The manual choke was a factory installed item on the 4 speed manual shift cars.
The car was built in the third week of January 1963 at the South Gate California plant and sold by Davis Motors in Sonora California on July 17, 1963 to Salvadore and Madelaine Mier of Tuolumne California. The Cole’s rescued the car from the drive in shed on their property where Madelaine had parked it in 1986. Their youngest daughter Judy, who is likely in her early 70’s, still lives there. She said she drove the car as a teenager but never got her drivers license.
We intend to get this baby back on the road hopefully by the summer. We strive to have all our classic cars in excellent driving condition so we can drive them anywhere. I just drove my 1961 Olds Fiesta wagon the 1500 miles back from Florida to our home in Canada this past April and intend to drive it back down to Nashville for the OCA Nationals in July. I have no intention of selling it: I plan to ‘drive the wheels off of it’ !
I just got the turbo back from Jim Noel and Mark from D&D Aluminum V8 is rebuilding my engine as we speak. By the time the car is on the road I will have so much money in it I don’t imagine any one would offer me enough to make we want to let it go.
So to continue with my story:
As I said, after finding out about this car I started talking to Harrison about the car and their plans for it. After a day or two I offered to buy the car ‘as is’ now. I got him to send me some high resolution photos and the more I saw, I knew it needed to be mine. By the end of May I had ‘wore them down’ and we had come to a tentative agreement but that deal fell through as we could not come get the car until mid July as Steve had to have some surgery first and Mark truly did not want to sell it – so he backed out. However I was promised that I would be the first too know when it became available.
Finally in early August I got the message I was waiting for. Co-incidentally, Steve had sold his Harley at the first of the week and a couple hours before I heard from Harrison, Steve had also sold a 1972 Olds 442 that he had bought in June (it was a mess when he bought it, spent July working on it and really cleaned it up and made it into a nice saleable car). The Karma Gods (or is it the CARma Gods) were smiling on me that day! So we dropped everything, scraped together a bag of cash, hooked up the trailer and went on a 2,500 mile Road Trip to California!
