My First Forty Cars: An Automotive Memoir

With a grandfather who drove a horse car in 1900 and who later had a 25-year career as a chauffeur for a wealthy family, Nelson Bolan has a unique viewpoint about the automotive industry during the first third of the 20th century. In later years, Bolan began his own car collection. His first, a 1929 Chevrolet, was purchased for USD 100 in celebration of his brother’s safe return from World War II and his own high school graduation. It had an outside gasoline gauge, and if the driver forgot to read the gauge before getting into the driver’s seat, he had no way of knowing how much fuel he had. Chevrolet made the change to dashboard gauges in 1930. The car also had actual wooden floor boards, which were removed and reinstalled easily when servicing was necessary. By 1937, all U.S. automobile manufacturers had converted to all-steel bodies, so the term
floor board
has been a misnomer since that time. This automotive memoir includes a chapter for each of Bolan’s first forty cars, including photographs of the actual vehicles where possible. A nostalgic but factual recollection of each car in the order it was acquired, the book includes interesting information about each model. All were passenger cars and built in the United States, with the exception of a Dodge van station wagon assembled in Canada.