Second Safari, second time around

Ed Bolain had always remembered fondly the first new car he bought as a young married man, a huge 1958 Pontiac Star Chief Custom Safari station wagon. The car had performed beautifully as he and his wife, Eleanor, raised their two daughters.

“I bought it off the lot … at Byron Stout, for about $3,800 and drove it until the late ’60s. We took the girls to Minnesota to fish, pulled a boat with it. And we took it to Wyoming to go deer hunting,” he said.

So when his brother, Don Bolain, got into the collector car hobby, it planted an idea in older brother Ed’s head.

“I told Donnie if I could find a ’58 Pontiac station wagon, I might want to rebuild one. He’s the one who really got me into this,” Ed said.

His brother located a likely candidate on the Internet, a green ’58 Safari wagon, and sent a trailer down to pick it up and haul it back to Wichita.

“The body was in good shape. There was not a lot of rust at all. Just the left floorboard had been replaced,” Ed Bolain said. “All of the chrome was off the car, just thrown inside it. There were about 110 pieces of chrome on that thing, inside and out, and a lot of stainless steel that needed to be polished out.”

Pontiac built 9,701 copies of the 6-passenger Safari wagon in 1958. It weighed in at an impressive 4,025 pounds, with a basic window sticker price of $3,019. Bolain’s car had been outfitted with an optional chrome roof rack.

With only minimal body work to be done, the car was delivered to Lonny Moore’s Collision Repair, where it was repainted in beautiful two-tone Squadron Blue Metallic and Viking Blue. All of the chrome and stainless trim was either replated or polished to a brilliant shine, including the four horizontal bars across the clamshell tailgate that mark the car as a Safari.

With the help of John and Boone Reichenberger, Bolain lowered the car three inches fore and aft, with the use of new coil springs. The 5-spoke mag wheels that came on the car were retained, with new Hankook P235 /70R15 thinline whitewall tires installed.

The Morgan-Bulleigh upholstery shop took on the job of crafting a beautiful two-tone leather interior for the big wagon. The rear bench seat, when not needed for passengers, can fold forward to provide absolutely cavernous cargo space in back.

Once the wagon was finished, it was ready for a real road trip, a 3,600-mile jaunt to California and back as part of a caravan of vintage cars. Barely a month later, Bolain hit the road for Arkansas to show off his Safari to another brother.

That’s where disaster struck.

“A guy pulled right out in front of me. It got everything from the firewall forward,” Ed Bolain said. Fortunately, no one was hurt in the crash. But the wagon had to be trailered home, where repairing it would become a year-long, $22,000 project.

Replacement fenders and hood were located and Kansas Body Works handled the sheet metal repairs and paint matching.

The most worrisome thing, though, was the fact the massive front grille was damaged and finding one was not going to be easy. Only the Safari wagon and the Bonneville shared the cast metal grille in 1958, with other models using a stamped steel grille, Bolain explained.

Fortunately, through another car collector, he learned of a fan of vintage Pontiacs in Minnesota who might have what he needed.

“I got in touch with him and he said he would have to go look. About a month later, he called me back and said he had found it up in the attic,” said Bolain, who wasted no time buying the grille. When it arrived, he wasn’t disappointed. “It was perfect.”

Bolain figured that while the front of the car was off, it would be the perfect time to rebuild the engine. Tom Whilhite of Derby pulled the 370 cubic inch V-8, bored it and installed new pistons, rods and a bright aluminum Edelbrock intake manifold. While he was at it, he had Kevin Kaiser of American Muffler create one of his fine dual exhaust systems for the big car.

“It seems like it has quite a bit more horsepower than it did before,” Bolain observed. “It would run faster than you wanted to drive it.”

The car still uses the original Hydramatic transmission, but is now equipped with front disc brakes, tilt steering, cruise control and Vintage Air air conditioning.

“It’s back up again now, a much better car than it was before. It drives so much better now than it did when we took it to California,” he said. “We’ve had a lot of fun with the car.”

That being the case, the Safari has at least one more major road trip in its future. When the weather warms up a bit, Bolain and his wife are planning to take the reincarnated wagon to Lincoln, Neb., to tour the Smith Collection Museum of American Speed, before heading on to explore the Black Hills of South Dakota.

This story was originally published November 28, 2014 at 8:23 PM with the headline "Second Safari, second time around."