon Chevrolet half-ton in Deluxe trim. This meant a chrome bumper and grille, and quarter windows. Dad said it was a good truck except every now and again the steering would jump –Typical poor GM steering system, he would say.  It also proudly had “W. Sexsmith, Birch Hills” painted on the doors, as regulations then required.

The truck provided one of his greatest stories.

While hunting pronghorn south of Swift Current in the fall of 1953, Dad and his companions wounded an antelope and finally caught up with it. As they dressed the animal on the tailgate, a uniformed man rode up on horseback. After examining the truck’s license plates, the lettering on the doors, and their hunting licenses, he casually asked where Birch Hills was.

When they told him, he smiled and explained why he’d asked.

“You fellows aren’t locals,” he said. “You’ve wandered into Montana.”

He happened to be a Montana Fish and Game officer.

The officer advised them to head about ten miles north as quickly as possible—and not mention they’d ever met him. On the drive back they spotted the border marker. Considering Birch Hills sits more than 270 miles northeast of Swift Current, it remains one of Dad’s more remarkable navigational achievements.

Back at home, Mom drew the line at honeymooning in a pickup, so Dad traded it for a 1950 Pontiac Fleetleader. The dealer considered the truck more valuable than the Pontiac, so no money was exchanged. Dad owned the Pontiac only briefly before hastily replacing it with a beige 1953 Chevrolet 210 equipped with Powerglide. At the time of the purchase, he was told both engine and transmission had been recently replaced, which he considered a good thing.

It proved to be the worst car he ever owned.

The transmission failed shortly after purchase, and although the underlying problem was eventually corrected, the Chevrolet continued to suffer steering, alignment, and electrical problems. One night, while returning with Mom to Yorkton, every light on the car suddenly went out—even though the engine kept running. Dad managed to pull over safely, flagged down another motorist, and followed that car into town in complete darkness.

He never trusted the car again. Years later he often said he should have spent the extra money on a leftover 1954 Meteor Niagara that a friend had tried to sell him instead.

I don’t remember the Chevrolet myself, but I did ride home from the hospital in it after I was born, and there’s photographic evidence to prove it.

By the spring of 1957, Dad was eager to get rid of the Chevrolet. But with a new house bought in the fall of 1956, and a growing family, there was not a lot of money to spare. Dad solved the problem by trading for an older car—a gray 1952 Buick Custom sedan powered by a straight-eight engine and Buick’s Dynaflow automatic transmission, which he liked to call “Dyna-Slush.”

This is the first car I actually remember.

The Custom was a Canadian version of the Buick Special. It had an enormous hood ornament that looked capable of skewering a pedestrian, and a hood that opened sideways from either side (easy to remove entirely with two people). It also had very sharp radio knobs, and one day while visiting my Uncle Lloyd, Dad braked suddenly and I was thrown forward into one of the sharp knobs, opening a cut just above my right eye. The wound required several stitches, and I still carry the scar today. I have felt hostility towards GM cars ever since!

The Buick remained with us until 1960. Dad admitted he had probably been driving it harder than a nearly 100,000-mile straight-eight deserved when the engine failed about twenty miles from home near St. Louis, Saskatchewan. He bought several quarts of oil, managed to limp it home, and had the engine rebuilt. Unfortunately, the crankshaft had warped and soon caused another catastrophic failure, requiring a replacement engine. Even then, Dad insisted the Buick never ran quite right again.

Those first ten years established a pattern that would continue throughout his life. Dad was practical but optimistic, mechanically resourceful, and never afraid to gamble on another used car if he thought it might be better than the last. Some purchases became lifelong favorites, others unforgettable disasters, but every one added another chapter to the family story.

In the next installment, I’ll look at Dad’s cars of the 1960s and early 1970s, when a growing family, changing jobs, and the rapid evolution of the automobile brought an entirely new set of stories.