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CommunityClassic Ford owners think this model is A-OK
Collectors in Southern Maryland compare notes about their all-time favorite ride
Friday, July 25, 2008
 Click here to enlarge this photo Staff photos by DARWIN WEIGEL
Members of the Southern Maryland Model-A Club return after a cruise along Southern Maryland roads during the group’s annual picnic earlier this month.
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By PAUL C. LEIBE
Staff writer
About half of the 40 members of the Southern Maryland Model-A Club gathered in Deale earlier this month for the club’s annual summer picnic. Amid steamed crabs, hot dogs and burgers on the grill, they relaxed for an afternoon and talked about their hobby – their cars.
‘You can’t own just one’
In the late 1950s, when Bill Beardmore was a teenager taking vocational-technical classes and majoring in auto mechanics at Bladensburg High School, his dad introduced him to the Model-A Ford, the kind of car his dad had owned decades earlier.
‘‘I thought it was pretty neat,” Beardmore said, recalling how his father had admired the Model-A’s style and simplicity. ‘‘It wasn’t a ’55 Chevy, but I thought it was pretty neat.”
Beardmore, who now lives in Deale and is a member of the Southern Maryland Model-A Club, never forgot that initial exposure to the classic car. Many years later, when he had an opportunity to buy a Model-A, he jumped at the chance.
A friend, he recalled, ‘‘spotted one for sale in Front Royal [Va.] It was a real piece of junk. I didn’t know anything about restoring cars back then, but I knew I had to have it.”
So he bought it, got it back to Maryland and began fixing it up.
Since then, Beardmore has restored between two dozen and three dozen of the highly collectible cars, either for himself or with friends, fellow Model-A lovers he’s met along the way.
Beardmore now has two Model-As.
‘‘You can’t own just one,” he joked. ‘‘You have to have at least two.”
Beardmore owns a tan-and-green 1931 coupe that he restored in 1990 and has driven more than 80,000 miles since putting the car back on the street. His other Model-A is a 1929 two-tone green Fordor that is unique within the circle of collectors with whom he shares his interest.
The ’29, Beardmore said, ‘‘is all original equipment, from one end of the car to the other,” making it highly unusual. ‘‘It looks kind of rough – it’s not restored – and has all its original parts and pieces.” Before the ’29 came into his possession, he said, the two major Model-A clubs in the United States both used that particular car to set their judging standards because it was intact with original equipment.
‘It was just anold rusty shell’
Charlotte Hall’s Don Auman also has two Model-A’s – an all-black ’31 coupe with red wheels that he bought about 18 months ago, and a 1930 that’s registered as a street rod, not a historic vehicle.
The ’31, he said, ‘‘could use a paint job and it needs a little work. But generally I’m very happy with it.”
Auman saw an ad for it in the newspaper, he said, and drove to Breton Bay to take a look at it. ‘‘As soon as I saw it,” he said, ‘‘I knew it was mine. The price was right, and it was in pretty good shape.”
By then Auman was already driving the street rod he and his son built.
‘‘My son found the [street rod’s] body at an auction” in Pennsylvania, he recalled. ‘‘It was just an old rusty shell, really, what most people would call serious junk.”
That was how the project began.
Today, powered by a Chevy 327-cubic-inch engine and equipped with an automatic transmission, Auman’s turquoise street rod has 15-inch wire wheels, a heavily chromed open engine with side exhausts and no fenders.
‘‘It can’t be registered as a historic car,” he said, ‘‘so it has ‘street rod’ tags on it.”
What does he do with his cars?
‘‘Last weekend,” Auman said recently, ‘‘we took the ’31 to church, then took it for a spin, and then stopped and bought some groceries for dinner before going home. Just a nice Sunday outing.”
‘I bought it in pieces’
Master Chief Petty Officer Ron Lique owns several old cars, including a gray 1930 Model-A Ford Tudor that is, he said, ‘‘for the most part, stock. I’ve modernized the engine a little, to make it run better, and I added an overdrive. But it’s pretty much all original.”
Lique, 47, is assigned to the Fleet Readiness Center Mid-Atlantic at Patuxent River Naval Air Station. On most weekends, Lique drives home to Virginia Beach, Va., where he keeps his growing collection of vintage vehicles.
It all began about five years ago, he said, when he bought a 1949 Dodge pickup truck ‘‘that needed some work. And that led to the next thing ... I bought the ’30 Model-A to have something to drive around while I was working on the ’49.”
Lique recently added another Model-A to his growing inventory, but like the still-unfinished ’49, his recently acquired 1930 Model-A pickup is a work in progress.
‘‘I bought it in pieces,” he said. ‘‘I bought the cab for $100 from a man who had it in a field in New Hampshire. I got the frame in Suffolk, Va., and ordered the pickup bed from a catalog.”
