King Midgets and More! The Barry Hilbert Auto Collection

hi I'm Lance Lambert thanks for tuning into the vintage vehicle show we are at Everett High School in Everett Washington just because we thought this would be a cool place to start this interview with somebody very interesting who I'm going to introduce you to a few years ago I was at a car show and a guy approached me and told me about a small but very eclectic collection of cars and stuff that he has and really interesting guy I stayed in touch with him the time just kind of ended up being right I called Barry Hilbert and said let's do an episode so Barry come on in here how you doing hi Lance couldn't get so much for being on the vintage vehicle show oh my pleasure you are I was really impressed when I met you with how knowledgeable you are and in the best sense of the way you are peculiar like me in that you like some some kind of unusual cars and the passion that you have for automobiles is just effervesce I I get accused of living in the past but I love the time frame of the cars I collected they meant so much to me when I was in high school and I I can't believe I found them you know it's just a high school how did it start was it then or we were a little kid pushing cars around in the dirt and and it just grew from there I did that till I had the little model AMT cars and I pushed those around and I remember the first car that impressed me we were driving 1951 in San Antonio and a 50 Nash came at us and I said dad what's that that's the first car in an unusual car that caught my interest but it is the 50s evolved and up to 59 I was about 15 years old and the cars at that time frame just seemed to come together it was the ultimate the 50 styling the colors they were new every year and I more or less have left my heart in 1959 and that's what I was looking for when I started looking for the cars and your collection screams of the 50s I mean it is the most 50s 50s collection you can have it's great well supposedly this is a hobby for rich men but I just had the desire to save these and gradually through the help of some friends and we just have brought them back and it's so nice to still have them now and you talk about rich men people have asked me about cars that I love if you put a six million dollar Duesenberg in front of me I'm really going to appreciate it and I'm gonna spend a good 10 to 15 minutes looking at it if you put that 50 Nash in front of me I'm gonna spend a half a day looking at it because that really lights the passion a car that lights a passion also I used to own a 60 Thunderbird you have it right here yeah a 60 this is this is very nice and it's a convertible so tell us about this car well this one I couldn't believe I found this one in this color my favorite TV show and 59 and it was a top show on the air was 77 Sunset Strip and Efrem Zimbalist jr. drove one just like this this color scheme and I was at an apartment in in South Everett where I lived in the mid-70s and two girls drove up in this car and I couldn't believe it and I walked over and I said this is just what I've always wanted and they said oh this it's dad's car he thinks it's neat and they didn't even want to be seen and of course I had to meet him he lived about a mile away about a year and a half or so later I was able to buy the car for a whopping $1,500 I know that the public back then and people are still saying it they got really mad at Ford when they went from a two-seater to a four-seater that was their sales doubled so they knew what they were doing well that was a gentleman who just passed away and he's known more for his vietnam-era time frame and that's Robert McNamara he came into Ford and he was all business and he said the little bird is cute but it's not a good business proposition and they came up with this and they built this car and the other car I have in the brand new Wixon plant and they built the plant just so they could make the unibody that these were made of and they had never done this before it was a personal four seater a console very low and it broke all sorts of rules and moles it had a cross-flow radiator they never tried that before and in 58 they had a big recession that was short-lived and this was the only success this car they had overtime going on these and they couldn't build him fast enough one of those stories that I've heard that makes sense is these are somewhat rare because in the demolition derby community because of the unibody and plus all the sculpting which get it a gave him extra sector bodies were very popular in demolition derby so a lot of them met their demise and in that I remember wanted a wrecking yard back in the 70s it was it looked as nice as this and there was sitting the wrecking yard just because of what a transmission probably made you sick I couldn't save everything uh-huh well speaking the transmission what do you have for a running gear and this what's what well this came pretty much one way you've got the 352 v8 with the cruise-o-matic three-speed and the first year came out in 58 a coil springs in the back because they were thinking of doing air suspension but they didn't so this has leaf springs the interesting option you could get on this and very few people ordered it is you could get the Lincoln for 30 cubic inch engine in it with the cruise-o-matic and this phenomena goes to 140 and there's a collector who claims you can hold this at 105 that fortunately has to death I know too many bugs crushing all over that car one of the things that I think is so special about I'd say definitely starting with 58 well maybe even 55 but especially 58 because of the back seat on into the mid to late 60s as the interiors on Thunderbirds are so gorgeous and so unique and so classy and so sporty all at the same time they they were the first to pioneer the fourth seat seating arrangement the console and the high door sills for what made the car strong because it's a unibody and to lower it they had to encroach on those areas so the console was a new idea the personal seating and later in the mid 60s