DETROIT – An annual rite of late summer, the Woodward Dream Cruise is one raucous celebration of the automobile linking members of the Greatest Generation to their baby boomer offspring, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
Despite record high gasoline prices, “fin-tastic” cars from the 1950s plied Detroit’s main street August 16, 2008, along with muscle cars from the 1960s and early 1970s. They were steel and chrome visions of nostalgia for some, curiosities to others not from the original cruising era and a headache to normal commuters.
The unique feature about this year’s dream cruise was General Motors’ parade of more than 100 cars, representing different eras of automotive history, traveling up Woodward from the Detroit River and into the City of Birmingham, which is roughly the half-way point of the cruise. This caravan was part of the automaker’s 100th anniversary celebrations.
The total dream cruise route is 16 miles, from the Michigan State Fairgrounds, just south of Eight Mile Road, to the City of Pontiac, where Woodward ends in a loop around the city’s downtown. The Oakland County Sheriffs’ Department estimated that 1.4 million people and about 40,000 vehicles – and many growling engines – circled the route this year.
Some communities, such as Ferndale, have taken the dream cruise and created a street festival that ran from Friday –Sunday. Then along the route, there were throngs of people, parked cars and vendors. College age women at a breast cancer awareness booth hawking T-Shirts with the slogan “Save the Boobs.” Young men held a makeshift “beer pong” contest on the lawn of an apartment building just north of the Detroit Zoo. Mixed into the crowd were anti-abortion activists holding silent vigils or Elvis impersonators belting out tunes as a tribute to the King of Rock and Roll.
In one case, a Belle Tire store near 13 Mile Road sponsored a contest called the “Belle Tire Free Spin” where spectators could win several prizes. Two of the winners included Bill Waldorf of Macomb Township, Mich., and his brother Jim, who won used NASCAR tires. “I guess I wanted it. I’ll probably hang it in the garage or it could make a nice TV holder,” Bill Waldorf said.
The “General’s” Anniversary Parade
Woodward Avenue holds a special spot in General Motors’ history. With GM’s offices in Detroit, many of its executives and engineers would cruise up and down the road on their way to their homes in the northern suburbs. Many a car from the “General,” whether it was a Pontiac GTO or a Chevrolet Corvette, got broken in during informal test drives.
Kicking off its 100th anniversary celebration, GM Chairman and CEO Rick Wagoner led a parade of more than 100 cars in a Chevrolet Corvette powered with E85 – that’s fuel made from 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline. The centennial parade started from a parking lot just east of the automaker’s world headquarters building at the Renaissance Center along the northern bank of the Detroit River early Saturday morning around 8 a.m. Then it went about 14 miles up Woodward, to its corporate displays in Birmingham.
The parade, which began slightly later than scheduled, quickly accelerated up Woodward, through downtown Detroit, but faced an unexpected delay around Comerica Park. Then up it continued, at one point it passed the intersection with Grand Boulevard and to the left was the old General Motors Building where GM’s headquarters had been for nearly three-quarters of a century before the automaker bought the RenCen back in the late 1990s.
The large, block letter, electric sign that once proclaimed “General Motors” to the world and inspired former GM executive John Z. DeLorean to call his autobiography “On A Clear Day You Can See General Motors,” was taken down years ago. Now the building, renamed “Cadillac Place,” serves as an office building for the State of Michigan while the nearby Fisher Building – named after the seven Fisher brothers whose company became an early GM acquisition (the former Fisher Body Division) has the Detroit Public School system as its largest tenant.
In Detroit, Woodward’s former grandeur could be seen in the details of he decayed buildings, if you could look past the aging, worn store facades. The Boston Edison neighborhood, just off of the avenue, where many of Detroit’s auto barons lived (including Henry Ford before the 1910s) had many houses in good shape, but others boarded up or crumbling.
Detroiters came out to see the GM parade early in the morning waving as the cars rolled by, sometimes at 15 to 20 miles per hour.
South of Eight Mile Road – the dividing line between Detroit and Wayne County and the northern suburbs of Oakland County (where most of the dream cruisers stay) – the bright spots along the route were often the churches or large public centers such as the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Detroit Public Library, Wayne State University’s campus, or the modern shopping center in Highland Park that had been carved out of part of the old
Ford Highland Park plant property. Highland Park, for those unfamiliar with Detroit’s geography, is one of two small cities (Hamtramck being the other) surrounded on all sides by Motown.
