For this week’s edition of Punching the Clock, I made my to the Northeast Classic Car Museum to lend a worker’s hand or – as I secretly hoped – a driver’s foot.
Founded in the wake of Procter & Gamble’s withdrawal from Chenango County, the classic car museum represents a group of concerned citizens’ attempt to help elevate some of the county’s financial woes. Since opening in the mid-1990s, the museum has drawn thousands of tourists to the City of Norwich, luring them in with an impressive fleet of antique cars, currently tallying in at around 174. Before arriving at the museum, it had never occurred to me that the number of cars held within the museum is transitory. But I received some on-the-job education from Northeast Classic Car Museum board member and Norwich City Police Chief Joseph Angelino, who slapped some knowledge on me. As it turns out, the car museum’s exhibits are constantly in a state of flux, as volunteers work hard to swap out cars which have been delighting visitors for a given period of time with “new” ones.
“We like to change out the cars to keep the museum fresh and get people coming back again,” board president Phil Giltner later told me. This continuous exchange of motorized antiquities turned out to work in my favor, as I benefited from the unexpected arrival of a “new” car which needed to be wheeled in.
Before we got to that, however, Marge Horovitz, a pleasant volunteer who can often be seen working the museum’s front desk, took me on a spin though the museum’s lobby. Marge’s job mostly demands she be her cheery self and handle incoming visitors to the museum, which also offers an assortment of collectables with best sellers being tin signs.
“I am not sure why they sell so well,” Marge admitted, “but people are just fascinated by them.”
After I was properly acquainted with the front portion of the building, I was handed over to museum volunteer Dick Schutt. Dick brought me to the museum’s main floor where he explained most of the duties he performs as a volunteer. As it turns out, the museum’s climate controlled environment takes care of a good portion of the work and most of what Dick has to do – as far as handyman work goes – involves checking tire pressure, dusting, and changing out the cars. Still, the board does allow him to tinker with some of the cars which the museum owns. Now a retired teacher, Dick was once a mechanic by trade, as well as a life-long car enthusiast, and he has been able to get a few of the cars running, such as the museum’s 1912 Metz, which made an appearance last year at the Syracuse nationals. The real heart of what Dick does, however, is lead guided tours of the museum.
“I especially like guiding the group tours for schools and car clubs,” he added.
It was around this point in the tour that we met up with Giltner, who had been hunting for Dick to enlist his aid in moving out one of the cars populating the museum’s post-war showroom with another that had just arrived. He got more help than he had anticipated, as I was determined to tag along, even if I would not get a chance to operate one of the antique automobiles myself.
A fair amount of the cars in the museum’s post-war room are actually loans from various private owners. The car we had to move out was a pine green, 1953 Packard, to be replaced with a salmon colored, 1950s Ford Skyliner. Luckily, both cars were running, so we wouldn’t be forced to push them in and out of the museum, although we did have to manually propel an adjacent navy blue Packard to make way for the transaction.
The process of changing out the cars was conducted with the smooth precision of the veteran volunteers’ experience. Dick jumped into the green Packard and, with a little help from a portable jump starter, got it running. Once the Packard was out of the way it was time for me to move and rid the concrete floor of the used clothes used to catch the dripping oil as well as wipe up any stray splotches speckling the floor.
Shortly afterwards ,the vacant spot was once again filled with a new/old car, which I sadly was not permitted to drive either, though I admit that was probably for the best.