they had that lounge seating in the top right yeah look like a couch accounta and overhead consoles came in later on with backseat look like a booth at Dino's exaction earlier yeah exactly and then the dashboard on these so a little bit Corvette II looking just a little bit because it's got the magic dudes yeah but really really good-looking and and chrome the whole Dash is chrome and it's heavy metal you you lower the glovebox door and you could break a kneecap if you weren't careful they were built I mean you know when you close the door on this car it's not oh yeah have you had to recrawl anything like the front bumper every bit of chrome on this is original okay because you don't go to a proper no not you they Ford was so intense I'm getting the styling right on these that their regular bumper manufacturer wouldn't stamp that much steel because it's so big the bumper grille and they finally found a company that would make it one piece so that it would look right I had a look at style was everything the term I liked was gentleman's hot rod good term yeah although to be honest these these don't handle very well in corn though they're very nose heavy be a chef forward for style and they're a Boulevard cruisers yeah like my 60 like - that's right you turn the wheel and then you'd kind of give it a little time and they would do a little nosedive and then fight exactly turn but you look good doing it yeah that's true a good one of these you know you can if you can find it you can go out and get a good hardtop for 12 $15,000 make it a convertible and you you quickly add at least $10,000 to that and on well they built about 60 just over 60 thousand Thunderbirds and 59 10,000 were convertibles and there was a book I got back in the 70s I have still have it somewhere tucked away but it had two interesting charts in it that I thought were really fascinating it shows the value curve of a car and it goes straight down to nothing at about twelve years and then starts to come almost straight back up again meanwhile how many are left and it showed that it when you reach 18 years of age there's 0.8 percent or less than one percent of a car left so I was buying these cars that I have when they were worth nothing in about years of age and there were still enough of them out there that hadn't been crushed or done away with and like they said you know when a car gets old it has no value and it needs a lot of work so what's the sense in keeping it unless you think it's something else may your crystal ball is yes shined up the convertible top on these they're kind of fun to watch go down well they they initially thought about they spent a lot of time debating the convertible on this car first of all it's a unibody they have to keep the statement for the viewers that don't know the unibody means there's there's no frame on no friends yeah it's all why like an old Nash a Nash was unibody the Lincoln's efforts were and they thought about a three-piece retractable top like the retractable Ford's that didn't work at all so then they thought about having a target t-top which they built a prototype of it looked really nice and they were gonna have flaps that lift it up so you could get in easier someone came up and it might have been the same man who came up with retractable having a retractable soft top that lifts off and folds up and goes upside down into the trunk and then your trunk is hinged backwards like to retract of a hole yeah and it totally gives it such a clean look and yet you've got you know the best of both yeah some of the sixties had sunroof set up 60s had 2100 sunroof say made with a metal roof to cranked back and they didn't offer it again till 67 I believe it was but again a good idea but people just didn't spend the money on this is a lot of car this is a huge car and in huge I mean if you if you looked it up on the dictionary this is it this is hard what do we have here and how big is it this as I call it in the age of excess this was excess it's a 59 Continental Mark for convertible and right away people are going to say well wait a minute mark for didn't come out till the 70s when they dropped the mark to Continental in 57 they wanted to keep the name alive and this was a whole new car the unibody again and they said let's use the mark so in 58 they called it a mark 3 in 59 a mark 4 and in 60 a mark 5 then when the four doors came out in 61 they went to back to Lincoln Continental and it wasn't till 69 and then they had to decide what to do they were gonna bring the Continental back again and they just wrote these off so I called them and a lot of people call them The Forgotten Continental it's 19 feet 1 inch long weighs 5,400 pounds runs on nine fifty fourteen tires it's machine it's an inch longer than the biggest Ford SUV and it's nothing subtle about it all and the one thing for the view is to remember this is not a Lincoln Continental this is a continental well as as the books will say when they talk about it it's badge-engineered it's really a Lincoln with the most unique thing is its power back window and they put continental name on it but it really was just a badge and tell me tell the viewers what you just told me off camera but to come at your dad paid well my dad had one of these in a two-door hardtop of Continental mark358 and people would say oh you're Lincoln and he'd say no I paid $2,000 extra for the back window that goes up and down it's a continental giant car interesting convertible top interesting interior very heavy very long what's what's under that hood and what's the transmission well not only did they build a new Wixon plant to do these in yoona bodies nobody before or since has ever done a unibody this big the car kept getting heavier so they said we need a new engine so on top of everything else they built this monster is 430 cubic inch engine which is called a wedge and block combustion chamber the top of the block is cut in an angle when you put the heads on it can grate creates a combustion chamber inside the block and it's in 59 was rated at 350 horsepower with a 298 rear