In 1934, Elmar Rains and his family decided to move back to Missouri after living in California for a few years. They came home in a Model T Ford touring car, the same one they drove out west a few years earlier.
In about 1936, he traded his venerable Model T for a 1933 Chevrolet sedan. Rains didn’t drive the Chevy much because it was so different from the Model T, but the rest of the family used the car until 1946 when it went into a barn. There it sat for 20 more years.
When Rains died in 1967, his grandson, Dan, decided to rescue the old Chevy. Dan now lives in Independence. His father, Francis, and mother, Pearl, recently celebrated their 68th wedding anniversary.
“I remember that I thought it was a neat old car when I was a kid,” he said. “It always had a lot of junk piled on it.”
Dan said he hauled the car home in 1968, and it sat for an additional 20 years or so.
What am I doing?” he asked himself in 1995. “I want to drive that car,” so he got serious about restoring it.
The car was completely dismantled and all of the original wood support structure was replaced with steel. The new steel structure is almost like a roll cage and it made the body tight and solid in a way it would never be with wood.
Dan turned to Tony Vargas, a neighbor, and Precision Restoration (before it closed) to execute the project. A Corvette engine, a GM automatic transmission, a Mustang II front suspension and a Ford rear axle completed the modern driveline.
The cabin got new seats, leather upholstery and modern conveniences such as air conditioning, power steering and a stereo system. The outside was sprayed with gorgeous silver metallic paint accented with bits of dark gray.
The whole project took nearly 10 years to complete, but the result is stunning.
The Chevy will soon be joined by another car from Dan’s family, a 1962 Ford Galaxie 500 that was owned by his mother’s father. For Dan and his wife, Sharon, keeping cars in the family just seems to be the thing to do.
