I Drove 2,000 Miles And Battled Southern Heat, Giant Spiders, And Time To Rescue A 76-Year-Old Car I’ve Never Seen Before

This weekend, I did something that was a bit crazy even for me. After years of futzing around with modern German cars I bought my first American classic. But I didn’t just buy any old car. I decided to rescue a 1948 Plymouth Special Deluxe owned by a retired motorcycle cop and post-war Plymouth subject matter expert. I drove a 2,000-mile round trip, braving giant spiders, southern heat, irritating plants, and time to buy a car I hadn’t even seen with my own eyes.

Back at the end of April, resident rescuer of the unloved, Stephen Walter Gossin, dropped a goldmine into the Autopian‘s Slack channel. Located in the literal middle of nowhere in North Carolina is a cute wheelchair-accessible house for sale. A reader just trying to help the property get sold found a secret “cove” filled with several post-World War II Plymouths and DeSotos slowly being taken over by nature. The collection was astonishing and included everything from unobtainable vintage car radios to vintage Mopar parts you probably won’t find anywhere else.

I was crazy enough to decide to bring one of them home!

From A Plymouth Legend

All of these vehicles were once the passion of one man: Willie Shaw. For decades and even into today, Willie has been obsessed with everything about the Plymouth and DeSoto P15. These cars were the first products built by Plymouth after World War II and featured a mix of pre-war bodies and updated technology. The P15 was made for just a short span of time from 1946 through 1948, yet these cars have a strong following. Perhaps the biggest P15 fan out there is Willie, and if you’re willing to sit down with him, he can tell you about every nut, bolt, and intricate detail about these cars. Willie is like a living Haynes Manual, but better.

Willie wasn’t just an expert in P15s, but an expert with his photos and cars published in multiple magazines from oh-so-long ago. It sounds like if you needed to know something about a P15, Willie was your man. Willie was also an avid collector of P15 cars. He told me that his yard used to have around two dozen of them in it. The amazing part is that you’d never tell. Willie cleverly stashed his cars into an alcove carved out in a small forest. If you viewed his house from the street it just looks like any other property.

Check out the entrance to the cove. See what I mean?

Like any serial collector of a single model, Willie collected cars with stories to tell, and each with their own purpose. Some of his vehicles were crown jewels of the fleet while others gave up their parts. My 1948 Plymouth Special Deluxe was a car Willie regularly drove between New York City and North Carolina with a motorcycle in tow. He loved this Special Deluxe, especially for its real and shiny twin exhaust system. Willie then added white wall tires to give the shining black paint a little extra pop.

Sadly, no mortal can escape the ravages of time and eventually, Willie lost the ability to keep up with his expansive fleet. Now, well into his 90s, he’s become wheelchair-bound. Willie’s house has a wheelchair ramp, but his chair’s not really equipped to get back there. Sadly, there’s no way he’s getting to those cars on his own.

So, his cars have been sitting for years. Willie says most of the cars that were operational were parked 5 to 7 years or so ago. The cars weren’t broken when they were parked, but Willie wasn’t able to keep up with them. Willie told me that he drove my Plymouth into the spot it was parked in about five years ago. He last tried starting it three years ago and wasn’t successful.

So, you’re looking at about five years of decay here. That may sound weird because the car looks like it’s been buried in the woods for decades, but North Carolina’s environment is something else. As Stephen tells me, plant life out there grows quickly and cars parked under trees are quickly taken over by nature. Then there’s the sun, which absolutely bakes paint. I saw late-model cars out there with paint fade, so I cannot imagine what the sun does to these old beauts. Stephen protects his cars with UV-blocking covers. Actually, I don’t need to imagine what happens to old cars since the evidence was all there on Willie’s property.

Before I continue, Willie’s story also isn’t one of just being an expert in a specific car. Life is a wonderful thing and he has plenty of tales to tell of being a Black motorcycle cop in New York City in the 1970s. He’s seen things, he’s done things, and from the sounds of the stories, he was a thoroughly cool guy while doing all of it. I mean, this is swagger right here:

Unfortunately, time is something that gets to all of us and Willie believes it’s time to pass his beloved fleet on. So, basically everything in his car cove is for sale. A man from Mexico scooped up about half of the cars already, so Stephen and I were picking up the best of what was left. Stephen got a Citroen 2CV, which you’ll almost certainly read about later.

