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The Once and Future Car: Bill Brown and the Reappearing Pontiac Chieftain By Cate Huisman Bill Brown was not looking for fancy wheels when he moved to Sandpoint with his family in 1958 - just a way to get to school and get around on Saturday nights. On a trip to Spokane with his dad the following year, he found a 1955 Pontiac Chieftain two-door hardtop that had come in on trade. It was attractive - baby blue and cream, with blue upholstery, whitewall tires, and an image of its eponymous Native American on the
steering wheel. The price was $750, and Bill worked that off filling sandbags for the Corps of Engineers to keep the Kootenai River from flooding nearby Bonners Ferry. In the years before Libby Dam was built, many young men were able to pay off their cars that way. Bill drove the car through high school, and then he was off to Pacific University in Oregon in the fall of 1962. His dad wouldn’t let him take the car to college until he got his first set of grades, but when those passed muster, he headed south in the Chieftain after Thanksgiving at home with his family. But the car did not make it. “The engine blew up,” Bill says, in Pasco, Washington. So Bill caught the train to school, and his dad made the four-hour drive to the Tri-Cities to rescue the vehicle. He got it back to Sandpoint where it sat behind the family’s Huron Street house for a
while. Then Bill left college and joined the navy, and his dad, tiring of its inanimate presence, sold it while Bill was in the service. For most people with most cars, that would be the end of the story. “I thought it was a cool car,” Bill says, and he tried to find it after his naval service. He found the man out on Selle Road to whom his dad had sold it, but that buyer had sold it again, and he did not remember to whom. Time passed. Bill started buying rental houses and opened the business he still runs, Bill Brown Rentals, on Second Avenue in Sandpoint. He got married, had kids, worked on the pipeline in Alaska for a couple of years, and finished his degree at Eastern Washington University. Then came Bill’s 40th high school reunion in 2002. “My thought was to find a car like the one I had in high school, fix it up, and drive it to my class reunion,” Bill recalls. So he started looking through the classified ads, and felt fortunate to find a 1955 Pontiac for sale at Dad’s Auto Wrecking just east of town. “I went to look at the car; it was the same make and model as what I had in high school,” Bill states. That was a good start, but things got better as he checked it out. There was a cigarette burn in the back seat in the same spot as one (Continued on page 14)