Gearheads descended upon downtown Centralia last weekend once again for the annual Hub City Car Show, with thousands of visitors coming throughout the day to look at over 200 classic and custom cars lining Tower Avenue and its branch streets.
The Hub City Car Show is organized by the Centralia Downtown Festivals Association in partnership with the Lewis County Quarter Milers car club and also features Live 95 and KITI radio’s annual car giveaway. This year’s prize was an off-road ready 2012 Jeep Wrangler with an aftermarket audio system and backup camera from Thunder Autosound, along with a Muffler Man custom exhaust.
It was won by Rebecca Turner.
Among the many rides on display that stood out to The Chronicle were a 1963 rusty Ford Country Sedan station wagon, a 1971 green American Motors Corporation (AMC) Gremlin, a 1963 custom lowrider Lincoln Continental and a restored 1931 Ford Model A.
Country Sedans were produced by Ford from 1952 until 1974 as their full-size station wagon model, and full-size is no understatement, as Eatonville resident Guy Walston’s 1963 model stretches over 17 feet from its front bumper to the rear.
While the body is still original, Walston has heavily modified it, even to the point where it now has a motor taken from a modern Ford Crown Victoria police interceptor, and a new dashboard.
“So it’s got all the creature comforts now,” Walston said.
He found the car in a distant relative’s property, having been left out in a field with blackberry bushes growing around it. After the relative passed away, their daughter inherited the property and wanted to get rid of the Country Sedan, which needless to say required a lot of work.
Ever since suffering a heart attack and undergoing surgery, Walston has made getting the car running his project to keep himself busy during his recovery.
“It’s taken around four years to get it where it is now,” he added.
And despite its worn-down appearance, especially amongst most other polished and waxed car show entrants, Walston’s wagon always draws a crowd at car shows.
“It’s like a magnet. People remember their childhoods looking at it, like, ‘Oh my grandparents had a station wagon just like this,’” Walston said.
Another car with family roots at the show was the restored 1931 Ford Model A, which was originally owned by Dennis Marcott, who passed away six years ago. Now, Marcott’s grandson, Chehalis resident Callen Best, has nearly finished restoring it in his honor.
“This car has been in my granddad’s barn for many, many years. I remember him talking to me about getting it to run again,” Callen wrote in a letter displayed with the car.
After his grandfather’s death, Callen, together with his father Brandon Best and “Pop,” Gary Best, finally got it out of the barn and started the restoration process.
“I started this when I was 10 years old. I have taken welding classes, read and watched many YouTube videos and tried and failed at many things on this car,” Callen added. “I have been to so many swap meets purchasing and hauling parts that were missing.”
While running, the car still needs some interior work along with window installation, which Brandon was talking to another car show attendee about contacting someone who specialized in Model A window installation.
While The Chronicle didn’t get the chance to talk to either of the owners of the Gremlin or Continental, the Continental was owned by Todd Wallace and the Gremlin by Gary Detray, both Olympia residents who made the trip down to the Hub City to show off their rides.
Lincoln first began producing Continentals in 1939, and continued up until 2020. A subdivision of Ford, the Continental was Lincoln’s luxury full-sized sedan, and Wallace’s lowrider is from the fourth generation, produced from 1961 until 1969.
It came about at a time when Ford was struggling to keep its Lincoln division open as they were losing sales to Cadillac. Sales did rise from just over 25,000 in 1961 to almost 55,000 in 1966, but began declining again, prompting the design of the fifth generation of Continentals by 1970.
As for Detray’s Gremlin, AMC produced the tiny car to compete with other compact economy cars on the market at the time, like the Ford Pinto and Chevrolet Vega.
With designers wanting the styling to match the free-thinking mindset started by the hippy movement in the 1960s, and even debuted the car for sale on April Fools day in 1970.
By the end of its production run in the U.S. and Canada in 1978, a total of 671,475 Gremlins had been sold.
In a 2004 Charleston Daily Mail interview, the late NPR Car Talk radio show co-host Tom Magliozzi said of the Gremlin, "it's easy to criticize this car now, because just about any car from the early '70s would look bad next to today's cars. They had no fuel injection, no independent suspension, no air bags, no anti-lock brakes, no nothing! But compared with the other cars of its era, the Gremlin wasn't bad."
See more photos from the Hub City Car Show online at chronline.com.
