Car grills, I thought as I spotted stacks of them on a counter in the box-lot room at an auction house recently. Now that was unusual. I’ve seen cars put up for auction. I’ve seen motorcycles sold. I’ve even picked up a few car medallions from time to time, including a Mercedes emblem.
But I didn’t recall ever seeing plastic grills from a car. As I looked closer, they seemed too wide for car grills so I wasn’t sure where they had come from. From the size of them, I knew that the vehicle on which they had once lived had to be long and wide, like the antique cars of old with their expansive metal bodies.
I assumed the grills had been picked up from some parts store or garage that had gone out of business, because sitting on the floor just below them in plastic crates were headlights, side mirrors and other vehicle parts. There were also wide panels on a shelf above the grills that looked like boat windshields.
I had never thought of grills as works of art – those at auction were too pedestrian to be art – until I started researching them on the web. After seeing photos of antique metal grills, I saw the light. They were gorgeous. Take a look at the ones on this website, with its array of cars the size of tanks. Or this Flickr gallery, where the photographer noted that he might turn them into a calendar someday. I think I’ve already seen such a calendar.
The grills made me think about a trip I took recently to the Museum of Bus Transportation in Hershey, PA. I went in search of old Trailways and Greyhound buses, but couldn’t get to them in the basement until I ventured through the first-floor collection of antique cars. It was one of those “wow, wow, wow” encounters for an antique car lover like me.
The tour came with a delightful dose of history from car buff, former car restorer and the knowledgeable Walter Weidner. He was a walking-and-talking encyclopedic storyteller, regaling my friend Sandy and me with tidbits about specific cars, and insisting that we read each placard featuring women and cars. Weidner was included in a video that was part of the colleciton in which he recalled his first car at age 18 – a fix-‘er-up 1929 Model A that he bought with $30 that his grandfather had given him.
When I walked among the cars that day, I was taking in the all-ness of each of them, never separating the chrome grill from the leather interior or the polished exterior. So, I went back over the photos I took to see if I photographed any grills. And I certainly did. Maybe, subconsciously, I was taken as much with the grills as the rest of the cars and didn’t realize it.
Here’s some of what I found at the museum:
