If you go to the Cruisin’ Classics Show and Shine on Father’s Day, look for two rare 1920-era beauties, likely made a stone’s throw from each other a year apart at the Hudson Motor Car factory in Detroit.
One of them is a six-window 1928 Essex sedan, which rides on thin wooden spoked wheels.
Marius St. Pierre bought it three years ago in Smithers from Brian Lundy. Right down to the dials on the dashboard, the hinged windshield and the shutter-style radiator grill, Lundy spent 20 years trying to make it look much like it when it left the factory floor 95 years ago.
Powered by a 1,400 cubic-centimetre (85 cubic-inch) Toyota Carina motor, it’s not built for speed. But with its immaculate interior, four suicide-style doors and eye-catching paint job it’s a definite head-turner. And there’s no mistaking what year it was made. His personal licence plate reads, ‘ITSA 28.’
“I’m the car’s caretaker,” said St. Pierre, a retired sawmill worker.
“I put 500 miles every year on it. It’s not a picture you hang on the wall, you drive the damn thing.”
Hudson’s Essex division produced smaller, more affordable cars, and back then you could buy a brand-new sedan for $795.
Hudson’s performance engines in 1929 went beyond power capabilities of their rivals at the time in the late-20s and early-30s and were known as Super Sixes, an F-head straight six cylinder 288 cubic-inch motor that put out 92 horsepower.
Gangsters and bootleggers favoured the Hudson because it had a top speed of 70 or 80 miles per hour and could cruise comfortably at 52 mph, faster than most police cars.
Loren Allen‘s street-rodded 1929 Hudson two-door coupe is much faster than that. It’s built more like a drag-strip demon, powered by a 351-cubic-inch Windsor engine capable of delivering 470 hp.
“It’s only 2,000-pound car, it goes,” said Allen. “This is a fast car.”
It took seven years for him to build his car, which he calls Reaper. Allen didn’t do the engine work or the interior and the frame was engineered, but the body work is all his.
“Marius and I try to park together,” said Allen. “The years are so close. His is to a ‘T’ immaculate, he’s got so much original stuff. But I didn’t have running boards and that stuff and in order to make this thing, I just rodded it out, and it’s still fun and cool.”
He knows he loses to St. Pierre’s Essex when it comes to fuel economy.
“I started mine in the driveway and I probably used as much fuel in the driveway as he used all the way here,” said Allen, who owns Thunder-N-Chrome body shop in the Hart, where he does custom painting/airbrushing work and hydrographic designing on cars and motorcycles.
“I don’t race this car. I figured it took seven years to build it and 30 seconds to kill it, and if you’re showing off, nothing good ever comes of that.”
The Show and Shine at Lheidli T’enneh Memorial Park goes Sunday from 10 a.m.-3 p.m., preceded Friday afternoon by the Cruisin’ Classics senior home tour, which leaves downtown at 12:15 p.m.