axle ratio through a cruise-o-matic and this car when Motor Trend tested it only the Pontiac tripower and the Plymouth Fury were faster 260 miles an hour this thing was unbelievable it could take all this mass and move it down the road that fast and it has coil springs all the way around because they were thinking of doing air suspension and I could do it you turn out of downtown Street this this car handles so well you forget how much car you've got and you just start driving it like it's a regular car which is the most the best compliment I think you can give it uh-huh your t-bird is really different and sculptured and this is really different in sculpture but they don't look the same that it's you know it's different stuff rereading the articles on these cars they had developed a way of deep stamping metal by about 1955 into the late 50s and so the sculptures went to work on this and is the magazine article says there's a lot of deep drawn steel on this and a lot of unique styling the scoop effect that goes down the side the little little fins on the back but very defined and of course the headlight shaping it's it's just just a tiny I mean talk about a car that's a total opposite of this but there's just a little tiny Corvette touch with that Cove on the side I don't know what their thinking was on the cove in the 58 it was very deep and very pronounced on the 59 they toned it down the headlights on the 58 were isolated from the grill they toned that down and they just I don't know where they got the idea for the cove it doesn't to me seem to fit that well and style why's that that the back end of this shouldn't work I mean it doesn't make sense works not mechanically but just the style of it sir like what's going the wrong way and when it smell cut off and it's blunt but it still looks right it's my favorite angle of the car I I like the rear three-quarter view showing the cut in window and that I think makes the whole rear and look even longer which it doesn't like to say perhaps need to do and the interior on these look more like they should be in a very stylish 1959 modern home living room rather than in the car well one thing they did on the interior is they continued using leather from bridge bridge of where Scotland and that was supposedly a better deep die process and as my dad said the cows over there didn't get marks in them from barbed wire fences but they continued to use some of the things from the mark too but it really does with what they call biscuits and pleating they used a style it was in effect in your homes back then and it is unbelievable how much room is in that car I can what make the power seat go back and tip it so much I can't reach the gas haha and I'm six-two berry we have made a giant I want to say leap actually a miniscule look I guess said that from a giant 59 continental to a little itty bitty King [ __ ] and before you answer any questions I think you and I fall into what a lot of the viewers fell into when I was growing up my dad and everybody's dad had a subscription to Popular Mechanics and every issue in the back there was an ad for a king [ __ ] and every boy wants and lots of girls I'm from about four years old on just dreamed about having one of these cars I just think they are so cool I was that way it was 1959 and I was going to high school in California dad was in the Air Force and he took those magazines and I sent for the catalog which showed this model but at my high school one of the kids had the earlier King [ __ ] and every day he would come out and have to lift the front end of the car up off the concrete stops put it back down and put out of the parking lot but it dollar a week allowance for cutting the lawn even at six hundred and eighty dollars this wasn't going to happen it took 35 years to do with them yeah you have two of them they are there they're so cute well what's the appeal here I know the answer this already but I want to get your you know you have a car that's totally for the most part impractical you don't want to be trying to go down the freeway on this car people ask me if I Drive on a freeway it's limited and everything it's probably a little bit dangerous because it's maybe it's just not seen and you know knowing all these things I still want one no it's well it's got a cuteness about it it's timeless it looks like an old jeeps dirty looks like one of the jeep stirs from the early 50s the size I mean it's just unpretentious it doesn't put on any airs it just says hey look at me I'm in this little little car and it's so well made and I think that's what impresses me about it is how well-made it is the two men had a dream to build a little car in Athens Ohio and succeeded and people come up to me I can be my one-man car show and they come up and they want to know about it if I meet somebody that has even seen the ad I think that's amazing haha the history of King midgets I know they originally started out basically like looking like soapbox derby cars of motors and I won then they had a kind of a sporty model or whatever can you can you run us through the history well they started out they met after World War Two with a Civil Air Patrol meeting and they didn't say being these two guys yeah Dale Orkut and Claud drying huh and they both built homemade airplanes and said why you know why can't you build a little commuter car that was built like a home-built airplane very light efficient simple so I said well that's a nice idea but how can you do it so they started out building a scooter that really looks pretty neat have you ever see a picture of a king there's a scooter they kept pocketing the money then they came out with this one seater like you're talking about looks like a dirt track racer huh that was mostly a kit you had a bill that yourself then came the first two-seater which was a little small Ernest more rounded off smaller engine and this is the biggest car the final evolution the most complex thing they ever built still a 1 cylinder engine and this started being built in 57 and lasted till they went out of business in 69 