MY STUDEBAKER CHRONICLES Part 3

 When I first arrived in California in '89 the only people I knew took me to a place they were sure I'd love called Harbin Hot Springs. 

It was a restored Victorian era clothing-optional natural hot springs resort in Lake County that, since the early '70s, had been an intentional residential community - some would call it a "hippy commune". 

It's "parent company" was The Heart Consciousness Church. 

I was a philosophy and religion minor in college and had been on something of a "New Age" spiritual path since high school, so I was interested in alternative "churches" and when I got to Harbin's front gate for the first time and was told I'd have to join The Heart Consciousness Church, I thought, that's cool, I like that name, sign me up! 

But then, walking up to the spring fed pools I had second thoughts. 

Wait, now, this is California, home of cults and kooks! 

What if there's some dogma I can't get behind? 

What if there's some cult leader who wants to have sex with me or wants me to drink some Kool-Aid?!? 

What if the "church" is just a tax-dodge? 

I was hoping it was just all about the healing waters bubbling up out of the hillside and the freedom to enjoy them skinnydipping-style. 

When I found myself in Harbin's amazing hot pool water (113,5 degrees) that very first time, I thought, oh, wow, this is it, liquid God! 

My visits became more and more frequent, not unlike pilgrimages, and on August 26, 1996 I became a Harbin resident/employee. 

At first, I pitched a tent by Harbin creek with Elsie parked nearby.

The main, warm, meditation Pool at Harbin.

When I moved to Harbin, I was pretty certain that I was done with the car repair business, but I soon found out that Harbin had a hodge-podge small fleet of mostly small trucks that they used to care for the place which was on several thousand acres and included many old buildings. And I was surprised to learn that they had their own rather well-equipped, on-property auto shop with a lift and everything needed to perform in-house maintenance and repairs on their vehicles.

The manager of the auto shop at Harbin was something of a scoundrel and not ever particularly sober so they were looking for his replacement. 

So, I thought, oh, well, I can do that, it might be fun, and it'll be pretty easy to look good to the management after the guy they had... and I took the job. 

And there was an unused bay in the shop where I could store Elsie! That was before the time when Harbin's explosive expansion of the early 21^st century would prohibit it, so she had a garage again!

I sheet rocked, painted, decorated and reorganized the Harbin Autoshop and began upgrading the fleet, standardizing to mostly Fords.

The shop had plenty of tools, and the mechanics that worked for me brought in their own (sometimes quite literally) TON of tools. The lift was outside which was okay most of the time. There was a big compressor, a pneumatic bulk oil dispenser, floor jacks and jack stands, a brake lathe, a press and a drill press, a complete Dorman nut and bolt selection in both metric and SAE and a stock of oil filters, air filters, fuel filters belts and hoses. The local NAPA Auto Parts store delivered almost daily and the Snap-On truck visited. 
The shop was so clean that my sannyasin friend Nirakar suggested that I paint the floor white like the autoshop at Osho's ashram in Puna. ...Never got around to that...

Part of the Harbin fleet, most of which I purchased for Harbin over the years, assembled for a photo shoot at the Auto Shop. 2012

The shop truck and loaner became the Fordebaker with a '49 Studebaker hood ornament and little painting I did on the tailgate.

My personal company car, a '93 Camry wagon became the Toyotabaker, with some extra chrome trim, a honeycomb grille mesh out of an '01 Ford Ranger with a late '30s Studebaker "Red Ball" cloisonne medallion, and another '49 Stude hood ornament.

Elsie as "The Harbin Mobile" at the Harbin Auto Shop.

In my Harbin Autoshop office.

Elsie was running great again but her mostly all original paint, though still shiny, was wearing thin and showed lots of flaws, some dings and even a few rust bubbles in the common places - the bottom of the trunk lid and the leading edge of the back fenders. That, and my love for Harbin, is why, for the annual "Middletown Days" parade downtown, I decided to make Elsie into the Harbin parade car, and I applied graphics to the car.

