Maine Barn Find #1: 1932 Ford Woodie

I'm in NYC on The O'Briens book tour, and kind of busy, but I was impatient to get these images up from last Saturday in Maine. Two "barn finds" in Downeast Maine. Well, they weren't really "finds", because they weren't really lost: but both cars had been sitting in their barns for way too long. The 1932 Ford station wagon belongs to Teke Wiggin: it has been in his family since his grandfather bought it in '32 and started driving it from Lawrenceville NJ to Blue Hill, Maine every summer, a trip that took four days in the Thirties. The woodie lives in Blue Hill now. She hadn't been on the road for a couple of years when Teke asked  local Ford genius Gene Drake, of Bucksport, to come over and see if he could get her started. Gene examined, and fiddled, and scraped points, and in a little while she turned over for the first time in a couple of years, then fired up.

Teke has been scraping and sanding the wooden body down and consulting with my expert friend,  Frank Mariani of Santa Barbara, re. varnishes. That will happen next. Meanwhile we took the "Struggly Buggy" for a spin. It is delightful to get an old family car back on the road.

The next car unearthed was a 1930 Ford Model A Town Sedan that had been living in a Blue Hill barn for thirty years. But I'll save most of that for the next post.
     Re. Book tour: I was interviewed yesterday on the Leonard Lopate show here in New York, and spoke & read from my novel The O'Briens last night at the Center for Fiction. I hit the road in a couple of hours for tonight's event at the Galaxy Bookshop in Hardwick, Vermont. Then on to California. You can track my book events here.