I Am Bad With Time

I’ve had since April to prepare for this trip and I thought I planned it out pretty well. But, it turns out I am pretty consistent with being bad with time.

The original plan called for me to drive down on a Saturday, rescue the car, and drive back on Sunday. However, going to EAA AirVenture Oshkosh 2024 last week opened up the idea that I could drive down on a Friday and spend more time in North Carolina instead of doing a turn-and-burn. My new plan was to leave AirVenture on Friday, drive down to North Carolina that same day, hang out with Stephen Walter Gossin on Saturday, then rescue the Plymouth before driving home on Sunday. As I noted in my previous entry on this car, I expected a 13-hour drive from Garner, North Carolina back home to northern Illinois.

Well, the first problem with my plan was the fact that the car was not located in Garner, but Garland. This is important because it added an hour of travel time that I did not account for. I should have seen that coming. Stephen told me this house was in the middle of nowhere, but Garner is a real city, so I wasn’t making the connection. Well, duh, I had the entirely wrong location!

I’m sure you see the second problem. While I added a day to the itinerary, I didn’t add time to the car rescue itself. I never considered that rescuing a car could take several hours, then I would need to drive another 14 hours on top of that. There are only so many hours in a day, so I’m just asking for trouble.

Thankfully, starting my drive on Friday was still a smart move. It took most of Friday to dump my family’s camper’s tanks, leave AirVenture, drop off the trailer, and pick up the U-Haul Auto Transport. I didn’t start heading toward North Carolina until 4 pm on Friday. I ran out of energy somewhere in West Virginia, some 5.5 hours from Stephen’s place. But that was fine since I gave myself extra time to get there.

I should have given myself extra time for the rescue, too.

The Rescue

I reached Wilmington, North Carolina in the early afternoon hours of Saturday.

The 2024 Ford F-250 Super Duty Lariat I drove down proved to be a great road trip warrior. The 6.7-liter Power Stroke diesel V8 scored an easy 18 mpg while hauling the 2,200-pound U-Haul car hauler and I was delighted in the fact that the truck was so comfortable that I had limited fatigue. You’ll read more about this truck later, but I’m not sure there was a more perfect vehicle for this trip. I was certainly making this truck earn its keep from AirVenture to picking up the Plymouth, and the truck rocked in nearly every single moment.

Anyway, Stephen showed me around his fleet, his house, and Wilmington before we picked up his mom and spent an hour soaking in the sun and the waves at Carolina Beach. Stephen wanted to teach me how to surf but the current was so wicked strong that it was a bad idea. Stephen pointed out how Wilmington is shaped a bit like an ice cream cone and the beach we were at was near the bottom of it. If you got swept away by the current there’s nothing but open ocean past the bottom of the cone. Still, I had a blast taking my first dip in the Atlantic in at least a decade.

We then finished the night with dinner at a fancy Italian restaurant before I got the chance to drive his sweet Nissan Titan. I also got to meet his wonderful girlfriend and experience the thrill of a $200 Dodge Stratus. Sadly, we couldn’t spend too much time having fun because Sunday was a big day.

The car rescues stressed us out even before Sunday. Stephen needed a tow dolly or an auto transport but found that nearly every U-Haul Neighborhood Dealer was closed on Sunday or just didn’t have the equipment he needed. We found one place — a bizarre business where you can rent a tiny house, buy a Hyundai, rent a storage unit, or rent a U-Haul all on the same property — that had an auto transport, but it was unclear whether the business would be open. Google said no, but U-Haul said yes. Ultimately, we performed a recon and the door of the business confirmed that Google was wrong.

Things happened quickly on Sunday with us picking up reader Anthony Raynor (who goes by turbotictac on our site) around 8:30 am and the trailer around 9. Then we drove an hour to Garland, which I feel like I need to elaborate again was really in the middle of nowhere. I’m talking so rural that the roads don’t have any clear names. This is so rural that people have satellite TV and Internet.

Upon arriving at the property we talked with Willie and his wife, Stella. That’s when we found out that the Plymouth I came down to buy didn’t have a real title. Willie had a photocopy of the previous owner’s title and a photocopy of the bill of sale from the last owner, but nothing in his name. This was a bit of a shocker as I decided to do this 2,000-mile trip on the idea that the car had ignition sticks and a title. Unfortunately, photocopies of previous documents are useless in the state of Illinois. Sadly, the death of the Vermont “loophole” means no title situations suck.

Thankfully, I’m working with Stella to get a real title so I’m not too worried about this. The car is titled in Willie’s name, they just don’t know where the title went.

Stephen and I then descended into the cove with two readers in tow. Our mission was to free both a Citroen 2CV and my Plymouth, but also to clear space so one reader could retrieve a DeSoto and other people could possibly save other vehicles.

This sounds easier than it actually was. Stephen attacked bushes and small trees with a chainsaw while I picked up a leaf blower and used it to clear debris. These cars may have been sitting for just a few years, but they had built up of all kinds of detritus on them and had additional horrors inside. My Plymouth was full of giant spiders and what appeared to be former homes of wasps. I didn’t want to deal with any of that, so I opened all four doors and just blew out the cobwebs and everything else.

There was also just figuring out all of the bits and pieces. Willie had dozens of keys, but they all looked the same and Willie couldn’t tell you what they belonged to. It was a similar deal with the titles that were on hand. All of these cars were P15s, so the only true way to match cars to titles was to clear out the flora blocking entry to the vehicles and matching their serial numbers to the titles.

The keys were just trial and error. I found three keys that worked with my car. The ignition has its own key, as do the doors and the trunk. Are my three keys the keys that actually belong to my car? I have no idea, but they do work, so I’m not complaining.

As for the car itself, it was both in better and worse shape than expected. The underbody is remarkably clean. I’m talking it’s cleaner under there than just about any ten-year-old car from the Midwest. The rear axle doesn’t have a speck of rust on it and the frame only has the smallest beginnings of surface rust. The worst of the underbody corrosion is on the control arms.

While we were looking under there, we noticed Willie had installed new-ish shocks to the vehicle, too. Clearly, he did some repairs and maintenance before storing the vehicle. The car even wears new Coker tires – at least they were new when they were installed right before the car was parked.

On the other hand, I found more rust than I expected on the door sills. Thankfully, most of this rust is covering removable metal door sill pads. I removed the pads and found the metal underneath – the real car body – to be largely clean. There’s still some rust, but almost all of it is of the surface flavor. The only bad spot is near the front passenger door, where a bad window seal has left the floor drenched for years. But even then, it’s nothing like the rust classics get up here. There is some real rust in the trunk, where failed seals joined forces with carpet to help trap rainwater back there for five years or so. But again, the rust is scaly back here, but there’s no rust through and the underside of the trunk still shows paint.

From what I can tell, the car was likely mostly rust-free when it was parked. However, basically every seal is crumbling from the southern sun, so water is getting in through the doors, windows, and trunk. That water then sat under carpet and under the sill pads and rust started doing its thing. Thankfully, it’s not bad! I pulled up the carpet and was surprised to find the floorboards to be nearly perfect. It’s solid throughout with only some surface rust in areas where the carpet has been wet for a while.

I paid just $1,000 for this car and even factoring in the cost of diesel and the trailer rental I doubt I’d find a 1940s car this complete and this clean in Illinois for near that price. The condition is further illustrated in the engine bay, where one of our readers found that bolts in there just slipped right off without a fight. You won’t find that in the Midwest!

The drivetrain’s condition is also remarkable. The engine turned over by hand and it appears that all cylinders have good compression. One cylinder appears to have a small ring of rust in it, and I reckon that cylinder had a valve open this whole time. With Anthony ‘s help, we popped out the spark plugs, added some Marvel Mystery Oil to the cylinders, and began lubing up every joint we could find.

We were delighted to find out that so much of the vehicle was intact. The throttle pedal and its linkages work as they should, the wires and the vehicle’s ignition system looked to be in good shape, and nothing was really stuck. We found coolant seepage at the water pump and radiator, but those were the biggest problems we found. The jugs of coolant and water in the trunk suggest that the car might have even been leaking when Willie last drove it over five years ago.

