Beaver Springs Dragway – Every now and then, you see a car, and you just have to know. You just have to. What am I talking about? I’m talking about the Studebaker of Bob English. The English Brothers are no strangers to having hot rods, with a full stable of top-shelf cars, but this one is different. The first time I saw it years ago, I had to know more, I knew there had to be a story here, and I finally got around to asking Bob about it. If you haven’t seen it before, it’s one of those cars that just screams out with character. It’s not the flash, it’s not the roar of the engine, it’s the patina of the car from top to bottom, front to back, just the way it’s built that grabs a hold of your senses, with the ghosts of hot rodding past begging to tell their story. And now we’ll find out as Bob English tells the story of this car.

“It was 1965. My father had a little Mom & Pop gas station. He was a local hot rodder, did a lot of engine stuff for the hot rodders in the area. This guy [the car owner] was actually one of my classmates. He bought this car and took it to my dad to make a hot rod out of it. My dad put a 259 v8 Studebaker [engine], and a three speed manual transmission and a ford rear end in it.”

So that was the beginning of the car’s life as a hot rod. Carefully assembled by the capable hands of Mr. English, a master hot rodder with a solid reputation. But that’s only the beginning of the story. Bob continues, telling how it ended up in his hands. “Back then a lot of cars were street cars and race cars, they did both. He [the owner] drove it on the street and raced it with that Studebaker V8. Sometime after that, he sold it and it disappeared for 4 to 5 years. Turns out it was in a barn that probably wasn’t 10 miles from my house, probably for 40 years. When the guy that owned it passed away, the estate sold it, and it changed hands a couple times after that. My brother and his co-worker were on their way out to Pittsburgh and they spied it along route 220 out around Lock Haven along the road for sale. My brother sent me a picture on the phone and said ‘do you remember this car.’ I graduated in ‘64 so I wasn’t around the garage like he was, he was younger so I really kind of remembered the car but not all the particulars of it, but he remembered it like it was yesterday, because he helped my dad when they did the conversion on it. We didn’t really need another car, but I bought it because of my dad…my dad built it. It was really nostalgic that winter, I took the Studebaker engine out and put a chevy V8 in it, but I really tried leave as much of it as I could the way my dad did it. Back then they did pretty crude work, didn’t have all the technology they have today, TIG welders, all the fancy brakes and stuff. When he opened the floor up to make room for the transmission and engine, he just took his welder and turned up the heat on the welder and took his stick and burned out around it. There was a lot of stuff that was kind of crude on it, but I left it because my dad did it. That’s just how it was done then. But that’s how we ended up with it,” Bob said matter of factly. “It’s been a good car.”

Now we know the story of this special car. It’s not only a good backup car when one of the others are down, it’s a rolling testimony to the ingenuity hot rodders of the past needed to display every day to build their cars, as well as a suiting memorial to keep the memory of the English Brothers’ father alive in their own hearts. Think of that the next time you see this beauty pulling up to stage. It’s much more than just a car.