Stories:The Story Of The '47 Nash

Author: Charles Dickson (C3PO)
Before I even moved into my apartment in the Gilder-Murray House in College Park in 1991, the '47 Nash arrived. My friend John had discovered it hidden in the underbrush of a former farm property that his Dad had bought up in Carroll County. Among John's friends, I was the only one who expressed an interest in taking it. I was going to move into my friend Andy's old apartment in the house, but I think that it was even before I had moved in that John and his friend Dave cut away all the bushes, loaded the Nash onto a flatbed trailer, and drove it from the country to Suburbia, and parked it at the house, immediately causing anxiety for both Andy and his landlords. The Nash, a 4-door Super Ambassador, was quite rusty of course, with the upholstery nothing but crusty wire springs, and strips of some kind of cloth hanging down from the ceiling. But the body was pretty intact, made so thick that a pretty impressive rust layer still left unbroken steel all the way around. The engine was a tantalizingly simple straight six with the carburetor right up there where we could take it off and get it rebuilt for next to nothing at a shop in Clarksville. The dashboard was a work of art, glass, aluminum and art deco dials, all magically unweathered. If we could get it started, then we would go about figuring out how to get the seats fixed and maybe actually take it for some kind of drive.
I put tarps, and then car covers over the Nash, but the complaints from neighbors and citations from the city began rolling in, so I did what anybody who does everything backwards does, I got it painted. By that point I had ditched my first job at NASA in order to lead the life of a self-employed entrepreneur, trying to start an electronics business but mostly just doing whatever came to mind. With a girlfriend at the time I coated the Nash in grey primer, and then I loaded it onto a tow trailer (being towed by a car that probably weighed less than the Nash itself) and took it to the Goddard Auto Club, where I used their compressor to paint it a lovely cream color with some auto paint that I got from a paint shop's reject paint shelf (this was also designed to be practice for my upcoming plans to paint the Bus). At some point after that the Nash was evicted from the GAC and I had to again tow it back to the Gilder-Murray house.
By then, it was probably 1992 or 1993, and I think was one of the times that Vygis was crashing at my place for a while. It was fall, which is extremely glorious in Maryland if you spend any time outside. Living in the Gilder-Murray house was practically like camping, with old drafty windows and radiator heat that probably dated to the original construction of the house (which I later learned was 1911). One lovely October night, Vygis and I decided that we were going to try to start the Nash. In our minds it was practically a done deal, because I'd already gotten the carburetor rebuilt. We got out piles of extension chords and drop lights and tools and opened the hood.
The smells of working on an old car outside on a crisp October night are the thing that have stuck with me. I am a little convinced that time has a smell, and that Autumn in particular is somehow a bridge to distant eras. It felt that we were going back in time that night to work on this old car. The wind blowing through the leaves washed over us aromas of rust, mildew, oil, gasoline, industry, hope, exceptionalism, and other peoples' lives. A vehicle of such simplicity wore its engineering secrets in the open, it was designed to be maintained by farmers, shadetree mechanics, the corner shop. Men who had previously maintained artillery on battleships, or jeeps on army bases. In the dark of night, with the glow from Edison bulbs, around the side of a brick house from 1911, we could have been restoring this car 15 or 30 years earlier.
Knowledgeable as we were in the ways of internal combustion engines, we first opened the drain plug on the oil pan to see what came out. There was oil in it, but unnervingly a layer of water too. We tried cranking the crankshaft with a wrench, but it didn't budge. We had a breaker bar, a 5-foot long galvanized 1-inch pipe that we'd found in the basement of the house, but I didn't want to use it if I could help it. We tried every conceivable angle pushing on the wrench on the crankshaft with no luck, until finally I told Vygis ruefully, "Hand me the Dreaded Bar."
With 5 feet of leverage, we finally got the crankshaft to move, but it didn't feel right. We had the valve cover off by then, and looking at the valve train we noticed that my trepidation had been justified; some of the rocker arms were not moving as the crankshaft was turned. Quickly we popped some of the rocker arms off and pulled out the push rods, only to find them bent into "S" shapes by the abuse we had subjected them to with The Dreaded Bar. It was then that we realized that some of the valves were rusted shut and that we weren't going to be starting the car that night, or probably ever. Vygis brought the push rods in, along with some of the straight ones and did a little photo essay of them. In the end, that was the last thing that we did. We played around with the car's radio a little bit and the car continued to generate complaints and citations until it was eventually sold to a junk dealer that seemed excited to get it and came and put it on a flatbed truck.
I eventually painted the Bus and it came out well. Vygis had better luck rebuilding the engine of the Oldsmobile in the same driveway of the Gilder-Murray house several years later. I happened to find a skateboard with the word "Nash" on it and added the number 47 to it and made it my board for several years, amusing my friend. The term The Dreaded Bar became part of our vocabulary to describe any breaker bar likely to be used in an ill-advised manner. When we were cleaning out Vygis' house, I found a window molding from the Nash that he had kept as a souvenir.
Category:Stories
Category:Things:1947 Nash