Once the booming home to Ford’s Model T factory, which launched the middle class when its workers earned the then unbelievable $5.00 a day and Walter P. Chrysler built his corporation’s headquarters, Highland Park shows the impact of losing its industrial underpinnings. Its glorious Beaux-Arts large public library with its doors depicting built in 1923 to serve the cultural needs of this burgeoning community of autoworkers won the architect a prize. It’s now closed, boarded up and wears the obvious signs of neglect and vandalism.
As the GM parade approached the city’s dividing line at Eight Mile Road and the nearby Michigan State Fair Grounds, where the start of the Woodward Dream Cruise takes place, Detroit’s neighborhoods began looking better. Then it was up onto the main cruise route.
Although many cruisers were already out, vehicle traffic could still move faster than a quick walk. At some points along the way, other motorists – either not realizing or not caring – tried to either turn into the GM parade or join it despite the presence of police vehicles with flashing lights.
Eventually the cars made it to their destination along Woodward in Birmingham. GM’s chief, Wagoner, then participated in a media plug for Leader Dogs for the Blind. The automaker was sponsoring the training of a golden retriever, named “General,” who will be going to a person in southeastern Michigan.
Parade Participants
Among the GM parade’s participants were Tom Goad, a GM retiree with 12 years at Chevrolet and 27 1/2 years at Pontiac, who had the oldest car available, and Jerry Haller, a 39-year veteran with the automaker.
“I ended up leading the parade car because the 1912 Cadillac that was supposed to be here never showed up,” noted Goad, who is also a member of the Classic Car Club of America and the Cadillac LaSalle Club. “This is a 1924 Cadillac Phaeton and was the first year for the balanced V8. Before that, V8s were like two four cylinders running on a common crank and ran rough. This one has the cylinders on 90 degree offsets with counterweights to fully balance it.”
He acquired the car in 1981 at the estate auction of a pickle farmer (from Michigan’s “Thumb” area), who had committed suicide. However, Goad noted that the Cadillac Phaeton wasn’t his first choice.
“I bid on a 1929 LaSalle convertible that my wife liked very much but I only went to $19,900 and it sold for $20,000,” Goad said. “This car came up toward the end. I bid on it and got it for about $17,000.”
The oldest car in Goad’s collection of eight, the Cadillac Phaeton has its original paint and chrome, but newer wheels, a new top, upholstery and – because of today’s gasolines – even fuel lines and tubes.
“Modern gasoline are made for higher-end evaporatives for engines, but these cars don’t like the higher octane plus the alcohol in the mix of the gasoline eats up the rubber,” Goad noted. “If you have a car over 10 years, you better change all of the hoses. There was a couple with a ’55 Chevrolet that initially was running great with the caravan, but it stalled out. They probably didn’t have an electric fuel pump, which you need to force through the modern gasoline so it won’t plug up your fuel line with vapor lock.”
A ‘Vette with Zip
Driving a more modern car, Haller had a 1986 Corvette with little more than 89,000 miles on the odometer as he drove in the last fourth of the GM parade of cars. Even though many late 1970s and 1980s cars are sluggards when compared to the classic muscle cars, Haller noted that his ‘Vette’s engine could produce 350 horsepower and still get 27 mpg on the highway. In his youth, he was not familiar with the urban cruising scene of going from drive-in restaurant to drive-in. Instead, it was driving from one town to another to “look for chics.”
“I bought the car off a friend of mine five years ago and have been restoring it,” added Haller, who grew up as the son of a small-town Chevy dealer in Kansas.
The 1986 Corvette was very much an ‘80s car inside with a hard plastic dashboard, grayish fuzzy carpeting underneath, what was then a futuristic LCD (liquid crystal display) screen for the instrument panel, a Bose radio system, and (since airbags hadn’t been introduced yet) a big leather covered foam “bumper” on the passenger side of the dashboard, probably in an effort to reduce head injuries during an accident.
“What’s unusual about the interior is that it has bronzed leather on the seats and the glass roof also has a bronze tint – most others at the time had a blue tint,” Haller said. “I also took the original aluminum wheels, which had a clear coat of paint over them that had yellowed, and sanded and polished them. Now they are highly polished.”
Back to the Future
In a salute to their creator, six stainless steel, gull-wing door cars were lined up outside of A.J. Desmond & Sons (at least seventh unscheduled DeLorean car owner soon joined the gathering). The funeral home in Royal Oak is where John Z. DeLorean, the former General Motors executive who attempted to launch his own car company, was laid out in 2005. There also was a display by the new DeLorean Motor Company (DMC) of Humble, Texas.
