Mark Schleicher's 1948 Buick Super Estate Wagon

The first harbinger of spring for antique car buffs in Western New York is the annual Maple Sugar Festival in rural Franklinville. In April, 1991, I woke my 1950 Ford woodie from its winter hibernation and headed for the festival. As I was getting ready to leave the car show, a gentleman named Vern introduced himself as a retired dairy farmer and former mayor of Franklinville. He admired my woodie and announced that he had one of them-thar wooden station wagons in his barn.

It wasn't long before I was standing in a rickety old barn at Vern's homestead. Hidden behind a maze of broken doors, rolls of barbed wire, wheels, stake truck sides, and two iron cauldrons, was a light green 1948 Buick Super Estate Wagon covered with 36 years of dirt. It appeared to be very solid. Best of all, the wood was excellent. At first, I assumed the tires were flat. Upon further examination, I realized that they all still held air but the concrete beneath them had collapsed.

Vern explained that he and his parents had bought the woodie new from the Vincent and Wilday Buick Agency in Olean, NY. His father didn't drive and his mother always had another car. In addition, they had farm trucks. They stored the Buick in the barn every winter. In Spring of 1956, they never bothered to re-register it. The woodie had sat there ever since.  It still had 1955 plates on it. The odometer read 34,151 miles.

The Buick passed my inspection and I convinced Vern that I was just the guy to restore his woodie to its original splendor. A deal was stuck. My first order of business was to clean up my new-found treasure. After washing the exterior, I proceeded to remove about three bushels of mouse nests. I suspect that I left a large portion of the Cattaraugus County rodent population homeless. The back was full of April 1956 newspapers. A headline proclaimed, "U.N. Seeks Mideast Accord". Funny how some things never change.

Once under the hood, I changed the oil, filed the points, connected a battery, and poured some gas down the carburetor. Like Rip Van Winkle awaking from his long nap in the hills of rural New York State, the old Buick coughed a few times and sprang to life.

Over the course of the next seven years, the woodie has been completely restored and commands a great deal of attention at local shows and club tours. It is a great driving car. I brought the Buick back to the Maple Sugar Festival in 2000 to show Vern the finished product. The big moment came for the woodie at the 2001 Buick Nationals in Buffalo where it won the Gold with a National Senior Award.