Auto biography: Warwick family’s 1954 Chevy is lovingly restored

WARWICK — There’s a lot of family history rolled up in Barry Carroll’s 1954 Chevrolet 210 two-door sedan, going back to his wife’s grandfather, who was the original owner.

And while Carroll is nominally the owner, there is no doubt in his mind that the car really belongs to his daughter Katie, a special-education teacher in New Orleans.

And there is no doubt in her mind that one day she will introduce it to “my kids and tell them that their mother and their grandfather and their great-grandfather and their great-great-grandfather all have had a hand in keeping it running.”

Carroll agrees. “If you offered me $100,000 for the car, I’d have to make a choice between $100,000 and my daughter, and I can tell you, you won’t be driving away in it.”

Katie was a small child when Carroll bought the car — or what was left of it — from his father-in-law, George Comley, who inherited it from his father, Ellsworth Comley, who had bought it new.

Carroll said Ellsworth passed away less than a year after buying it and his son George drove it as a daily driver for many years before parking in the yard.

“He drove it until 1981 when it needed a lot of work,” he said. “He thought the car was “no longer worth fixing and lost interest in it. The car was left in a wooded area and left to rot.”

“In 1984, I married Pam Comley and began pestering George about that old junk out in the side lot,” he said, adding that he bought it in 1990 and spent the next four years restoring it with his childhood friend Don St. John.

And Katie.

“The part that got me was the story, where the car came from,” she said by telephone from New Orleans. “I could not believe a car could last that long.”

“I have a Jeep but there’s not a story to it, I’m over it,” she added. “But the big, old green-cream ’54, that’s a car.”

“Katie knows every working part of the car,” Carroll said. “She absolutely [gets] her hands dirty. If friends of hers have car trouble, they go to her and she opens the hood and gets to work.

At the same time, he pointed out rose decals on the front side windows and said they were Katie’s. “She never missed a cruise night since age 7 or 8,” he said. “The roses on the windows are a nod to the 7-year-old [but she also] went to her prom in the car.”

The Carrolls’ Chevrolet 210 is a first generation model of the midrange Chevrolet produced from 1953 to 1957. “The radio … was the big option,” he said.

He said the exterior was in very bad shape when he got it, with the quarter panels front and rear badly rusted. “It was pretty gnarly looking,” said Katie.

“I put together panels from sheet metal from a Whirlpool washing machine,” he said, adding that he used so much sheet metal that “the car is really a Chevrolet Whirlpool.”

He said the gas tank sat for a long time with gas inside. “I had a brainstorm,” he said. He cleaned it out with rocks and water, started soldering and ended up with no eyebrows.

He said the engine had seized. “[St. John] had a great idea, to push start it in gear,” he said. “It worked, but the transmission seized and stripped. The good news was that now I’ve got a brand new transmission.”

The car has whitewall tires, a 6-volt battery, a stylized eagle/jet hood ornament and five gears on the steering column. He said much of the interior was restored original, although blankets cover “where the seats need to be redone.”

He said the clock wasn’t working until he showed it to a friend who said it simply needed winding. “It’s kept perfect time ever since.” he said. “I wind it every day, 23 winds.”

He said he painted the car cream and GM truck green instead of the original sea foam green, which he did not like. He said both were 1954 GM colors.

Carroll said the brightwork was a mix of chrome and stainless steel. “With the steel, you polish, polish, polish and hope for the best,” he said.

Carroll, 59, is a retired machinist at the former Stanley Bostitch manufacturing plant in East Greenwich. “It all started because Dad worked nights and so looked after us during the day,” said Katie of herself and her brother, James.

Pam, who is a retired special-education bus driver, makes exquisite 1/144 scale dollhouses. “I think she kind of wishes I had gotten into dollhouses,” said Katie, but added that she felt “very lucky to have spent so much time with my Dad with something we both enjoy.”

Carroll said he did not go to cruise nights for two years after Katie left for the University of New Orleans. “It was always me and Katie and she was gone,” he said.

Katie said she, too, missed the cruises and when she visits her parents, it is in the summer so they can go to cruise nights in the “54.”

“It’s been a huge part of my life,” she said. “It’s the importance of keeping that history alive in the family.”