Hyrum man restores 1934 Ford Tudor after bit of 'auto archaeology'


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HYRUM — Larry Johansen of Hyrum, Utah never forgot his first car — a 1934 Ford Tudor he purchased in 1951 when he was 15 years old.

“Bought it from a widow lady here in town, with my bean-picking money,” Johansen said.

The day he turned 16, he took his driving test in that car. Later that day, Johansen and his mother parked it in the pasture south of their home and painted the car with brushes.

A year later, Johansen’s dad fixed his eyes on a newer, fancier model — a 1937 Tudor. Johansen sold the 1934’s engine and discarded what was left in the Hyrum town dump.

A few years later, serving in the army, he met some California hot rod aficionados who were surprised Johansen had dumped the 1934 model.

“And I started realizing that it was a special car at that point,” he said.

When he returned to the dump, he checked on the car.

“Over time there was more and more cars piled on it.”

The car, battered by the elements, was abandoned for 50 years.

Then in 2003, Johansen consulted with his son-in-law, John Petersen, about the possibility of retrieving the '34 Tudor, or what was left of it.

“We talked it over and he said, if you want it bad enough, we can probably do it,” Johansen said.

For three months they excavated the car from dirt and debris — what Johansen describes as “auto archaeology” — and on his 68th birthday, they hired a wrecker and towed it out.

“I knew it had to be (squeezed) down to get out of the hole because we couldn’t make the hole big enough, so I turned my back, said, ‘Let’s go for it,’” he said. “I turned my back because I didn’t want to watch it get squashed and I looked anyway.”

What they pulled out resembled a ball of tin foil, he said, barely recognizable as an automobile.

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Johansen, who’d restored other antique cars, expected it’d take him three to four years to fix up the car.

It took him 12.

Now Larry Johansen drives his first car again. The car, though, looks even better than when he drove it when he was a teenager.

“Making something out of nothing is really what it was,” he said.

He did preserve one imperfection — a bullet hole by the driver’s-side door he discovered the morning after he and some friends pilfered watermelons from a farmer’s field.

“The next morning I (saw) that bullet hole in the door and I didn’t want my parents to see it, so I put chewing gum in it,” he said.

Johansen said he feels young again behind the wheel of the restored Ford.

“There’s something about being that young and getting behind the wheel,” he said. “It just seemed like it’d be really fun to get it back.”

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