The frame, he said, is at his Virginia Beach home right now and he and Beardmore are working on the cab at Beardmore’s Deale home.
‘‘If you know where to look,” Lique said, ‘‘you could probably build a Model-A completely from parts you find” in advertisements and in catalogs.
‘This is not ...a show car’
In September 1965, Town Creek resident Jim Trent paid $500 for a 1931 Model-A coupe. It had a rumble seat and when he bought it showed 80,000 miles on the odometer. Trent towed it home and, for the next several years worked on it in his garage in his spare time.
He still has it.
Between 1965 and 1970, ‘‘I took it down to the frame and fully restored it,” Trent said, ‘‘and then I started painting it” a dark blue with the traditional black fenders.
It wasn’t until ‘‘1971, or maybe 1972,” he said, that he actually drove his Model-A out of his garage for the first time.
‘‘This is what’s called a ‘driver’s car,’” said his wife, Lois, who helped with the restoration. ‘‘This is not what’s called a ‘show car.’ We added seat belts and turn signals” during the restoration, she added, equipment to make their car more user-friendly.
In 1991 their son, Joe Trent, drove the Model-A to Indianapolis – to the ‘‘Brickyard,” the site of the annual Memorial Day weekend Indy 500 – to participate in a national Model-A owners’ meet. With Jim and Lois sitting in the rumble seat, Joe took a lap around the Brickyard’s 2.5-mile oval with hundreds of other Model-A owners. The Trents still display an event sticker in a rear window.
‘‘Joe would take the Model-A on dates,” recalled Jim, ‘‘and occasionally get stuck” when the car broke down. ‘‘I don’t think any of his dates ever complained, though.”
‘‘And I loved having it in the garage when the kids were growing up,” added Lois with a chuckle. ‘‘The rumble seat was where we hid their Christmas presents every year, and they never found them.”
On Jan. 24, 1988, the Southern Maryland Model-A Club held its first meeting. Jim Trent was the group’s first secretary. Today, 20 years later, he still is.
‘It’s good looking,and it’s fun to drive’
It was ‘‘10 or 12 years ago,” said Waldorf resident Wade Coates, that he bought his 1931 Model-A coupe. Although it’s the same year and model as the Trent’s coupe, Coates’ car is different. It was built with a rear trunk instead of a rumble seat.
‘‘I found it sitting in a garage in Baltimore,” Coates recalled. ‘‘It had been there for a long time and was all ate up with rust.
‘‘The coupe is a fancy little car,” he said of his decision to buy it. ‘‘It’s good looking, and it’s fun to drive.”
He brought it home and started working on the restoration. At the time Coates also had a Model-A Tudor, and he used parts from both cars to restore the coupe. Over the next nine months, Coates and several friends did all the restoration work on the ’31 coupe.
‘‘It’s always a group effort,” he said. ‘‘We always pitch in and help each other. That’s one of the reasons for the club, so we can learn from each other and help out when one of us needs a hand with something.”
As work restoring Coates’ coupe moved forward, he sold the Tudor body to someone who wanted to start his own Model-A project.
The coupe ‘‘was too far gone,” he said, when he bought it ‘‘to know what the original color had been.” So he chose to restore it with a bright red paint job, with the traditional black fenders.
‘These are myretirement cars’
Ed Sensebaugh started collecting classic automobiles about 26 years ago, 1950s-vintage cars at first, he said, ‘‘because no one was really collecting those cars at the time.”
Today, the 46-year-old Huntingtown resident owns about two dozen vehicles. Seven of them are Model-A’s and his 1928 Model-A racing car is unique in his collection.
Called a ‘‘boat tail” because the car’s back end resembles a boat’s bow, Sensebaugh’s racer is a hand-built replica. ‘‘There were only about 20 of these cars built,” he explained, ‘‘and because of their unusual shape, sections of them were made out of wood, not metal.”
Over the years, the race cars fell victim to Mother Nature. Eventually all of Ford’s ‘‘boat tails” disappeared from the scene.
But Sensebaugh, a master cabinet maker by trade, was fascinated with its unusual design, and built his own racer.
‘‘Mine’s a copy of Ford’s original design,” he said; there are a few other replica boat tails in the country, but his is the only one of its kind in this area.
Sensebaugh, president of the Southern Maryland Model-A Club, has a degree in automobile restoration from Northern Virginia Community College.
In addition to his cabinet-making work, he also runs an antique car restoration business. On a schedule of about one a year for the past several years, he’ll buy and restore a car to add to his own growing collection.
‘‘These are my retirement cars,” he explained. ‘‘My collection has more than tripled in value in the last few years, and it’s just going to keep getting more valuable. That’s how I plan to retire.”
And for these guys, having a garage filled with classic cars is a lot more fun than having a safe deposit box filled with stocks and bonds.
