1938 Plymouth convertible is full of family history

CHARLESTOWN — William “Bart” Bartholomew does not remember the first time he sat in his black 1938 Plymouth Rumble Seat Coupe Convertible.

But that’s not surprising, considering he was only a baby at the time.

“They put me on the seat in a basket,” he said, noting that he was born in 1941, two years after his uncle Edward Bartholomew bought the car secondhand in Florida. His father William also had the same 1938 model, black but with maroon upholstery compared with the brown seats in his uncle’s car.

“My uncle was so taken with my father’s car, he traded in his 1935 Ford and bought one a year old,” he said. His uncle wanted a heavier car for the drives he made between his home in Florida and New York, where the family lived.

Bartholomew still has the invoice from his uncle’s transaction with Dade Motor Sales in Hollywood, Fla., showing he traded in his 1935 Ford for $209 and paid $504 — 12 installments at $42 each — for the Plymouth.

In 1949, his father gave his Plymouth to Bartholomew’s brother, Ralph, who junked it after six months. “My father did not have any love for it,” he said.

However, his uncle held on to his Plymouth and even shipped it to Bremerhaven, Germany, in 1949 when he was stationed there with the U.S. Army.

The car was worked on in Germany. “But it was light blue when he came back in 1953, which I did not like,” he said. His uncle continued to drive it until 1960. “It had a lot of troubles toward the end,” Bartholomew said. “He parked in the garage and said he would fix it another day when he had enough money.”

But in 1965, he gave it to Bartholomew, saying it did not look like he was going to get around to fixing it. Bartholomew worked on it for six months, bringing it back to working condition. “I took him for a drive,” he said of his uncle, who died in 1972. “He had strong feelings for the car.”

Bartholomew, 72, is married to Jane and they have three children. He was raised on Long Island but moved to Rhode Island following service with the Navy at Quonset. He worked as a machinist at Brown & Sharpe until a bitter strike in 1981 and later in the maintenance department at URI for more than 25 years.

The walls of his garage are lined with license plates from various states, notably Florida, New Hampshire, New York, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island. Also period advertisements, such as one for a 1938 Plymouth that reads: “Stop! Look! And you’ll pick a Plymouth!”

His move from Philadelphia to Rhode Island involved relocating three cars he had restored: a 1940 Packard, a 1950 Studebaker and the Plymouth. “I drove each one up and took the bus back to pick up the next one,” he said.

He stored the Plymouth for a number of years but it was not a good arrangement and the car became increasingly distressed. In 1971, he built a garage for it but didn’t pay it much mind as he raised his family.

He got back into the car hobby about six years ago when he joined the Antique Automobile Club of America. Club members encouraged him to work on the Plymouth.

Bartholomew had already worked on the upholstery and the rumble seat, but the beige convertible top needed to be replaced, which it was by Frank’s Auto Top & Upholstery in Cranston.

Bartholomew painted the car himself, using spray cans of Dupli-Color automotive paint and a combination of spraying and rubbing compounds to get a lustrous finish. The black paint is complemented by a red pinstripe.

The face of the car is dominated by massive headlights which were so controversial — as they looked like a frog — that Plymouth altered the design in late 1938.

Under the hood, Bartholomew installed an 82 horsepower, six cylinder flathead engine from a 1936 Plymouth Sedan that he bought for $500. He did not think the engine had ever been taken apart judging from the sludge in the bottom.

He replaced the tires with whitewall radials, which he said handle better than the originals. And he had added turn signals because he found it dangerous to rely on hand signals in the modern world.

Inside, the dashboard is a classic example of Art Deco design, the most remarkable feature being the very small radio that sits above the similarly decorated ashtray. The antenna was incorporated in the running boards and he remembers his uncle listening to classical music on New York’s WQXR radio station.

Bartholomew said it was when his uncle shipped the car to Germany that it earned its nickname “Domouth.” The family had driven it to the Brooklyn Navy Yards when a fire broke out. They got it sorted out but not before his father had to fork out $18 for a new battery. “He was mad,” said Bartholomew.

And as soon as they started off again, the horn button popped off the steering wheel. “That’s it!” his father said, and advised his brother to junk the car. But the garage had a replacement, only it was from a Dodge. So they put it in, complete with the Ram insignia, and the car became known as Domouth.