Another problem came when it was time to winch the car onto the trailer. See, this car likely has something called a Fluid Drive, and back then it was Chrysler’s weird hydraulic coupler which replaces a flywheel. There are three gears on a column, but with a fluid coupling attached to the manual transmission, acting like how a torque converter would today. Fluid Drive was also slapped onto a “semi-automatic” transmission, which was really just a transmission with a high and low gear but still had a clutch pedal. You still need to clutch to shift gears in either case, but the Fluid Drive prevents stalling when shifting or when stopping. It’s weird and I’m definitely going to show you its weirdness once the car is running.

The immediate problem at hand was that we had no idea how to operate the transmission, Fluid Drive or not. So, the car was locked into a gear, which Stephen’s 2,500-pound winch wasn’t happy about. Worse was how the car sank a bit into the mud. So the winch had to work against both a mud hole and the transmission.

Thankfully, we are a crafty bunch. We got the car out of the hole by employing a giant block of wood and a floor jack to physically lift the car out of its resting place. As for the transmission, it doesn’t seem to have a familiar shift pattern, so what we thought was neutral (the shifter in the middle) was not. Instead, I had to put the shifter in the middle and then pull back to put it into neutral. I discovered that by accident and as David would say, it came in “clutch.”

Sure enough, all of these shenanigans took hours of work under the 90-plus-degree temperatures and super-high humidity of the south. Stephen and our readers were used to it, but I felt like I was trying to breathe through soup. And this soup was flavored like spiderwebs and mildew. We were mostly successful, too. Sadly, we couldn’t find the keys to the DeSoto the reader wanted to buy. I also didn’t have the time to go through the treasure trove of parts.

The Way Back

I finally hit the road around 3:30 in the afternoon. Google said I had a 14-hour drive ahead of me, which meant an arrival at 4:30 in the morning after accounting for the time change.

This is where I screwed up. I have to do that long drive, clean the car, return the trailer, clean the truck, and then work the rest of the day. Somehow, I just never factored in the “rescue” part of the car rescue into my timetables.

Thankfully, the F-250 had long legs. It got about 15 mpg with the Plymouth in tow and the 34-gallon tank meant 510 miles of range. Sure enough, the truck made it home on just two tanks of diesel. I was on track to beating Google’s estimated time of arrival by an hour, but then the truck asked for a drink of DEF. Somehow, four of the truck stops I visited either didn’t have DEF or the pumps were broken, so that was fun. Despite those delays, I still arrived on time.

I’ve never purchased a car that didn’t run before, but I figured I could let gravity do the unloading for me. I parked the trailer on a slight downward slope, maxed out the jack and then did a little bit of a test. See, we had no idea if the parking brake worked, if the clutch grabbed hard, or if the regular brakes worked.

I put the car into what I thought was a gear then set the parking brake. Then, I released straps holding the Plymouth to the U-Haul trailer. I was relieved when the car didn’t try rolling down the trailer. I left the emergency chain connected as backup, but it wasn’t needed! Instead I hopped into the car, put it into neutral, then used the brakes to gently roll off of the trailer. I then put it into gear and the clutch grabs more than hard enough to spin the engine over. Once I rolled into a parking spot, I pulled the parking brake and sure enough, the car locked itself into place.

Well, I’ll be dipped. I now fully believe the car was in operational shape when parked 5 years ago. So, all of this is great! In theory, the car will drive once I get the engine running again.

The Future

I’m super stoked about this car, enough that I’m going to give it a project name. Admittedly, when I first saw pictures of the Plymouth I said it looked like a “gangster car,” so we’ll go with that as a theme. I’m going to call this ride Project Capone.

What comes next is washing off the gunk inside and out so the car looks presentable. Then, I want to dig right into that fuel system. It seems I already have brakes, tires, a transmission, and a clutch, so let’s make it run! I’ve already sold off one other project and am selling off two others to clear my path for the Plymouth.

My plan isn’t to restore the car. To be brutally honest with myself, I don’t have the time or the skill for that and that’s part of why the U-Haul camper never went anywhere. Instead, I just want to get it running, clean up the interior, and enjoy it as a survivor just as David did with his old Plymouth Valiant. Only Project Capone doesn’t have massive ankle vents.

I hope to have weekly-ish updates with this one, starting with just cleaning it. Sheryl wants to work her proven magic inside and I’ve already gotten a head start outside. With some luck, maybe I’ll cruise a backroad before it gets cold again.