В Небраске спустя 116 лет восстановили и вывезут на выставку в Сью-Сити редкий Cadillac 1910 года

HARTINGTON, Neb. -- Family lore holds that Tony Arens and his brother, Frank, shipped a herd of cattle from their farm near Wynot, Neb. to market in Sioux City in 1910. Flush with cash from the cattle sale, the brothers each decided to buy an automobile.  For his, Tony chose a big Cadillac Model 30 touring car.  After 116 years, that car is still owned by the same family, decades after Tony Arens' death in 1965. (By the time Tony died, the car was already very old; he stopped driving it years earlier, and it sat in storage.)  The car passed through the family to one of Tony's sons, then a grandson. About five years ago, Tony's granddaughter, Marlene, and her husband, Jerry Dendinger, acquired it from the grandson, Marlene's cousin. It was not running at the time and suffered the usual deterioration that occurs when a car sits for a long, long time.  The first things to decay in a car after years of sitting are the soft things, like the tires and the upholstery. When it was pulled from retirement, the car's convertible top was gone, as was the upholstery. (The majority of cars in that period were convertibles; big open-air convertibles like the Arens Cadillac, with no windows other than the windshield, are often referred to as phaetons.)   Jerry, proprietor of Jerry's Service, a service station in Hartington, says he got the Arens Cadillac running after "one good afternoon" of working on it.  "We didn't overhaul it or anything like that," Jerry said of the engine.  The car was sent to Fremont, Neb., to be faithfully reupholstered, and the following year received a new convertible top.  Besides the cosmetic restoration work, the wooden-bodied, wooden-wheeled car, decked out in brass, is almost entirely original. The three-speed Cadillac has two ignition systems: a magneto and a battery. Ignition magnetos largely vanished from automobiles a century ago, and the Cadillac's magneto was not functional when the couple got the car. "Had to get that mag working," Jerry said.  Does it run nice?  "It does now," he said.  Turning a crankshaft by hand was notoriously laborious, compared to turning an ignition key, and was a cause of occasional broken arms. But Jerry has improved on it: He uses a power drill in place of the crank to turn the engine over, and after some hesitation, it starts right up.  The tradition of American car steering wheels being on the left side was not set in stone in 1910. (Ford's Model T, which was introduced only a few years earlier, played a pivotal role in moving the American steering wheel where it is now.) Like many of its contemporaries, the Arens Cadillac has its wooden steering wheel on the right side.  The Cadillac blows a bit of smoke out of its tailpipe, but Jerry Dendinger says it's all normal: It has no oil filter, and the four-cylinder engine naturally burns some amount of oil while it's running. There's a primitive oil gauge, of sorts, on the dashboard with a little glass window that shows an oil drip. As long as the oil is dripping in that gauge, there's oil, and that's all the driver needs to know about that.  Four cylinders might sound diminutive by Cadillac standards, but that was fairly common even in luxury cars in 1910. Twenty years later, Cadillac pioneered the enormous V-16 engine -- more really was more in those days -- before eventually settling back down to the more familiar V-8 engine.  Jerry says the car's "book" (manual) pegs the car's maximum speed at 65 miles per hour, though the speedometer tops out at 60 mph. Whether the Cadillac can attain that speed today, Jerry does not know -- the primitive braking systems and utter lack of safety features of early automobiles make high speeds exceedingly dangerous. Jay Leno, perhaps the most famous car collector in America, often says his meticulously preserved antique cars are capable of going much faster than he actually drives them, for safety reasons.  "It's our driver," Jerry said. "Marlene and I usually drive the thing about every Sunday, we take it out for a little ride, you know."   But they go at a gentle speed.  "Oh, I don't drive but, you know, 15, 20 miles an hour," he said. "That's good enough for me."  Bringing it back to Sioux City Jerry says he wants to bring the Arens Cadillac from its longtime home in Nebraska back to Sioux City to show at the Knoepfler Classic Car Show, noon to 3 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 20 at the downtown Sioux City Chevrolet dealership. (He will not be driving it on the 60-mile trip from Hartington to Sioux City; it'll be hauled in.) In its somewhat rustic state, Jerry said he doesn't expect the Cadillac will win any prizes -- but it should turn some heads anyway. "It's not a show car," he said. But it was a prestigious car Tony Arens was a farmer. His rationale for choosing a Cadillac is apparently lost to the sands of time. In 1910, most automobiles other than Fords and a few other bare-bones, budget-friendly marques were luxury items for big spenders -- high-end brands like Cadillac and Packard were especially prestigious and expensive. "He was just an average old boy," said Jerry Dendinger, who knew Tony Arens while he was alive. "He had a big white mustache."  The family says Tony purchased the Cadillac from a dealer in Sioux City, though the dealer's identity is unknown. Archival 1910 advertisements in The Journal suggest the dealer was probably the Wyckoff-Cord Automobile Co., which was apparently the sole Cadillac dealer in the city at that time.  A February 1910 Wyckoff-Cord ad in The Journal priced a new Cadillac Model 30 touring car, just like the Arens car, at $1,600 -- the equivalent of more than $54,000 today. (Calculating the value of U.S. dollars before 1913, when the Federal Reserve came into being, is somewhat inexact.) In any event, that sum was an enormous amount at the time and easily rivaled the cost of a modest house in Sioux City, which could be purchased for as little as $1,100. In many rural places outside Sioux City, the amount Tony paid for that car would've been enough to buy an entire 160-acre farm with money left over.  Get local news delivered to your inbox!