Been busy today so why not take in a double dose of Gilmore Car Museum pictures? Also it's Sunday so I would have been giving you this anyway.
One of the exhibits is a genuine 1930s Shell station relocated and planted here where ... if it does any work I suppose it must be refueling the Model T's that you can rent and drive around, although I suspect not even that. (Getting gas pumps that old certified would seem challenging.)
But you can see in the station things like this, a Model T reconfigured for American intervention in the Russian Civil War (1918 - 1922), Siberian front.
Peeking around inside the service station; I think we weren't allowed past the door, which is why I can't show you what's on those flyers up front.
Looking from the station back over an ancient poster for motor oil which, in the charming advertising vernacular of the day, just asserts that a product exists and not even warns that it should not be confused for Campbell's soup.
Those old Pontiacs, though, they were built like a brick wall.
Sign informing us that what we're about to enter is the G Barn. And why is it called the G Barn? Well, it started out on G Avenue, and inside it has --- ah, we'll get there. Anyway the sign notes that when the building was being moved they discovered that only the upper floor could be preserved.
Inside are a bunch of kid's cars (and other vehicles), stuff you can play with. You might notice something in the upper center there; we'll get to it.
And here you see an array of self-powered kiddie cars and tractors and stuff, many of which were clearly prime, upper-class toys in their time.
And here's the other reason behind this being the G barn: it has actual filming props from the 1967 Walt Disney Classic that I never heard of before either, The Gnome-Mobile! All about the antics you get up to with a 1930 Rolls-Royce and gnomes.
So here's the centerpiece: an oversized replica of the backseat of the titular Gnome-Mobile. They assert this, with a confidence I'd feel dubious about for any century-old movie studio, to be the only Disney-made set to be in the possession of anyone besides the Walt Disney Corporation. If true, that's, huh, all right.
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bunnyhugger peers up at the handle of the oversized door of the Gnome-Mobile shooting set.
And here's what the backseat of an oversized Rolls-Royce is supposed to look like. How well does it capture the actual look? That is a question to be answered in this column shortly.
Trivia: James Buchanan Eads's dredging and river-cleaning work, opening up the South Pass of the Mississippi dela, from 1875 to 1877 increased the slope of the river from its previous 0.24 foot per mile to one of 0.505 feet per mile, making --- an Army report descried --- ``a marked scour in the channel''. Source: Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America, John M Barry. So, you know, great work for making the channel ship-navigable but also part of the problem with how we've optimized rivers to create catastrophic flooding.
Currently Reading: Sign Painters, Faythe Levine and Sam Macon.