“There were 9,200 to 9,800 DeLoreans produced, but no one’s sure what the precise number was,” Byron Zanzelmo of Waterford, Mich., one of the participants. “About 5,500 are known to exist on the roads today. There are about 75 or so clubs worldwide and six DeLorean franchises in the U.S.A. that service and support DeLoreans as a full-time job.”
Much of the remaining inventory of the DeLorean assembly plant, which had been located in Belfast, Northern Ireland, was purchased by the new DeLorean Motor Company. With its 50,000 square-foot facility in Texas, the DMC has crate engines, transmissions, and a variety of other parts – enough to make complete cars.
“We do build about a dozen new DeLoreans a year and there’s a nine-month waiting list,” noted James V. Espey, DMC vice president. “We are going to built the first-ever right-hand drive version of a DeLorean from the ground up in September.”
Espy, who knew John Z. DeLorean from 1997 until his death, claims that the new DMC can make its parts cars better than the originals.
“The car had a bad reputation when it came out for quality, well we’ve had some 9,000 prototypes on the road for 25 years and we can fix all of the known issues,” Espy said.
The weakness of the original cars were there weak alternators, which have been replaced with 150 amp models; replacing a plastic elbow that used to break in the power window motors with an all-metal version; using cast zinc door handles instead of the original plastic ones that broke with age; and using all-stainless steel frames instead mild steel coated with epoxy.
“The epoxy was supposed to keep the steel from rusting, but over time, it got brittle and cracked,” Espy said. “Moisture gets inside and the frame rusts from the inside out.”
It takes a special breed of car lover to own a DeLorean, which some people might equate to the “Back to the Future” movies, noted Zanzelmo.
“You were buying an expensive car that was ahead of its time,” Zanzelmo noted. “You’re more adventurous than the common person and willing to test new waters.”
Growing up, Zanzelmo saw the original DeLorean car commercials with seagulls and the ocean waters splashing while a DeLorean sat alongside a bay. He used to beg his mother to take him to one of the few DeLorean dealers so he could look at the car.
“My dad was driving big Cadillacs at the time... two weeks later, my dad drove it home. I couldn’t believe it. Almost every night, I’d open up the garage door and look at the car. Whenever it had any fingerprints on the steel or the glass, I’d clean it up,” Zanzelmo added.
Even after the original DMC went bankrupt, Zanzelmo’s father bought a second DeLorean to use as a daily car and put his first one in the garage.
“My mom is French and Greek and my father is Italian. The car’s styling is Italian so it was a perfect fit for us,” Zanzelmo added.
Woodward Landmarks
There are many cultural and industrial landmarks along Woodward Avenue, ranging from Comerica Park and the Fox Theatre in Detroit, Ford’s former Model T plant in Highland Park, the Detroit Zoo in Royal Oak, the Cranbrook Educational Community in Birmingham, and churches, but businesses can also be icons – especial of the cruise.
General Motors often sets up shop at the Athens Coney Island in Birmingham, where various corporate press conferences are held and members of the media might be able to partake a hot dog and chili fries – renamed for the cruise with GM brand names of course.
There’s Vinsetta Garage, Michigan’s oldest and most recognized automotive repair shop that is a about a quarter mile north of 11 Mile Road, or Wetmore’s, the tire shop with “the car on its roof” at Woodward and 9 1/2 Mile Road that’s been in business since 1928.
Then there is Cosmo’s Restaurant at the corner of Woodward and Nine Mile Road, adjacent to Ford’s Mustang Alley and the site of the official ribbon cutting ceremonies that signal the start of the cruise on Friday, Aug. 15, and other events (many of which were already underway).
“We were founded nearly 48 years ago on April 1, 1961. We’ve had a lot of college kids who’ve worked here throughout the summer – Michigan State, Wayne State and the University of Michigan,” noted owner Cecilia Grego. “The cruise has benefited everyone though business has been down lately because of the higher gas prices.”
Cosmo’s is about a mile north from where the dream cruise first got started at Eight Mile Road and Woodward, added restaurant manager Bryan McNamara.
“This was the hub of the cruise. Now it goes all the way to Pontiac and circles back,” McNamara said. “This year, a lot of the big companies came back to where it all started.”
Ford Motor Company, for example turned both sides of the Nine Mile-Woodward intersection into a multi-block long street fair and car display.
Nine Mile’s Mustang Alley
Mustang Alley has been existence for 10 years at Nine Mile as a rallying point for Mustang owners although the surrounding side streets and parking lots have been open to other makes and models. For the first time, Ford concentrated its corporate effort in Ferndale – before it had displays about four blocks off of Woodward in Birmingham’s Shain Park, roughly seven miles northwest.
