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Dalton man restores 300 antique pedal cars

 

By Clint Cooper
Staff Writer

DALTON, Ga. -- Sometimes, when people first come into Bobby Dixon's store here, they ask if it's a museum.

While the expected melange of elements in a pawn shop are piled on the floor, stacked on tables and displayed in cases, it's the pedal cars that set the American Pawn Shop on South Hamilton Street apart from others.

On shelves above customers' heads are 40 or so of the shiny, multicolored, 4-foot-long metal vehicles.

"Everybody needs a hobby," said Mr. Dixon, 48, who has some 300 of the pedal cars at his shop and his home. "I guess this is mine."

When automobiles came into vogue in the late 1800s, toymakers began to make replica cars for children. Through the years, most of the cars had simply styled sheet-metal bodies, seats and hard rubber tires. They often were equipped with horns, bells, lights and other accouterments.

Pedal cars hit an all-time high in popularity in the 1950s, according to the Pedal Car Co. Web site, as the burgeoning number of post-World War II parents rushed to give them to their children.

Dave Kleespies, a Tempe, Ariz., man whose business is restoring pedal cars, said no manufacturing numbers are available for pedal cars. However, he said there were likely hundreds of thousands of models of a popular AMF fire truck made between 1962 and 1985, for example.

He said people collect the vehicles today "for sentimental reasons" and perhaps because their "families couldn't afford them" when they were children.

Mr. Dixon, who never owned one of the vehicles as a child since his family moved around with the U.S. Air Force, has been collecting the cars for around 17 years and has restored the majority of the ones he owns.

His interest, he said, moved from a longtime love for antiques to vintage bicycles to a particular interest in a pedal boat because it was "something different."

When Mr. Dixon finally located a man with a pedal boat, he wound up buying three replica vehicles.

After being frustrated at the time it took to have one of his pedal cars restored, he elicited the help of a friend in the body-shop business and began restoring his own.

"It was trial-and-error at first," Mr. Dixon said.

In a workshop behind his house, pedal cars in restored and unrestored states are packed on shelves. Equipment and parts are strewn throughout the building.

"It's like an operating room," Mr. Dixon said. "There's stuff everywhere."

The restoration process includes disassembling the vehicle, sandblasting the metal body, priming it, painting it and reassembling it. Occasionally, he has to weld in a piece of metal on the body where rust has eaten away a hole. If the work is really intricate, he solicits the help of a professional fabricator.

"It's a lot of fine work," Mr. Dixon said. "It's a lot of a sweat, and it's time-consuming."

A fully restored car takes 30 to 50 hours, he said.

The pedal-car collector said he doesn't sell the cars he restores and only rarely swaps them for something he needs.

"My wife says I hoard them," Mr. Dixon said.

His collection includes pedal cars from manufacturers such as American National, Steelcraft, Garton, Gendron and Murray and features models from the 1920s through the 1970s.

The "premium models" were manufactured between 1922 to 1932, said Mr. Kleespies, 50. Some of those models, he said, had opening doors, tilt steering wheels, windshield wipers and independent suspension.

The most valuable models have sold for as high as $100,000, he said.

Mr. Dixon said he has no idea how much his collection is worth because one vehicle may bring $1,000 at one place and the same vehicle several hundred dollars at the next.

"Availability has everything to do with price," he said. "It's not easy to put a value on them."

The sheet-metal cars were often styled after their full-size counterparts such as Ford, Lincoln, Pontiac, Buick and Chrysler, and Mr. Dixon has one of each.

By far the most popular models, he said, were the fire chief cars and fire trucks.

Mr. Dixon's replica collection also includes 1930s- and 1940s-era Woody wagons, race cars, boats, an Air Force jeep, airplanes with working propellers, a Casey Jones Cannonball Express train engine and a military commando car complete with a plastic, hood-mounted gun.

Perhaps his most unusual item is a working 1950s-era porcelain barber chair with a pedal-car fire truck -- with a bell -- as the seat. He bought it from an Atlanta man whose father was a barber.

Many of his cars are painted in metallic two tones like the cars of their era. He paints some of them, he said, from pictures of the originals in catalogs. For others, he uses his imagination.

"It doesn't affect the value if you do something tasteful and eye-appealing," Mr. Dixon said.

The pedal-car collector said he doesn't have a favorite.

"It's always the one I'm working on," said Mr. Dixon, who pays $50 to $100 for unrestored vehicles. "Once they're done, I don't do anything with them. I just enjoy seeing them go from surface rust to all shiny again."

He said he takes a few of the cars to a couple of shows a year but, having no children or grandchildren to share them with, generally just displays them. When he finishes a car, he said, his wife allows him to bring it in the house for a couple of weeks.

Generally, though, she just "kind of rolls her eyes," Mr. Dixon said.

E-mail Clint Cooper at ccooper@timesfreepress.com