Elsie in full Harbin Mobile regalia in the Middletown Days parade.

The main, warm, spring water pool at Harbin Hot Springs has a distinctive railing around it that was incorporated into Harbin's logo. 

A beloved big fig tree spread its branches out over the pool providing shade. 

So, using automotive stripe tape to depict the trademark railing, green contact paper for the fig leaves, a Harbin logo like I put on all the fleet vehicles on her doors and glow-in-the-dark stars on the roof, Elsie became "The Harbin Mobile". 

I applied for and, much to my surprise, got California to issue me "HARBIN" vanity plates. I couldn't believe no one had already had them.

Over the next many years Elsie brought home trophies from the parade as Best Decorated Vehicle and the graphics very effectively disguised the fact that she really needed a paint job. 

Elsie had a good long run as The Harbin Mobile alongside the 1959 Chevrolet fire truck Harbin had and which I slowly began restoring! 

The '59 Chevy Viking 3100 fire truck originally served the town of Middletown, then as fire protection at Harbin in the late '70s before enough water was plumbed around the property. Then it was fitted with a back bumper sprinkler system for dust abatement on the dirt roads. Eventually the roads were paved, and she became strictly a parade vehicle that the Harbin community kids loved to ride on for the parade. It only had 23,000 total miles, but undoubtedly over thousands of short trips, by that time.

For the parade each year, the Harbin "flower girls", those resident/employees tasked with making the flower arrangements that decorated Harbin, made two huge arrangements that were set in oasis in four cut-down gallon milk jugs and nestled in the rear bumper overriders. 

On Elsie's front bumper overriders for the parade, I mounted flags of all the many countries from which my fellow Harbin residents hailed. The flowers and flags came off after the parade, but the graphics stayed on - she remained the Harbin mobile all year long and for about 15 years.

My Bay Area Studebaker friends were very polite about it and didn't say what they were no doubt thinking: "What the heck did you do to that poor car?!?" If you didn't know Harbin, the graphics were no doubt puzzling...

Ready for the parade with flags mounted.

A fellow named Bhagavan Das, the guy who told Dr. Richard Alpert to Be Here Now in India in 1967 and who brought the good doctor to his guru to become Ram Dass, was living at Harbin when I moved there. 

He became my mentor in the ways of kirtan - Hindu-style call-and-response chanting, which I fell in love with. 

Bhagavan Das was very car savvy himself, having at one time done a stint as a Marin County car salesman, and he loved Elsie. 

Six foot four, with another three-inch top knot, he had plenty of headroom in Elsie and I took a picture of him giving a blessing from her doorway.

Bhagavan Das.

While I was the fleet and auto shop manager for Harbin, several other Studebakers followed me home, some towed behind the Fordebaker, including a very nice '60 Lark VIII 4-door sedan, a '59 Lark VI 2-door sedan, a '59 Lark VIII Regal hardtop in its original "Tahiti Coral", a sharp '64 Commander fixed-roof Wagonaire, my second 4-speed '62 GT Hawk, two 4-door 1950 Champions, a '51 Land Cruiser and several parts cars.

By 2014 I was really wishing Elsie could lose the graphics but pulling them off was not an option. By then they'd been on for 15 years and even if removing them might not have taken a bunch of paint off with them (it would have) you'd still see where they were and the car would still, and even more so, need paint.

You know the bumper sticker that says "HIT ME I NEED THE MONEY"?

Well, in the summer of 2014 I was at a big Sacramento car show with the Harbin Mobile. 

It was really hot as the show concluded around 2PM and participants were leaving. 

