12 minute read
A VERY SPECIAL AUTOMOBILE
Way back in 1934, long before social media, and well before the marketing boom in the 1950s, the Packard car company began using the slogan “Ask a Man Who Owns One” to help convince drivers to buy their cars. Local dealerships even handed out booklets to prospective buyers with the names of people in the community who owned the luxury auto. The last Packard rolled off the production line in 1956, but you can still ask Gary Keehl of Adrian what it’s like to own one.
Not only does Keehl have a beautifully restored 1936 Packard, but he has a remarkable story of how he came to own it.
Keehl took possession of the 87-year-old car in 2020, driving across the country from Michigan to Bakersfield, California, to pick it up. Arrangements were made in advance for the vehicle transfer, including getting a trailer to bring the car back to Michigan, but Keehl’s journey happened to be on the same day the Covid-19 pandemic was quickly shutting everything down in California and across the country. “It was an interesting trip,” Keehl’s wife, Donna, recalls.
The same might be said of the story over 40 years in the making behind their cross-country trek. Keehl wasn’t going to California to purchase the classic car. He was accepting it as a gift left to him by Buck Owens, country music star and longtime host of the TV show “Hee-Haw.”
Owens died in 2006, but when some of his valuables were distributed last year, “I was the chosen one for the 1936 Packard,” Keehl said. Buck Owens and the Buckaroos breakout song, “Act Naturally” hit number one on the Billboard country music charts in 1963, a song The Beatles would record two years later. Gary Keehl, a modest man with a gift for all things mechanical, including small airplanes, model trains, and automobiles, became a valued and trusted member of the country music star’s inner circle not only for his mechanical prowess, but undoubtedly for his down-to-earth authentic values of honesty, fairness, and hard work.
A native Michigander, Keehl moved to California in 1969 as a young man in search of better weather and better work than the auto-painting he was doing in Dearborn, not making much money and being exposed to toxins all day. First, he worked in the oilfields in California, doing that “not long, but long enough to find out that’s not what I want to do.” “I knew I could always create work, fix stuff, put together enough scrub work to keep myself alive. I did a lot of different things,” Keehl said.
Soon enough, Keehl found work as an airplane mechanic fixing small plane engines, and later opened his own mechanic shop in downtown Bakersfield. “There were no signs, not even an ‘open’ sign. I had plenty to do, thank you—my business was all word of mouth,” Keehl said.
Driving a 1933 Plymouth at the time, one weekend in 1977 Keehl went to see about a car advertised for sale in the paper. While he was checking out the car, another gentleman pulled up, asked Keehl about his Plymouth, and they struck up a conversation about older cars when the stranger asked if Keehl worked on Packards. “It’s a car,” Keehl said. “I work on cars.” The man said his boss had a Packard and it needed an engine overhaul. “I told him, ‘I can do it.’ So I did it,” Keehl says, chuckling at the memory. “I’ve always messed with cars, and I’ve passed myself off as a mechanic. And I knew enough to nail this job,” Keehl said.
The man Keehl met that day was a Buckaroo, one of Buck Owens’ band members, and their chance encounter led to Keehl becoming Buck Owens’ mechanic, a lifetime of friendships, and some extraordinary experiences for the delightfully ordinary folk that Gary and Donna Keehl are.
Keehl began working on Owens’ 100acre horse ranch soon after the chance encounter with the Buckaroo, but it would be two years before he met the man he worked for. “He had trucks and Jeeps and things for the ranch and a big building full of cars, a motor home,” Keehl said. “One of his businesses was a publication advertising cars for sale, and I worked on some of those cars too, getting them ready to go out to various places.”
Trust takes time, and Keehl earned it in the two years he did work for Owens before meeting him at Buck’s sister’s house, located on the ranch. “Buck was very generous, very kind,” Donna Keehl recalls. “He treated Gary not as an employee but as a family member because he trusted him. As famous as Buck was, sometimes he didn’t know who to trust, but he trusted Gary.” “Buck treated us to a weekend at Kewadin Casino up north when he performed there. He treated us to Nashville to see the filming of Hee Haw for the day, and we were in some of the episodes,” Donna said.
In 1998, Owens even presented Keehl with one of his signature red, white, and blue guitars, complete with the inscription, “To My Friend Gary — If mechanic-ing ever throws a rod maybe you can ‘Pick and Grin’ with us! Buck and the Buckaroos.”
Something of a mechanical wizard, Keehl gained a reputation for his knowledge of specialty cars, and Buck Owens had a rotating fleet of them. At any given time, Keehl estimates, Owens had about 25 cars, and Keehl worked on their engines, transmissions, brakes — whatever they needed to run. Besides the 1936 Packard Keehl now owns, there was a red Viper that Owens once let Gary and Donna take for the weekend, a ’59 Cadillac that is still part of Owens’ estate, and a 1972 Stutz Blackhawk Owens bought from his good friend, crooner Dean Martin. Most famously, a 1972 Pontiac Grand Ville, dubbed the Buckmobile, now hangs on display behind the bar at Owens’ Crystal Palace, a music venue, nightclub, and country music museum in Bakersfield, California.