“I’ve been leading this effort (as the chief organizer of Mustang Alley) the past few years, working on a shoestring budget,” noted Mike Gordon, a Ford supervisor for Product Development, Body Engineering and Design, who has worked the dream cruise as a volunteer for 10 years. “Last year, I brought my friends down from the other parts of Ford Motor Company and I had them experience what we’re doing here in Ferndale and they said, we have to be down here with you guys.”
The biggest change along Nine Mile is that Ford’s full line up of vehicles was present, not just Mustangs, along with displays of the Ford Model T which is celebrating its centennial in September. Other divisions, including Ford Racing and merchandising activities were also set up.
An Original Who’s Still Cruising
One of the original Woodward cruisers, retired Ford designer Joe Durante has been coming out to every dream cruise since they started 14 years ago. Accompanied by his wife Lilly Durante, Joe is also a charter member of the Mustang Owners Club of Southeastern Michigan and owns an unrestored, red 1965 Mustang with a red interior. The car has only been brought out during the summers, so it’s never experienced the corrosive action of Michigan’s winter road salts.
“I used to drive out to Ted’s Drive-in out at Square Lake Road in Birmingham in ’65. So, cruising isn’t new to me,” noted Durante, who lives in Dearborn, Mich., the home of Ford Motor Co. “In the 1970s, (cruising went out style) when gas prices started to go up and insurance companies started charging high rates for high horsepower cars.”
To purchase the Mustang, Lilly Durante was forced to sell her Ford Falcon, the only car she ever owned, which had been a gift from her father.
“The Falcon I could have run ragged, but this one, you’ve got to be careful where you’re going to park it,” she said with exaggerated outrage.
With a 289 cubic inch V8 engine, Joe Durante modified the engine with various performance parts after the first-year warranty ran out to get more horsepower out of the engine. The car’s odometer only recently crossed the 40,000 mile mark while its red vinyl seats – with the special interior décor package showing running Mustangs on seats – had very little wear and tear.
“We’ve done all we can do to preserve it. We put it away in October and brought it out the next April,” Joe Durante said, who had turned his 40-year pin from Ford into a ring. Regarding the Woodward Dream Cruise, he added that every year remains exciting. “I look forward to it. As I get older, I probably enjoy it a little bit more because you wonder if it’s going to be your last one.”
A Pony Car With A Trailer
Any number of hot rodded or modified cars, vans, trucks and chopper motorcycles were cruising or parked along Woodward – including a brightly colored “garbage” truck (or a vehicle made to resemble a very clean garbage truck) with a passenger compartment where the waste hopper was with people sitting inside and throwing candy out of open side panels. In other cases, military vehicles, including a World War II era half-track rumbled down the avenue.
Giving part of a wrecked Mustang new life, Charles Crump of Redford, Mich., took the back half of a car and had a fabricator in Tecumseh, Mich., turn it into a trailer that looks like a match to his silver 1999 Mustang GT convertible. With four children, Charles Crump and his wife Zeephia “Zee” Crump can’t fit everyone in the car, but the trailer gives their pony car a bit more flexibility.
“My inspiration was seeing older cars that had trailers that look like their car,” said Charles Crump who works as a diesel mechanic for the City of Detroit. “Mustangs don’t have much trunk space and me and my family like to travel. We can put our tent, chairs and a grill in the trailer.”
Spending about $11,000 to have the trailer made, the front part was fabricated out of metal and tubular steel. The hood is custom made, but can be replaced with a used Mustang hood.
“The idea of building this car off of wrecked Mustang was to make sure that a lot of the parts are interchangeable with what’s available on the market. That way, I don’t have to go back to a fabricator if something breaks,” Crump added.
Owning Mustangs since he was 18, about half his lifetime, Crump said that he became a mature driver after receiving two traffic tickets within months of having his first car – a 1987 Mustang GT hatchback.
‘The High & Mighty’ Rides Again
In the 1950s, a group of Chrysler engineers met in the Chrysler lunchroom and passed along engine and tuning secrets to each other. Calling themselves the Ramchargers, they published an informal newsletter called the Horse Trader where they notified each other about who had what parts to sell and swap.
“One day we decided to build a car and run it at a drag strip and race it,” said Dick Burke, a Chrysler retiree who was at the display of a hot-rodded 1949 Plymouth business coupe at a shopping center at the intersection of 13 Mile and Woodward. Four large pipes came out fan-like from the car’s right and left front fenders while the engine sat above where the hood should be with a large blower sticking up from the top.
