With the sun gleaming off freshly waxed paint and polished chrome, 262 gearheads officially entered their prized rides to the 25th annual Toledo Cheese Days Car Show on Saturday, July 12, at the Toledo Middle School field during the weekend-long Cheese Days festival.
The car show was organized by the Toledo Lions Club in partnership with its local sponsors. It was first held in 2000 and organized by Steve McNew, Ron Smith and the late Jim Williams.
Proceeds from the car show go to help fund not only next year’s car show and other Cheese Days events, but other Toledo Lions Club events throughout the year and the club’s high school scholarship program.
Other events proceeds go towards include the Jim and Penny Lancaster Fishing Derby, the annual school supply drive and food baskets for families during Thanksgiving and Christmas.
To learn more about the Toledo Lions Club, including how to get involved, visit https://toledolionsclub.org/, or follow the club on its Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/ToledoLionsClub.
And while a plethora of trophies were handed out to attendees, there were a few vehicles which also caught The Chronicle’s eyes during the show including a mint 1983 Toyota Celica GT still with its original owner, a classic slammed 1973 Chevrolet P-10 milk truck, a resto-mod 1935 Ford pick up truck and one of legendary racing drivers Ken Miles and Carroll Shelby’s lesser known projects, a 1966 British Rootes Group Sunbeam Tiger.
Original owner Celica GT
Back in 1983, Tacoma resident Kathy Holt was looking for a new car, but she had safety in mind over speed as she had recently been rear-ended twice.
“I wanted to buy a car with some metal behind it. I did a lot of research for safety and dependability,” Holt said.
On Aug. 4, 1983, she purchased what was actually a showroom model 1983 Toyota Celica GT. While the majority of the sporty, compact Japanese coupes came with a standard transmission, showroom models came with automatic transmissions.
However, Holt didn’t choose this particular Celica for the transmission, but for the color. She wanted a blue one, but the dealership she was at didn’t have one in that color.
The car salesman stepped out of the office to talk with his manager, and Holt overheard the manager saying, “Just sell her the yellow one.”
“I’m just sitting there going, ‘Do you really think I’m that stupid,’” Holt said. “Plus, I worked in two car dealerships before I went in there, so I knew the game. I said, ‘No, a blue one.’”
Eventually, the dealer found a blue one, a showroom model, in another dealership several hundred miles away. Not only was she able to get a blue one, but she also got the dealer to have the warranty start at 374 miles as the car was driven over.
“He wasn’t happy with me,” she added.
Though it does have an automatic transmission, it is still the GT version of the car with the largest engine Toyota fitted to the cars as an option at the time — the 22R, a 2.4 liter inline-4 motor capable of producing 105 horsepower.
While that may not sound like a lot by modern standards, in a compact coupe that barely weighs 2,000 pounds, it’s more than enough power for Holt.
“I have to be careful with my speed on the freeway, because you don’t know, you don’t really feel it,” she added.
Holt used the car as a daily driver for 25 years, and though it’s been retired from daily driving, she still takes care of it with annual tuneups and has the car’s maintenance and detailing done by Bill Duncan.
“He does museum-quality work, he built his first engine at 10 years old,” Holt said.
A ‘Sub Standard Dairy” truck
Owned by Castler Rock residents Mike and Romy Spooner, their “Sub Standard Dairy” 1973 Chevrolet P-10 milk truck was originally a rusty restoration project.
“There was more rust in that, when we brought it home, than there is in Longbeach, Washington” Mike said.
With the motor restored, the Spooners also put it on a pneumatic suspension system, letting them turn the milk truck into a low-rider as well.
“We keep cutting it out here, stretching it out there, it’s kind of our low-budget project now,” Mike said. “It’s fun to play with. You can take it uptown to go grocery shopping, and if the neighbor’s cart gets away and runs into it, I’d rather that didn’t happen, but it’s not a big deal.”
As for the name, Sub Standard Dairy, it’s a play on the original Standard Dairy in Longview and Kelso.
“We all grew up in Longview and Kelso with Standard Dairy delivering milk to our front porch. Us kids had to pull the milk out of the box before it got too hot and put it in the fridge for mom,” Romy said. “I wanted to put something on the side of the van, and my brother said, ‘It wouldn’t be Standard Dairy, it would be Sub Standard Dairy.’”