Originally intended for Elvis Presley, the Grand Ville’s interior was customized by Nudie Cohn, famed “tailor to the stars,” the man responsible for the many bedazzled outfits worn by the likes of Elvis and country music stars from a bygone era. Keehl’s memorabilia includes one of Cohn’s business cards from the 1970s. “Cars were like toys to Buck,” Keehl says. “Sometimes he drove them but not always.” Keehl’s own ’33 Plymouth was an object of BUCK OWENS UP FRONT fascination to Owens. One day
WITH THE ‘HEE HAW’ CAST Owens asked, “How do you start it?”
“Stick with me, son,” Gary replied to Owens. “I’ll show you how to start it with a crank.” “But that’s how he got along with Gary,” Donna says with a laugh. “Not too many people would say that because they’re in awe of a star, but not Gary.” The son of sharecroppers during the Dust Bowl, Buck Owens came from very humble beginnings. “One thing about Buck is he never forgot his roots,” Donna Keehl said. “He always appreciated where he came from. He appreciated anybody who did hard work. Hard work was very important to him.”
Gary Keehl knows a lot about hard work. A born tinkerer, Keehl also clearly enjoys the hard work he does. “After we picked up the [1936 Packard], I completely disassembled it, took it, had it painted, brought it back piece by piece, reassembled it, Humpty-Dumpty, and there it is,” Keehl said.
When Keehl brought the car back to Michigan, it was a return to its roots. Made in Detroit, the car has an inline 8-cylinder engine, a three-speed manual transmission, the original factory radio, a trunk, and a rumble seat, also known as a mother-in-law seat. A fold-down seat located in front of the trunk, the seat is so named as it sits above the low rumble of the exhaust system. Automobile continued...
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The Keehls invited me to try climbing into the rumble seat. There are no handles, but two steps — roughly the size of silver dollar pancakes — one on the rear bumper, and another approximately two feet above it on the fender. Balancing on the first step on the ball of the left foot, then stretching up to get the ball of the right foot on the second step, the left leg then must swing all the way up above the trunk to step into the seat. Any mother-in-law would have had to have been fairly nimble and undeterred by high heels or a narrow skirt to make the precarious climb. Once in the seat I admit I felt compelled to wave like the
Queen. Always drawn to the Bonnie and
Clyde-type cars from the 1930s, Keehl admires the many features of his very special ‘36 Packard convertible coupe. “The styling. Riding in it, you’ll feel that it’s smoother than any other old cars,” Keehl says with a grin. “It’s a quality car, a luxury liner. It’s just a very fine automobile. They steer easy. They brake easy. Comfortable, rides soft, like a sofa. They were big, beautiful cars. Oh yeah, you go down the road with that, you’re going to cause wrecks the way people look at it. It’s like a little king’s car.”
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Keehl was kind enough to take me for a ride so I could experience it for myself, and it was every bit as smooth as he described. After I’d “asked the man who owns one” what the car was like to drive, Keehl’s generosity was on full display when he said, “Why don’t you ask the woman who drives it?” and pulled over to switch seats with me.
The clutch was smooth and easy, and the three gears easy to find on the long stick shift. The large steering wheel had a little play in it, but was easy and responsive, as were the brakes. Looking through the small windshield and over the long front hood felt a little like being in a two-seater airplane.
We cruised through some neighborhoods at 25 mph and while other drivers turned their heads as we glided by, I was relieved not to have caused any wrecks before turning the wheel back over to Gary.
The Keehls take the Packard to about three car shows a week this summer, and it most recently won “Best in Show” in Tecumseh. Both Gary and Donna enjoy sharing their knowledge of the car with others. “I love using it as a learning tool, to show people the differences between cars today,” said Donna, a retired teacher. “Children are just so fascinated by it, and many of their parents don’t know about things like rumble seats.”
Gary agrees. “It’s funny the reactions you get,” he said. “One little boy ran his finger along it, then licked it as if he thought the car was frosting. Women want to sit in it. Men like to reminisce about someone they knew who had one, a grandpa, or someone they were raised with. Rarely do you find anyone who knows that era.”
Earlier this summer, the car was used in some scenes for a movie “The Adventures of Yamashita’s Island,” currently in production by a local independent film company, PapeTon Pictures. “They’re gonna put me in the movies. They’re gonna make a big star out of me... and all I gotta do is act naturally,” sang Buck Owens in the song that rocketed him to fame almost 60 years ago.
Gary Keehl is happy to have his car in the spotlight rather than himself. His eyes light up when he talks about his work on airplanes, his model trains, and especially his car. His stories about the people and things he’s surrounded himself with come with an easy laugh and genuine affection. I couldn’t help but think there’s kind of a magical Santa’s workshop feel to the spaces where Gary does his work. But to Gary, it may be less work than just acting naturally. n
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