“This is a replica of the original car – ‘The High & Mighty,’” Burke explained. “We originally had a 49 Plymouth but we could never find what happened to it. There had been a couple of things that had been saved. There’s the air intake that I had designed and the tachometer which, when the engine gets to a certain rpm, says ‘Shift Damn It.’”
The original car was built between 1957 and 1958, while the replica was started around 2003 and completed three years later by a group of current and retired Chrysler employees.
“I developed the rear suspension system on the car with a couple of my contemporaries,” Burke noted. “It was the first four-link suspension system. The individual exhaust pipes on the side came from a Norton motorcycle (a British make). We figured they would provide us with more power, but now we’ve since discovered that there are better systems that help produce more power, but none that make as much noise.”
Calculating by hand – given the fact that computers and calculators weren’t available to them in the late 1950s – the original Ramchargers filled several two- to three-inch thick notebooks. Adding and subtracting the weight of components, the Chrysler engineers figured out where The High & Mighty’s center of gravity would be.
“The goal was to get 100 percent weigh transfer on the rear wheels,” Burke said. “The biggest mass was the engine, so we raised it up. The center lie was almost three feet to the ground in front. The NHRA (National Hot Rod Association) later outlawed the design because there were too many people copied us who didn’t know what they were doing.”
During its two years competing in the C altered class, the original High & Mighty set NHRA records for top quarter mile speed – 12.8 seconds at 109.75 mph – and elapsed time, which was 12.62 seconds at 115 mph. It was also the first car photographed to do a wheelie.
“Cars did not do wheelies at the time because we did not have tires to get the traction that we can get today. There weren’t these wrinkle tires to get the car off the ground,” Burke said. “I was upset that it had done a wheelie because it meant that the suspension needed to be adjusted.”
Darting About
Near The High & Mighty display, 40-year-old Ron Moll was sitting in his folding camping chair near his red 1966 Dodge Dart convertible.
“I like Chrysler cars from the 1960s because they had the best body styles out there,” Moll said. “I also a ‘65 Belvedere, a ‘66 Coronet convertible, and a ‘64 Plymouth Savoy.”
The Dart was restored from the ground up, with every body panel removed and every bolt and nut replaced with stainless steel ones. After 10 years of work, and about $25,000 (about seven times the Dart’s original cost), he finished the car in 2004, just before Detroit’s Autorama hot-rod show where it took first place in the convertible, pre-war and newer class of cars.
“I collect cars as a hobby… I am a locksmith and install card access machines and TV cameras,” he added.
Hey, Hey We’re the Monkees
On the strip of lawn outside of an office building south of Coolidge and Woodward, another 1960s iconic car was on display and very fitting for the dream cruise – the original Monkeemobile. Created in 1965 for a TV show, the pop-rock band was composed of Micky Dolenz, Michael Nesmith, Davy Jones, and Peter Tork and derisively called the “prefab four” since they were a knockoff of The Beatles.
The band rode around in a heavily modified Pontiac GTO that featured a two-piece windshield, a touring car styled convertible top, an extra third row seat, and other exaggerated features, such as the pointed nose and taillights.
Mel Guthrie, owner of Michigan’s Guthrie Lumber, purchased the car this year at the 2008 Barrett-Jackson auction for $360,000. Barrett-Jackson Customs modified it for its new owner, adding video monitors in the back and a better speaker system.
“I loved the Monkees and I loved the car my whole life,” Guthrie said. “I’m a workaholic. I worked my whole life and accumulated a little wealth where I could attempt to buy this car… and I have eight other cars, but none this good.”
By chance, in December 2007, he learned that the Monkeemobile was going to be at the Barrett-Jackson auction less than a month later. He spent three weeks puzzling over whether or not he should attempted to buy it.
“I said to myself, if I don’t go, I’d never forgive myself,” Guthrie said, but somehow he submitted the winning bid at the auction in Scottsdale, Arizona, and became the proud owner of the unique car with its 389 cubic inch V8 engine.
All Good Things
The 2008 Woodward Dream Cruise is now part of history as summer closes out and autumn approaches quickly on the calendar. Car clubs still hold their various little road rallies and impromptu car shows in the area and the dream cruise has spawned any number of smaller cruisers on Detroit area streets.
But there are no other car events nothing else has large, as noisy, or as popular in Michigan or probably around the nation.
Motown’s “dream machines” still have five to eight more weeks of motoring before their owners tuck them into their garages to sleep through the winter, and avoid the road salts. In fairly short order, the volunteers will be making plans for next year’s cruise, which will mark the event’s 15th anniversary. See you then.
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