which wasn't their fault a guy bought the company in 66 and it went into bankruptcy in three years this particular car has a 12 horsepower Kohler in it right right that was the biggest engine they ever put in them they started putting those engines in in 67 12 horsepower and then before that they used the Wisconsin nine horse how fast will it go and what kind of transmission does it have they supposedly patented it's a two-speed centrifugal clutch system which surprisingly very simple but they came up with it in the catalog they said it would do 55 when I was younger and dumber I took one of them down in front of the Navy base held the gas pedal down and it got to 55 and I'm thinking this is a dumbest thing I have ever done if you've ever seen the cameras in the land speed record cars just before they flip over huh where they're going like this that's security that's what I was doing mmm they're happiest around town at about five they hate they love to do what a big car hates to do stop and go short trips slow speeds my thought is that the ownership of one of these it's a short commuter you run to the grocery store any you run to the neighbor's house and it you just have fun in it yeah you know you're not gonna pack up and make a 200-mile drive and although I'm sure there are people out there that do that but what what is the best use of this is this a smart car out of out of the 50s or wouldn't he well exactly what you're saying what would kill a big car this loves to do stop and go short runs one of the best ideas I heard is used it at the service airplanes at a small municipal airfield he can go out with a little trailer behind it go from plane to plane shut it off turn it on put around it nothing's gonna bother it but there is a they showed a photo of the guy with his King [ __ ] the earlier model in the early 50s this guy took one from Michigan to Mexico City and back over 11,000 foot high mountain range at seven hundred miles of desert didn't have a single breakdown to cost him forty four dollars for gas so people did some bizarre things with these way beyond what you'd imagine but they they were yeah they would they were ahead of the time the smart car the whole idea of simplicity maintain it yourself is wonderful what this car cost is what it costs for a diagnostic checkup today before you even find out you know what your car needs very let me drive this from where he lives to a little spot here yeah the first thing that impressed me was it was so roomy inside there was a lot of room in there it was actually comfortable and could have had my wife sitting alongside of me and we'd have been just fine in it it felt like my you know is there something beyond here or was it all the way to the front because it looked like right about here is where the floor comes up with a fender right into the fenders and right even with the fenders there is a partial shelf that goes all the way to the nose it's a little hard to get at between put side curtains coats and whatever you want back there and nobody will even know it's there a little bit of trunk area but it is anyone I've given a ride to in this just marvels at how much room there is inside the other ones white what's really nice this looks really sporty and you say this is a stock color on this this was a stock color they decided initially to do one color and that was white keep everything simple but in the 60s people wanted colors so they offered red yellow and blue and the story goes that because now they had a mixed of paint and put it in a spray gun and shoot your car that they would charge ten dollars extra for the trouble unlike Detroit which would offer you what about 50 colors of Samms power per year and a certain period of time all 50 callers at the same time on it on the car this my wife loves the red I like the white one because the white one was one of the one I saw in the ads in the magazines and you know the restoration on this I mean this this looks like a show car this is absolutely beautiful well it's it's it's nicer than most of them look is a lot of them were used up and thrown away you find that they've been thrown out in the backyard somewhere some were just treated always as a toy and this one obviously was I got it from an elderly couple and they said it have been in heated storage ten years the only thing bad with it was the inner tubes it rotted oh and it's got the original Goodyear tires the tops original the masonite dashboard I'm even know if you can buy masonite anymore it's it's just a nice original car with our one repaint on it what model year is this this one's a 67 67 and this is when the new owner started cranking these out instead of building them as they were getting orders and they were storing them all over Athens Ohio and they ran out of money and he just he did the exact opposite of what was working for over 25 years and but he was gonna make a big success out of it well supposedly at one time it was the fifth biggest car company in the United States and when all of independents were disappearing yeah Barry thank you very much for allowing us to take a look at your collection both large and small very large and very small I thinking we have done over 400 episodes of the show and you have the most the biggest in the small collection we've seen most at each end yeah yeah so thanks a lot my pleasure and I appreciate any publicity at the king that you can get that it never got when it was being built is great to see ya and thank you very much for watching the show I'll let you in a little secret I'm working on a deal on owning a king [ __ ] so next time you see me ask me if I actually did the deal thanks a lot for watching and we will see you again next time until then bye bye you

Channel: VV Productions

Views: 6,204

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: The Vintage Vehicle Show, Lance Lambert, Barry Hilbert, 1959 Thunderbird, 1959 Continental Mark IV, 1965 King Midget, Everett, Washington, WA

Id: XF5UopUtB_w

Length: 26min 5sec (1565 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 01 2014