Charlie Brown gets his gasser

You couldn’t blame Charlie Brown if he was a little sensitive about his name. After all, there’s that “round-headed kid” in the comics who is always being put down by Lucy. And there was that Coasters song in the late 1950s with the lyrics, “He’s a clown, that Charlie Brown.”

But Brown not only isn’t bothered by his name, he has had Charlie Brown the cartoon character painted on the side of his 1941 Willys coupe. He grew up learning to build engines from the late Bob Cassil and always wanted to own a ’60s vintage “gasser” of his own.

“Bob was very strict, very competent … the master of detail. He was like a big brother to me. I decorate his grave every year,” Brown said.

He quickly discovered that finding a real, all-steel ’40s Willys coupe was no easy undertaking.

“My good friend, Morris Bitler called me one day and said, ‘Are you still looking for a Willys?’ He said he had found one, in pieces, in a guy’s yard in Manhattan and it was for sale,” Brown recalled.

He and his wife, Kay, took a trailer and a wallet full of money to Manhattan and discovered the car was essentially all there. Expecting to pay several thousand dollars for the project, he was stunned when the owner sold it to him for $75.

“I told my wife, ‘Let’s get it loaded and haul it out of here.’ We didn’t stop to tape the doors shut until we got to Strong City,” he chuckled. This was in either 1969 or 1970, he said.

The Willys coupe was a favorite choice for drag racers of that era, and this car had been in the process of being converted to a straight line racer. It was, however, missing a deck lid. Brown did not want to put any fiberglass replacement parts on it.

“I wanted to keep the car period, in the ’60s, a true gasser,” he said. “Vern Holzman found a deck lid for me at Ark City.” He was able to track down a factory stock instrument panel for the car from a 15-year-old kid in Hutchinson, buying it for $15.

At one point, he had to wade out to a small island in the middle of a pond to retrieve the correct axle for the Willys.

“It took me 10 years to find all the parts for the car,” Brown said. The car remains all steel and even has the original Willys heater under the dash and the correct rear bumper and hood trim with the model name “Americar” emblazoned in them.

His plan was to install a 1960 Corvette engine that he had built, a 283 bored out to 292 cubic inches by Darrel Palmer. It is mated to a Neal Chance-built Powerglide transmission in the car. A 9-inch Ford rear end fitted with 3.73 gears is the final link in the drive train.

He installed a hard-to-find GMC 4-71 supercharger and a Holley 750 cfm carburetor on the engine, all sized to the small block Chevy’s breathing requirements. Duane Saum balanced the rods, which are connected to a Bill Reynolds Dyna-Rev chrome crankshaft.

“As the car progressed, the radiator was a concern,” Brown said. His neighbor, the late Donnie Berger, came to his rescue.

“He had a Rolls Royce six-core radiator and he said, ‘If you want it, you can have it.’ It fit in the Willys like it was made for it,” Brown said. Since the car was built for the street, not the strip, keeping it cool was especially important and the Rolls Royce radiator handles the issue in style.

Brown installed a set of Street & Performance headers on the car, built his own exhaust pipes and used a set of Smithy steel-pack mufflers under the car. Another friend, Jim Troyer, gave him a vintage Joe Hunt magneto, which he sent in to the manufacturer and had rebuilt for the sum of $12. He also managed to find a period-correct set of original Halibrand racing wheels for the Willys, which now wear radial street tires.

“I think through the years, so many opportunities were lost when guys didn’t build cars during their younger days. Now the parts are no longer available and you can’t afford the reproduction parts at the prices they charge today,” Brown said.

Brown credits Art Carlton of Innovators West with being “the man behind the car,” creating the “Brown Brothers” valve covers, air cleaner and many of the other parts necessary to replicate a 1960s gasser.

When it was time for paint work, Brown went to Dan Royston, who mixed a custom batch of rose-colored lacquer for the body. The paint has survived in amazing condition for more than a quarter century.

“The one thing that eluded me all my life was a person who could letter the car like the gassers in California in the 1960s,” Brown said. Recently, another friend, Bill Graham, recommended Brady Scott of Hutchinson, who took on the task of lettering and adding graphics to the package.

“I wanted ‘Brown Brothers’ (in tribute to a C/GS gasser team from Arizona) and I wanted Charlie Brown holding an atom on the door,” Brown said. He also had a Kansas tornado painted alongside all the equipment suppliers and the characters from “The Wizard of Oz” painted on each side of the hood.

Inside the car, Eddie Clark of Newton rebuilt a stock Willys bench seat and upholstered it and the door panels in gray velour. A VDO speedometer and accessory gauges, along with a Sun Super Tach, provide instrumentation.

Although the car will probably never see time on a drag strip, Brown says it is plenty fast.

“It’s like a rocket sled from hell,” he said.

But it’s the old guys, the Gray Hairs as he calls them, who really get what this car is all about when he and his buddies Kenny Barnett and Mike Weber roll into a car show and unload the Willys.

“You’ll see them walk by and look at it and when no one’s looking, a guy will tap it and go, ‘Yeah, it’s steel.’

“It isn’t the cars we build, it’s the friends we make,” Brown said.

This story was originally published February 6, 2015 at 3:36 PM with the headline "Charlie Brown gets his gasser."