Got Fender Jewels?

Lanny and his Stude, with his brother Chuck and his Fairlane... at a car show last fall.
Chuck's car won an award! We enjoyed the day outside spent with people we love.

 It's not about doing the things you love, it's about doing things with the one you love. 

          ~Unknown

Yesterday, my husband and I took a day-long road trip up to Southbend, Indiana. As a Studebaker car enthusiast and collector, my husband wanted to attend a Studebaker Driver's Club regional swap meet.

When Lanny and I met, I had no knowledge of Studebakers, and really little interest in it. I remembered the cars as inexpensive, rather boring automobiles from the distant past. Lanny began to educate me, and his enthusiasm for the cars was catching. Next thing I knew, I'd married him and the pile of old car parts in the garage was off to be reassembled into something driveable.

It took a lot of headaches and 6 years, including an almost disastrous first restorer, who botched the restoration and who we had to threaten with legal action before we got the car back. The second restorer was a gem-- a wonderful guy who loved the car almost as much as Lanny did, and who took his time and "did it right". What he sent back to us was a completely restored 1963 Studebaker Lark, with a powerful, supercharged engine in it. Lanny was awestruck... and I have learned to love it too.

What I love is spending time in the car with him, when he is relaxed and happy. Whether just cruising around or sitting at a car show, we have so much fun together with this car!

So much fun that last year we bought another one... this time it was me who fell for the car first. We bought an unrestored 1950 Champion convertible-- the one famous for the bullet nose. (Think: Muppet car!) I named her Ruby. She is 2 years older than me and while she also has a few scratches in her paint and a bit of a sag in her bumper, I think she is lovely. 

Here is Ruby, getting ready to participate in the Veterans' Day Parade last November.

So this spring, after tinkering on both cars all winter, we headed up to Southbend to the swap meet. It's about a 2 hour drive through a lot of flat Indiana farm country. I can knit while Lanny drives. We listen to music and talk. Yesterday we could open the windows and I could sing along to the radio... we had fun. 

The swap meet is huge in Southbend. That is where Studebakers were originally made, and it is where a lot of them still live. Their owners tinker with them as much as Lanny does, and so are constantly looking for parts. We were looking for a very small piece of plastic trim on the chrome decorations on Ruby's front fenders (called fender spears...) Our fender spears had missing "jewels"... 

Behold the fender spears... one with and one without a "jewel". 

We looked at the cars on display. We dug through boxes of car parts. We ran into other Indy area Studebaker enthusiasts. We shopped. We bargained. We came home with an old Stude pickup truck's tailgate (to be repurposed as a fold down shelf  out in Lanny's shop...) but we learned fender spear jewels were not available anywhere in Southbend. After we got home, Lanny looked up "the guy" we'd been told had them and ordered them. 

As I think about it, the whole purpose of the day was to get those fender jewels and we could have gotten them by making a simple phone call. But what would we have missed?  We had fun together doing something I never in my life imagined I'd ever do... with someone I have come appreciate in so many new ways... the breadth of Lanny's knowledge of old cars, his patience in looking and finding just the right thing, his ability to explain car stuff to me so I understand it, his love of traveling together too -- all of that helped give us a great day.