An elderly gentleman in a row of show cars opposite me may have had a moment of heat stroke as he was leaving and his Dodge Charger rolled into Elsie's right front, the same place where I'd wrecked the fender in '75 and where the lady in the Anchorage gym parking lot had hit it in '87. The bumper, bumper guard, right front fender, the right grille end cap and the upper grille bar were damaged. At the time I also had a presentable, good running '50 Champion sedan (the blue one - photo above) and my first thought when the accident occurred wasn't "Oh, no!!", it was, "Oh boy!! I can sell the '50 and put that with the insurance settlement and maybe even afford to paint all of Elsie!!" I did, thereby achieving the beautiful $15,000 body and paint job I thought I'd never be able to afford.

I hunted up a decent, used replacement upper grille bar and end cap and a new auxiliary front bumper guard kit and started taking the car apart for paint. I removed the bumpers, all the chrome and stainless trim and the rear fenders and brought Elsie to the local body shop that I'd been using for Harbin fleet trucks. The painter was kind of old-school, like me, and he appreciated the car and did some fine bodywork and applied plenty of single-stage enamel paint like she was originally painted with and that I had insisted on.

I didn't want the car to ever suffer from peeling clearcoat disease.

He did a great job, probably spending more time on the car than his boss would have liked. In 2014, he may have actually been braking California law by using old-school paint on my car. 

I told him I could live with a certain amount of orange peel in the paint, but he cut and buffed it anyway.

When he was done and I put the car back together I couldn't believe that such a sharp-looking car was mine. She was finished off with a set of new reproduction wheel covers.

Elsie's makeover begins, 2014.

Just out of the paint shop back in her formal evening wear having shed her Harbin party dress. 

In the next installment, fire destroys Harbin Hot Springs, Elsie becomes my firestorm escape vehicle and we move to southern Oregon.

MY STUDEBAKER CHRONICLES, PART 2

 Lugene Hurd was a Christian southern belle with a delicate and kindly manner and a crucifix on the wall, and when her husband died she acted like I was sent from the Lord to buy back the '52 Studebaker Land Cruiser I had sold him 6 years earlier. (Clearly, I was!)

She said, "John even said to me that if anything happens to me, see if the kid wants the car back." 

I said, "Mrs. Hurd, the kid wants the car back!"

 
I went in her garage to have a look. Elsie fired right up after a little carb priming and I took her for a test drive.

The enjoyment John got out of Elsie was to have the neighbor kid wax it, then he'd back it out of the garage, pull up a lawn chair and look at it.
During his ownership, he put only 50 miles on the car.

My old trash was still under the front seat. It was like a time warp.

On the road test it was apparent that the car needed tires. 

All that time sitting on those early steel belted radials had given the tires flat spots and they thumped down the road.
When I got back, I told Lugene that I definitely wanted the car back even though it needed new tires. 

I asked if she'd been offered anything for the car and she said that a man had offered her $2000. 

I happily counted out $2000 for her. 

After a moment of looking wistfully at the money she handed me back $200 and said, "Here. it needs tires."

I thanked her profusely for what was essentially six years of storage. 

And so began my second term of custodianship of this amazing car.

I had Elsie back!

I had fantasized about having her back for some time and taking my "Just Married" ride in her - and I did.

One time my wife jumped in and chased me around a field in it roaring with laughter. At first, I was not amused. She was a good driver, she had a two-stroke Saab at the time, four on the tree as I recall.

Other Studes followed me home to Candor; a '53 Commander Starliner in rough shape and a '51 Champion Starlight Coupe that got painted up with water colors like the Muppet mobile at a local fair that I stopped in at the day I towed it home. 

I began building a garage for Elsie.

But my marriage ended rather suddenly and dramatically in the spring of '86...but that's another (long) story.

By June of '86 I had my eye on moving to California.

I'd been California dreamin' since the '60s.

I had lightened my load enough so that all the worldly goods that I had left fit in Elsie, packed right up to the headliner, and with a new rather intense woman who had won my affection and another really big bag of weed I headed for the Golden State. 

