Delta Barn Find Bonanza
A little bug-eye Sprite sits front and center in a building full of interesting things. Can you spot the Facel Vega or the Nash-Healy?
Words: J.B. Welda Photos: Mike Blanchard
The Delta. That mysterious place south of Sacramento and west of Stockton that many natives don’t even know exists. A land of sport fishing and pleasure boating. Dank and dim sloughs and bayous, right out of the Deep South, concealing who knows what just below the surface. A place etched with the dusty parallel lines of agriculture. Big trucks taking up all of the narrow roadway in front of you for miles at a time, just tempting you to pass them and be squeezed right off into the dark waters of the river.
Also, traditionally, a good place for a bank robber to cool his or her heels until the heat from their most recent job passes. Home of stationary, mobile and even marine drug labs. A place where you never know who you will meet or whether you will want to meet them. And a place still containing barns full of derelict relics of civilization past. Cars, buses, trucks, airplanes: You name it; you can still find it out there, sometimes in abundance, especially if you are willing to talk to strangers whose bark is usually worse than their bite. This is exactly the feature that brought us out here on a sunny July day to do some barn-crawling.
The owner is a big fan of early Honda cars. This one sits on a Suzuki Samurai chassis.
As we pulled into the property and took a quick glance around, we noticed right away we were in the right place. Tall metal packing sheds and ancient grain elevators with three-story-high doors with cranes looming above them. Automotive detritus both recognizable and not scattered all around. Strange aeronautic apparatus leaning against walls, dilapidated tour bus vehicles back in the weeds, rusty ag equipment sticking out of rough holes in the buildings. Piles of stuff, for lack of a better word, lying around in all directions. A hoarder’s paradise and a collector’s dream.
A door opened on the side of the main building and the property’s owner, Bill, emerged into the sun, squinting from the change in light. Hailing us to come inside, we left the blaring metallic glare of the sun for the cool dankness of the three-story-tall building. A seaplane hung from the rafters along with a few ultralights. Other less-recognizable pieces came into focus as our eyes adjusted to the darkness. As we adjusted to the dim light, we realized we had come to the right place, and the stories we had heard were, if anything, understated.
Before our eyes was a wonderland of vehicles, ranging from the rare and treasured to the merely obscure, all coated in years of dust. Ex-race cars, European touring and sports cars, and beautiful coach-built vehicles once owned by famous movie stars and entertainers are now resting in faded glory in the dim light of expansive buildings that serve to shelter them from the elements, in some cases not too successfully.
Bill informed us that his collection was down to about 40 cars, from a recent high of over 100, and that he was actively selling them as we spoke, along with most everything else on the property, and the property itself. He has plans to move back east where one can buy a lot of acreage cheap, and pare down the collection at the same time. He invited us to take a look around, and he would catch up with us in a bit.
So we started looking around in the main building: A Facel-Vega here, Nash-Healey over there, some bug- eye Sprites sporting what looked to be fresh paint in one corner, and beach-buggy-like Siata Springs in another. A group of turbocharged 903 Cummins engines from Bradley Fighting Vehicles, all fresh out of the crate: must have been at least a dozen of them. Six hundred horses each as they sit; can be detuned for daily-driver use. Big Chryslers, a mid-’60s Bentley, a Volkswagen-powered dune buggy. A gaggle of Honda mini-cars from the ’70s. And this was just the first building.
“I was always interested in cars and vehicles in general, and was pretty good with a wrench,” said Bill. “So sometime in the ’70s I started buying cars that interested me, either to fix up and sell or just to keep if I liked them enough. Having storage space, I was way ahead of the game in that if I liked a car but couldn’t afford to fix it right away, I could store it and get to it when I could. So, they kind of piled up even though sometimes I was selling them as fast as I was buying them. I always have an eye out for projects, and I like the oddball ones the best. So, as you can see, they can accumulate way past the point of reason. There is that ‘hoarder’ thing too, obviously.
Mr. Speedy keepin’ it real under the hood of a Hillman panel van drag car.
“In the old days I used to watch the classified ads of all the area newspapers, and do it religiously, every morning. You never knew what you might find, and if you didn’t jump on it, the good ones would be gone by noon and you would miss them. I especially looked for specific brands, and particularly if they had some background, like being owned by a movie star or entertainer, or maybe a race car with a pedigree. Used to be, you could find those cheap as there is little worth less than last year’s race car. I would always keep my ear to the ground about auctions and estate sales and cars buried away in backyards and garages; you could find some wonders that way, too. Nowadays it’s all about the internet and Craigslist and all that, and everything has a ‘worth’ these days, especially old cars.
Mercedes coupe with fantastic presence, and patina.
“Sometimes I would buy cars with the idea of pirating parts for other projects from them and then turn around and sell the remainder for scrap. But the scrap metal market took a real dump in the last few years so it’s not even feasible to do that anymore; you just don’t get much for scrap metal. So now when I buy something, I plan on keeping it for better or worse, sometimes for the much worse.
“I was also big into converting Mercedes diesels into veggie-oil burners. That really worked great for a while; could pull into a McDonalds and they would let you take all their waste grease for free: just pump it right into your tank filters and off you go. But then it became a ‘commodity ‘and was no longer free, so I gradually gave that up for the most part.
“My favorite auto maker is probably Maserati. I have had a thing for their cars for as long as I can remember. Own quite a few of them right now. And always looking for more.
“I have also been interested in aviation and flying, and there are some items connected to that around here.”
Looking up and seeing the seaplane and ultralights suspended from the three-story ceiling confirmed that, as did pieces of a plane stored in one of the back buildings and other aeronautical items scattered about. In some places, the buildings take on the look of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum’s main lobby.
Asked about his impending move Bill replied, “I want to go back East and find a nice big property where I can continue collecting cars and other stuff I love. I will sell off as many of these cars as I can while I am here; I already have people interested in my properties, and so I am planning on keeping a few select cars and taking them with me, and then starting all over again. I have this stuff in my blood; I will always be looking for interesting cars.”
The passion Bill has for cars and collecting is obvious when you look around. Just in our short tour we noticed a couple of the “cars of the stars”: Ava Gardner’s Facel-Vega, the real jewel in the crown of the collection. Of somewhat lesser notoriety, entertainer-turned-preacher MC Hammer’s Porsche 924, distinguished by its license plate, “HAMMR TM.”
And “oddball,” how about a pair of NSU Prinzes along one wall; the multiple Siata Springs tucked into corners; a Datsun (now Nissan) Bluebird; a Subaru 360, a Japanese mini-car never imported to the States; the various British sports cars scattered about, some containing surprises under the hood, like the Austin-Healey bug-eye Sprite Bill recently sold that was powered by a Mazda 12b Rotary. You just do not see this stuff outside of museums anymore … if you ever did.
Completely aside from the automotive and aeronautical items, there are other curious things here and there, mostly acquired through Customs or law enforcement auctions. Pallets of brand-new dishwashers, for one example, seized by Customs and auctioned off; another area full of drill presses, again from an auction somewhere; and pallets of eucalyptus oil stacked against a wall, used in the Mercedes diesels. In another corner are wooden canoes and bucks, some hand-built by Bill; others are antiques he has bought up as they became available. There is literally something here for every mechanical interest; a treasure trove baking away under the hot Delta sun.