“Since it’s lowered, it’s ‘sub,’” Mike added.
While they do have other classic restored cars, the Sub Standard Truck is the one they love the most as it is the one they have to worry about the least when taking it out for a spin.
“We saw this and said, ‘Let’s have some fun with it,’ and that’s what it is, fun. You can drive it around town, people laugh at it and give you the thumbs up,” said Romy.
A visiting resto-mod from Arizona
While he normally lives in Casa Grande, Arizona, Chuck Rucker Jr. was visiting his brother-in-law in Vader, and decided to bring along his resto-mod 1935 Ford pick up truck.
Aside from making the truck a chop top, removing three inches from the roof, he also fitted the motor, transmission and suspension from a 1986 Ford Ranger.
“But you’re still in the cab of an old truck,” Rocker said.
Living in Arizona, he decided to theme the truck after the legendary Old West town of Tombstone, complete with “Tombstone Undertakers” vinyls and a custom mini-coffin he crafted to put in the truckbed, complete with a “dead ringer” bell. Prior to the Industrial Revolution in the 1800s, embalming was not a common practice — leading to some poor souls being incorrectly declared dead and buried alive.
“In London, they dug up a lot of graves and there were scratch marks on the coffin lids, what a horrible way to go,” Rucker said.
As a precaution, many coffins of the era had bells attached to long rods placed on the coffin lid, with a string connected to the bell and fed through a hole in the coffin, then tied to the deceased’s finger.
The idea was, if the person wasn’t actually dead and woke up, they would be able to ring the bell, alerting those tending to the graveyard that it wasn’t actually their time.
A rare tiger
While Carroll Shelby and Ken Miles are best known for both their skills on the racetrack and the design and testing they carried out developing the 1966 24 Hours of Le Mans winning Ford GT Mk II and the iconic Shelby AC Cobra coupes, AC Cars wasn’t the only British car manufacturer Shelby and Miles worked for during that era.
In England, the British Rootes Group had been producing the Sunbeam Alpine, a two-door sport coupe with at most, a modest 1.7 liter inline-four motor producing just over 90 horsepower.
But from 1964 to 1967, 7,128 of them were produced with just a tad more power as Rootes Group Sunbeam Tigers, featuring a 4.7 liter Ford V8 motor making 164 horsepower.
One of those just over 7,000 Sunbeam Tigers now belongs to Ocean Park residents Richard Willis and his wife, Renee Newstrum.
“The fellow (Ian Garrad) that was the (U.S.) west coast manager for Rootes, when Carroll Shelby made the Cobra, this guy was in LA and knew him, and he drove a Cobra, and he said, ‘Gee, I think we can do that to an Alpine,’” Willis said.
The Cobra originally started off life as another woefully underpowered British sports coupe known as the AC Ace 3.6 from the English auto manufacturer, AC Cars.
So Shelby, along with Miles, got to work tuning up the Alpine the same way they did with the Ace.
“Ken Miles was an incredible engineer too. They took an Alpine, gave it to Ken, and he put a Ford motor in it. And that was how it was originally made. Once they got it all together and worked out some bugs, they flew it to Europe,” Willis said.
There in Europe, the newly modified Alpine was shown to Lord William Edward Rootes, then-CEO of the Rootes Group.
“He was having a big birthday party at his castle, and they presented it to him there. He took it out and drove it around the castle grounds and he said, ‘This is neat, we gotta build it,’” Willis said.
With that, production began in 1964. Unfortunately in 1967, the Rootes Group was sold to the Chrysler Corporation, which at the time was in a tight competition with rival U.S. automotive giants General Motors and Ford.
“Chrysler didn’t want to sell a car with a Ford motor in it. They tried to put their small block V8 in it, and it wouldn’t fit, and that was the end of it,” Willis added.
As for how they ended up with their 1966 Sunbeam Tiger, it was actually Newstrum’s choice.
“It’s actually my wife’s car, it was her choice 25 years ago over a new Mustang GT convertible,” Willis said. “It was her daily driver for probably 15 years in San Diego County (California), but then she needed something she could lock up because she was carrying expensive products for work, so it kind of got retired.”
