Buck the Magic Truck

They say there’s no rest for the wicked, and if that’s true, I must be pretty bad.

I took advantage of the long holiday weekend over Memorial Day to get my family’s ’55 Cadillac Series 62 coupe ready for the Classic Car Club of America’s Grand Experience on June 3. This event at the Classic Car Museum/Gilmore Car Museum in Hickory Corners, Mich., was for Classic-era cars (V-12 Packard, Cord, Duesenberg, Marmon, Cadillac, and others) manufactured during the “Classic Era.”

At this year’s Grand Experience event, the CCCA featured Cadillacs, so the club welcomed all Cadillacs built through 1970. So, the old yellow Caddy stretched its 133,000-mile legs to make the trek across the Lake Michigan ferry for the show. It was quite an adventure, but you'll have to read about that in Old Cars Weekly!

Since my family’s 1955 Cadillac is unrestored, I’ve put a lot of elbow grease into the original paint to get it to shine. Since the deadline for the show is looming, I spent the weekend touching up the paint chips, polishing the paint, and then applying a second coat of wax. If you drive big cars and take proper care of their paint, then you don’t look forward to waxing them, either. In the end, I applied two coats of wax. My elbow is out of grease, but the car looks great.

As if waxing a Cadillac twice in one day wasn’t enough, Keith Mathiowetz and I went to work preparing Buck, the Old Cars Weekly1954 Chevrolet panel truck, for the Tulsarama event in mid June. Buck hasn’t been very well taken care of lately, but Keith and I made up for it by washing it, waxing it and cleaning out the interior. Keith even touched up the paint so Buck looks its best during the Tulsarama festivities.

Waxing the ‘55 Cadillac took a while, but waxing the sides of Buck truly felt like waxing the planks on an old barn. The paint was dry, and there was almost as much surface to wax on buck as there is on a barn. Regardless, Buck is looking pretty for a heavy-duty truck with more than 200,000 miles since its rebuild!

If you’re at Tulsarama or Back to the 50’s, be sure to keep your eyes peeled for the freshly waxed “Buck the magic truck!”