First stop was Santa Cruz and my college buddy Bob's place, then to Mount Shasta to visit my new girlfriend's friend. Her friend was Doug, a charming, older, gay retired San Francisco architect who was caretaking a very elderly, very petite woman named Josephine Taylor who was a psychic and a medium.


He'd built her an amazing, super-cute, ¾ scale Victorian gingerbread house that, to me, seemed more like ½ scale.. They were host to many "New Age" celebrities. One day I had the opportunity to meet and hot tub with Peter Caddy, the founder of the intentional community in Scotland known as Findhorn.

Josephine Taylor. She lived to be 108 years old.

While in Shasta while under the spell of this woman who I thought must be my soul-mate or twin flame (or whatever), she got the "hit" that she needed to visit her brother and mother who were living outside of Anchorage Alaska so I volunteered to take her.

At that time the AlCan, the Alaska highway, constructed in WWII in part with Studebaker US6 trucks, was not completely paved, it still had about 75 miles of gravel so that when big rigs passed going the other way you got showered with gravel, and in certain stretches of the road ("highway" was really too flattering a term) there were big year round ice heaves in the pavement that really put a car's suspension through it's paces.  

On that trip I'd never seen so many cars with broken windshields, so I had cardboard taped over the front of the car and the entire windshield except for about a 2 1/2" slit to peek out of and we made it all the way up to Anchorage without significant damage. 

Somewhere in British Columbia though, Elsie's tailpipe loosened up and banged a hole in a brake line that ran across the top of the rear axle causing my second experience of hurtling through space in an old Studebaker with no brakes. Again, we limped to the nearest gas station which luckily was only a few miles away, and not hundreds of miles away in the middle of nowhere, where, as luck would have it, they had a pile of junk parts including a rear differential with brake lines running on top of it, one of which I installed on Elsie.

We arrived in Alaska on my 31^st birthday, August 10th, 1986.

But by October my intense partner, who hated winter, was tired of me, and she wired an old boyfriend for the money to go back home to L.A. and she left. 

I was broke too,  and now heart broken, and I spent the next two cathartic years in Alaska before I "got out".

I lived on Hidden Haven Drive in Eagle River Alaska.

The famous Iditarod sled dog race went right by my house. That's me in the big coat.

Elsie still ran and looked great, especially for a car that hadn't seen a garage since John Hurd's and one that made it up the AlCan. 

I drove her occasionally all year long in Alaska but I drove my '76 Impala winter beater during slippery road conditions. 

I grew up driving in winter conditions and I drove in winter car races in upstate New York so I kind of actually enjoy it.

Once in the dead of the 1987 Alaska winter, an oncoming pickup truck lost traction and hit me and my Chevy, putting us into a snowbank. 

After the accident the truck driver came to see if I was alright and to apologize and he was surprised to see that I had a big grin on my face. All I was feeling was grateful that it was the Chevy that got banged up and not Elsie. 

Another time when I had Elsie parked at the local gym and I happened to be looking out the window when I saw a woman back into Elsie's front bumper. Damage was relatively minor, but the woman was very apologetic, saying how much she appreciated beautiful things and that she was so sorry she'd damaged mine. 

She paid me adequately for the needed repairs without involving her insurance company. 

I spent the money on living expenses, and the damage would go unrepaired until Elsie had body work for her first ever repaint in 2014.

By the fall of 1988 I finally had enough money to leave Alaska.
I had promised Elsie that we wouldn't drive the AlCan again and so I'd planned what turned out to be a delightful voyage together on the Alaska State Ferry in October when the rates went down.

By then there were already some winter driving conditions between Eagle River where I lived just outside Anchorage, and Skagway, down the Alaska panhandle where the Ferry set sail.
Elsie and I slogged through mud ruts a foot deep and she got absolutely covered with mud, with many pounds of it packed in behind the wheels and underneath.

In order to get to Skagway Alaska from Anchorage one must drive through the Yukon.

On this trip, cruising along at around 80 MPH suddenly the engine died. 

