A 1929 Dodge Model DA four-door sedan, a right-hand-drive export model, with a six-cylinder flathead engine, wire wheels, dual side-mount spares, and a trunk mounted on the rear bumper used as a taxi in Montevideo, Uruguay, was driven up the Pan-American Highway to the United States in 1967 or ’68.
after arriving in California, it was driven around the U.S. before settling in Brooklyn, New York.
The owner painted a white map on the dark blue car, and at most major stops he added the places he visited. In New York, everyone he encountered marveled at the accomplishment. Once established in Brooklyn, he started R.S. Refrigeration & Air Conditioning Company.
These stories of cars being driven to/from South America north never include how they went around the "Darien Gap". There are no roads so, are they using a ferry boat or a crgo plane?
ReplyDeleteyou know that I don't reprint the whole article I find, I only post the good stuff.... and that prevents me from wasting your time with the endless pages of text that does nothing to keep your interest.
DeleteSo, I include the link to the source, and if anyone wants to read the whole thing, it's a click away.
In the original, "In many places there were no paved sections, so he traversed dirt roads and sometimes ferries."
I think it was a few years earlier that I read an article in Life about a South American fire company that drove their 1920-something pumper up the Pan American Highway, to seek a replacement, which as I recall they got in part as a reward for the journeym which of course was a PR coup, I think for American LaFrance. And my dim recollection is that they did indeed, have to resort to log raft ferries at some point. Of course given that there was a pretty good photographic record of the journey, one might suspect that there was more planning than they'd like to admit, a little like those travelogues where someone is biking/paddling/sledding alone in the wilderness but somehow or other there's a camera buzzing away behind them. Too busy and too late at night to search for the story, and it's even possible you already did it and I forgot. I have a dim recollection of the Uruguay car being in the news as well somewhere at the time. A rare event if not entirely unprecedented.
ReplyDeleteGreat story! I hopefully will remember to look that story up and hopefully find it and post it! I looked in my archives, and I haven't posted it.. but, it sounds familiar.
Delete