2022 KC/MI Wander: Day 12

This is Part 10 of the blog post documenting my epic wandering around the middle part of the country. You really should read them in order. To that end, here's a link to Part One. At the bottom of each post, click the link for "Newer Post" at the bottom. And here is a link to ALL the pictures I took on this trip. Viewing them will require that you scroll through God knows how many pictures of parts of old cars, so you might want to just skip that altogether.

So, I'm in the Eastern time zone now. My phone knows that automatically; my computer and my car don't know it at all. I haven't told them. Me, I'm somewhere in between: I know it, but sometimes I forget. Like this morning, when I was planning my day after a frustrating evening of not having usable wi-fi, and a poor night's sleep. I thought long and hard about going to the Air Zoo before heading out to the car museums in Hickory Corners, but after full consideration decided that the Air Zoo would be a zoo on a Saturday morning. It sounds like fun for young and old, but in my experience that means a lot of standing around watching kids have fun and wishing they weren't there. I mean, it's not like they're my kids. And I'm sure they're all badly behaved.

So I decided to pass on the Air Zoo. I figured I'd just run by the local university campus to see a statue in front of the stadium called The Committee, and then up to the museums, which open at 9AM. I finished the frustrating task of checking through yesterday's pictures, and captioning them, and then I finished writing Part 9 of this blog. I posted it, and got to the car just a little later than I'd planned. I'd figured that 8:30 would be a good time to leave this morning, and when I shut down the computer it said 8:45. Close enough.

Except, of course, that that was 8:45 Central, and as I mentioned, I'm now in Eastern time. Oh, well, not really much I could have done about it. I couldn't have finished the post any faster, though I could have skipped the hotel breakfast, and gotten a big cup of coffee on the way instead of three little cups, one at a time. That would have saved me three or four minutes.

So I drove over to the university. Statue's not there by the stadium. I checked the listing again and confirmed its reported location. Asked three people who seemed familiar with the campus. None of them knew what statue I was talking about. Didn't really care that much, so I blew it off and went up to Hickory Corners, which is, I guess you'd say, a village northeast of Kalamazoo, northwest of Battle Creek. (I moved to a hotel in Battle Creek because the one I was in last night was such a dump; this one's a noticeably better class of dump.) (No, that's not fair. This one's actually OK so far; what you'd expect of a 2-star hotel.)

I went to Hickory Corners thinking there were five separate car museums (Gilmore, Lincoln, Franklin, Cadillac and Classics), all on the same campus. Turns out that's a little understated. There are those five ... plus the Pierce-Arrow Museum and the Model A Museum and the Campania Barn, a museum of cars from the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. And a bunch of other things. Motorcycles. Pedal cars. Carriages. Steam cars.

So if you're not interested in my extended musings on car styling and such, you might as well just skip the rest of this blog post, because I stayed at the museum until my phone's battery gave out from all the pictures, and I traded my museum ticket for a two-day pass, because I'm going back tomorrow to see the rest of it. 

And that, by the way, will pretty much be it for car museums on this trip. I'm actually glad of that. I'm looking forward to getting in the car tomorrow afternoon and just driving up and down the state of Michigan, not having the least concern about whether someplace is going to be open when I get there or not. All I've got to do is pick a road at every intersection and eventually end up in San Antonio. The weather has been glorious since Oklahoma; I've felt not a drop of rain nor any temperature above 87 degrees. I could live like this.

just for context

The first gallery in the Gilmore was a special exhibit of Corvettes. Having just been to a Corvette museum in Texas, I got through that one quickly: a couple of wide shots for context, plus one picture of an interesting variation, the Bubble Top Corvette. (The bubble top was an after-market product usable on Corvettes with removable hardtops. It looks as silly as it sounds, unless you still think the Jetson's vehicle is cool.)

(And, once again, let me apologise for the quality of the pictures I took today, & probably for the ones I'm going to take tomorrow. The spotlighting in the Gilmore and its associated museums is not really conducive to quality photographs. Might as well park the cars next to a big window.)

1934 Auburn V-12 line-up

The next gallery might be one of my favourites of the ones I saw today. Or any day. First thing I saw when I walked in was a stunning Duesenburg J-111 phaeton, royal blue and black. I took several pictures of it before I noticed that, just across the aisle from it, were five 1934 Auburn V-12s, all painted in the same understated grey and black colours. The cars were identical from the front bumper to the windshield, but represented all five available models: speedster, brougham, phaeton, sedan and cabriolet. (If you're wondering what those names mean, compare the roof lines on those five cars.) I've never seen such a line-up of cars before. All five are on loan to the museum by a local couple. I have to wonder what's left in their garage.

