A real wood-paneled station wagon

AUGUSTA – Longtime car collectors Dean and Adrienne Hurley were looking for a shoebox Ford convertible, but found something else altogether, half a continent away, after trips to St. Louis and Dallas didn’t pan out.

The cars they saw in those two cities just weren’t quite up to what the Hurleys were looking for. So Dean sat down at their home computer and began exploring the Internet. What he found last year was a shoebox Ford of a different kind – a wood-paneled 1949 Ford Custom 8-passenger station wagon.

“I just kind of liked the looks of it,” said Dean. “It looked like it would be good to tour in.”

And the car, like so many of those the couple have owned over their 63 years of marriage, came with an intriguing story.

It had traveled only about 35,000 miles between the showroom floor and the day it was put into storage nine years later. It would sit, apparently forgotten, for nearly four decades. A tattered 1958 Massachusetts registration sticker on the windshield testifies to the date the car was retired from active service.

Sometime in 1996, the wagon was pulled out and restored. The owner at that time, Daniel Silva, was a sailboat manufacturer and had his crew patch several pieces of the wood framing that secures the paneling to the metal body of the wagon.

The car was also repainted in the original Arabian Green and the wood paneling received a fresh coat or two of varnish.

“I think they put it on with a broom,” observed Dean Hurley. The wagon also got fresh seat covers and some non-original carpeting at that point.

When Hurley found the car for sale online, it was in Maine, where it was jointly owned by Joseph Donnelly Jr. and Howard Tate II. They had bought the wagon in 1998, but only put a couple of thousand miles on it.

Adrienne still had her heart set on a shoebox convertible, but a deal was struck and arrangements made to transport the wagon to Kansas.

“We had a heck of a time getting it here. That’s when they were having all that snow back east and it took about six months to get it here,” said Adrienne.

The 1949 Ford marked a break from the manufacturer’s earlier styling, with a new slab-sided look incorporating the fenders into the body and an eye-catching “bullet” grille up front. Pent-up postwar demand for cars resulted in more than a million new Fords being turned out that year, with 31,412 of them being the two-door “woodie” wagon. The base sticker price was an affordable $2,119.

The previous year’s station wagon had been a four-door model, so the ’49 version featured tilting front and middle row seats for easier access to the rear seating area.

The car is equipped with Ford’s workhorse 100 horsepower flathead V-8 using a 3-speed column-shifted manual transmission. The Hurley’s car also is equipped with a working cowl-mounted spotlight and a metal-covered spare tire mounted to the rear wood-paneled tailgate.

Dean points out that the outside lever-action door handles are unique to this model car and did not come from Ford’s parts bin, but from sister brand, Mercury.

But Adrienne still had her eye on a particular shoebox Ford convertible, a slick cream-colored ’51 owned by a fellow Early Ford V-8 Club member from Tulsa.

“I was drooling over that car,” she recalled. And, naturally, shortly after they got the wagon, the owner of the convertible told them he was finally ready to sell it.

“I told him we had just bought a shoebox,” Dean said. “And I said, `Wait just a darned minute,’” Adrienne interjected.

So now the Hurleys have a pair of shoebox Fords, one for him and one for her.

“Our kids just think the wagon is the most wonderful thing,” Adrienne said.

“It has enough room that our granddaughter’s entire wedding party rode to the reception in it,” Dean noted.

“I’ve been through a lot of old cars in my life. I have brought some dandy stuff home. I’ve kind of got the ones I like now,” he said.

“I like it with the old wood on this one. I’m not going to restore the car, I’m going to drive it like it is,” he said.

This story was originally published November 22, 2014 at 9:18 AM with the headline "A real wood-paneled station wagon."