The timing gear had stripped. 

We got a tow to Whitehorse Yukon, again, luckily not too far away, where the tow company/local taxi service kept her while I waited for parts. 

I stayed at a youth hostel for those few days. 

It was during the 1988 US presidential campaign and US politicians were talking about health care on Canadian TV. 

I remember one rather grisly hosteler commenting, "Old people in your country are f***ed!"

Following my trusty shop manual, I was able to successfully replace the timing gear and we continued on to Skagway. 

I of course sought out the Skagway spray it yourself car wash to remove many pounds of mud and many, many Canadian quarters later, I drove Elsie on to the hold of the ferry. After two days and three nights of beautiful inland passage travel in the company of dolphins and eagles, Elsie and I arrived in Seattle. Some of the best $500 I ever spent.

I set out to check out some folks I'd heard about in Scottsdale Arizona that were doing some interesting healing breathwork that I was familiar with called Rebirthing.  They turned out to be what I would call a "sect" of the rebirthers. They were immoralists. They basically believed that believing you had to die was just a belief... so, in the end, they proved a bit too far out for me.

I got a decent job as a service writer at a Jeep dealer in Mesa.
Those new Jeeps leaked oil right off the truck, and my experience there ensured that I would never own a Jeep.

My apartment complex had a pool and a hot tub. 

There was a "Studebakers" restaurant and bar in Phoenix that I liked to frequent that had a red bullet-nosed convertible (cut from a sedan) in the restaurant. 

That was all very cool, but the climate was anything but cool and when it got to be 112 degrees in April, I knew I needed to get outta there.
After 20 years of California dreamin', it seemed I'd finally move there.  

Settling in Marin I got a good paying job as the service department manager of Marin Subaru.

Suddenly I had a little money and I acquired another Stude, a decent '52 Commander Starlight Coupe, cosmetically far from perfect but with a recently rebuilt engine that had belonged to an African American Vietnam vet. The car had vanity license plates that said "TET 68". 

My '52 Commander Starlight (with the unfortunate riveted on side moldings) that would be Elsie's engine donor.

I also tried to hook up with Bay Area Studebaker people. 

Craig Debaeke, a Petaluma Studebaker collector/restorer became my California Studebaker guru.

For a time in Marin, my daily driver was a nice, black '63 Cruiser. One day, driving through San Anselmo I noticed a fellow standing on the curb who was staring at my funny looking car. As I got closer, he looked right at me and cracked a big, characteristically sparkly smile and we waved at each other. It was Ram Dass, among other things, the author of the seminal 1971 "hippie bible", Be Here Now.

My drawing of Ram Dass.

 

By then Elsie had around 160,000 miles and the original clutch was beginning to slip and the engine was tired. I made a deal with Craig to install the Starlight's fresh engine in Elsie with a new clutch in trade for giving him the rest of the Starlight, which I very recently saw for sale on Facebook. 

My old Starlight for sale on Facebook in 2023, the "Peter" emblem I made from a Peugeot nameplate still on the driver's door.

I had new front springs installed too, after, even with the heavy-duty shocks, she began to bottom out on bumps. I also upgraded to a later model, frame anchored front stabilizer bar and had to have one of the front lower A frames welded up when 
a crack appeared in it.

In 1992 my new girlfriend Suzy got the Studebaker bug and wound up owning two Studebakers that I got to play with. First was a 100% original Tahoe Green '52 Champion 4-door that she eventually sold to her best friend who was Huey Lewis's girlfriend. 

Then Suzy acquired a very nice '60 Lark VIII convertible!

In '94, I moved to the town of Sonoma and took a job as the fleet manager of California Wine Tours looking after their busses and limos. Unfortunately, my boss was a high-strung, very disagreeable young man that I suspect was putting lots of white powder up his nose, and working there grew more and more unpleasant.

By the summer of '96 I was ready for a change.

It would be huge.