I spent a lot of time going back and forth among those five cars, but eventually forced myself to move on. That entire gallery shows cars from that era, and almost all of them are fabulous, but after the Duesenburg and the five Auburns ... and the Packard 12, of course, and the Chrysler Royal, and the Chrysler LeBaron Imperial, and one of the two Rolls Royces (built in America, mind you) (the other, a Phantom I Torpedo, being so ugly I didn't even bother to photograph it; can you imagine?), and the '37 Cadillac Imperial convertible.... Well, the other cars just seemed kind of ordinary. A '34 De Soto Airflow; saw one the other day. Essex Terraplane; big deal. Packard Custom 8? Saw it in Salt Lake City.

So ordinary... 1951 Studebaker

Next up: cars from the '50s & '60s. When I was very young, I used to see cars like these on the streets all the time. Mostly in poorer neighbourhoods, because by the time I was old enough to identify a car, these were almost all old rattletraps and junkers. Cars didn't last as long back then. But of course the examples on show in the museum have been cleaned up some. The gallery's display starts with the basic Chevy starter car, then moves on to slightly more upscale cars. There were a couple of Mercuries -- a Montclair and the top-of-the-line Turnpike Cruiser -- and a whole lot of other cars that I didn't photograph because, by then, my battery was running down and ... well, I'd seen 'em. Just for spite they threw in the 1963 Chrysler Turbine, a research model that was too expensive to actually mass-produce, but one that's so famous I've probably seen a thousand pictures of it. Now I've seen the actual car. And the room finishes with one of my absolute favourite cars of all, a 1963 Buick Riviera. I want one.

Just off to the side of that gallery is the Muscle Car Gallery. I went in there expecting not to take any pictures because, as I said, my battery was running down, and muscle cars are standard displays in every car museum. I figured it'd just be more of the same, having been to so many car museums in the last two weeks. And I was right: a bunch of 'Cudas and GTOs, some Mustangs, Camaros, Dodge Coronets souped up and stamped with Super-Bee logos ... yeah, yeah, seen that. I did take a picture of one muscle car, a '68 Mercury Cyclone GT, just because I'd never seen one. Everyone I knew that had that kind of car had the Ford Torino version, which as far as I can see is identical. 

And then there was this:

The Perfect Driveway

I want one of each. Except I want them in black.

I moved on to the next museum, the Franklin Museum. I had never realised, somehow, that Franklins were air-cooled; I just always thought they were funny-looking. They didn't need a big radiator and all the machinery that pushes coolant around the engine. They were a little more expensive to build, consequently more expensive to buy, but they were excellent cars, especially if you lived in the Southwest, where cars tended to overheat. Franklins never overheat where there's air. 

(I'm reminded of my first trip to San Diego on Interstate 8, where the shoulder of the highway is lined with big tubs of water for radiators. And my first trip through Death Valley, in 1999, and all the cautions we heard about going back up to sea level: Watch your guage! Open the windows! Turn off the air conditioner! Pull over!)

So anyway; Franklins were always different looking. Odd. Owners were sensitive to the teasing they got, especially if they had one of the models that tended towards ugly. Dealers complained that the weird-looking styling of the front ends affected sales. They were probably right. But Franklin's head guy refused to abandon his form-follows-function philosophy, until he did, in 1925, when the new Franklins were suddenly adorned with a front end that looked like every other car on the road.

1928 Lincoln convertible sedan

After Franklin, Lincoln. The Lincoln Motor Company was started by Henry Leland, the same guy who started Cadillac more than ten years before. After a rough couple of years, it went belly-up and was bought in a foreclosure sale by Henry Ford. Ford gave it to his boy Edsel to run. The two Henry's had some history together: Henry L had been instrumental in forcing Henry F out of his first car company; now the shoe was on the other foot. It wasn't long before Henry F forced Henry L out of Lincoln. Edsel seemed to have a knack for the luxury car business, and within a decade Lincoln was playing with the Big Boys.

Lincolns had a rep for quality engineering, and Edsel had a good sense of what the luxury-car-buying public wanted. He was responsible for the Lincoln Zephyr, a very successful and stylistically bold line, and then the Continental, which started out elegant, then got even more elegant, then got ... well, maybe not ugly, exactly, but odd; and back and forth in a pattern that seems still ongoing. Of course, Edsel died somewhere in there, so he's only responsible for that first (elegant) Continental. 

At that point in my day, my phone's battery was on its last legs. I did go over to the Model A Museum, because I knew I wouldn't want to take any pictures there ... except I did, and will probably go back with a full battery tomorrow to do that.