Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 3, 1993 TAG: 9212310016
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BOB MANN STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: FLOYD LENGTH: Long
CLASSIC LOVE AFFAIR
On a summer day in 1985, Bill Weddle, already a pretty satisfied man, found a huge hunk of happiness stashed in a country barn near Hillsville.Weddle is a Floyd trucker who does not make decisions in haste. He did not marry until he was 39, for instance.
But on that day seven years ago he did not hesitate to slap down $5,000 for what he called "a piece of junk." He towed it home.
Spouse Fran Weddle, the more gregarious of the Weddles, had always appreciated her husband's sure, steady ways. But after eye-balling the "junk," she wondered if Bill had lost it.
However, that was then and this is now.
Seven years and hundreds of hours of intricate work later - plus some more "significant" dough - Bill Weddle's junk is worth at least 35 grand, and probably a lot more.
When he rolls it out, it is a Floyd showpiece.
"I don't put a value on it because it is not for sale," Weddle maintains even to serious buyers.
Although he is not a man impressed by traditional exclusivity, Bill Weddle relishes being one of only 2,400 members, worldwide, of the International Ford Retractable Club.
Membership in this rare auto collectors' club turns not on possessing a fancy European touring car or an exotic sports sizzler but on owning an American Ford that rolled off a Detroit assembly line the old fashioned way, about three and a half decades ago.
Oddly enough - and not unlike their Edsel cousins - the retractable Ford hardtop convertibles are an idea that never really caught on.
"They just didn't have a mass appeal, and they stopped making them in '59, after only three years of production," laments Weddle, a man whose clinch-toothed smile is as constant and as American as his hobby.
Weddle slips into talking about the history of the rare Fords while pumping the accelerator of his l957 cold black retractable, until the sound of sucking gas succumbs to the steady boom-rumble, boom-rumble, of a big V-8 that sissifies everything else on the road.
There is a second member of the International Ford Retractable Club in Floyd, a secluded mountain town where Weddle's regal vintage vehicles do not look as out of place as they might amidst the bevy of foreign makes they would share the road with in a metropolitan setting.
Fran Weddle's 1958 Gulf Stream blue-and-white retractable - a second gorgeous renovation accomplished by the dedicated hands and head of husband Bill - not only makes her a member, too, but it was her retractable that won best of show at the club's eastern region meet recently in Roanoke.
The Weddles agree, though, that it is Bill's '57 - the model Robert Mitchum made famous in "Thunder Road," the movie classic about running moonshine - that represents most their mutual affection for the Ford retractables.
Ford produced the retractables for only three years: 20,000 in '57, 14,000 in '58 and 12,000 in 1959.
Unlike traditional soft-top convertibles, these rare vehicles' hardtops are made of the same metal and steel the rest of the car is made from and were designed so the top could be stored, with one push of a button, in the trunk.
"They just had limited appeal, and there were some problems," Weddle admits, his voice trailing off as though he were talking about a wayward relative.
Just how rare their matching retractables are, particularly to younger generations, was not obvious to the Weddles until one day when they were approached by a teen-ager who asked, "Did you make this car?"
They didn't, though Weddle's renovation efforts involve major body and engine surgery. The retractables are, though, the brainchild of Ben Smith, a now-retired resident of Winchester.
Ford wanted something different, so in 1952 Smith was hired to do just that. Five years later, the retractables became reality. It was a year that Elvis Presley, Pat Boone and Tab Hunter had hits all over the Top 40 charts, and it was their music that roared from those cars as America, early on at least, embraced the new design.
One of those classics, a dashing red-and-white, recently got blown to bits in the movie "Ford Fairlane," starring controversial comic Andrew Dice Clay.
"They used a really nice one for him to drive in the movie, but the one they blew up was mostly a painted up piece of junk," Bill Weddle explained as casually as though all America should know that.
But it was likely the first time many of today's moviegoers had seen such a car.
The way the retractables work - moving heavy steel from the regular roof position and into the trunk and back again - required a design and mechanical genius.
The start to stop process takes only a single lever, and lasts but 20 seconds, but the system consists of 13 electrical power relays, 13 circuit breakers, seven 2-way electrical motors and 610 feet of wire.
Reconstructing all that, and much more, is a challenge Weddle searches for.
Telling him it can't be done is a mistake, too.
He recently renovated a '58 for a North Carolina woman mainly because someone said it couldn't be done. That someone was a renovator who had begun work on the car, then had differences with the owner and gave it back to her in many pieces.
"He made the brag that she'd never see it again," Weddle recounts, his country-lawyer grin taking on a special shine.
Weddle and partner Curtis Nolan reassembled the '58 after a national search for parts, and it rolled off the Weddle-Nolan assembly line in October of 1992, 13 months after Weddle and Nolan began their magic.
The car won first place in its division at the last eastern regional show.
The most sensitive part of the restoration is the precision required in the electrically guided movement of the car's steel top into the trunk where it must fit, just right, into a protective metal tub. A fraction of an inch miscalculation mashes the tub, trunk, top and all.
Special luggage was designed to fit in the trunk tub.
The Weddles do not own a set of the luggage - probably worth at least $3,000 - but understand a Vinton man has one.
"It is not so much locating a set but paying for it," says Weddle, the constant searcher for retractables - in any condition - and their accoutrements.
The Weddles' collection of matching retractables requires nurturing as diligent as that of fine art.
Both the engines in their prized '57 and '58 are originals, but transmission fluid was leaking from one of the aging classics recently, and Fran spotted several engine parts that she told Bill could use paint touchups.
The retractables, as beloved as they are, are not the only cherished cars in the Weddles' life.
There is another, a 1969 Mercury Cyclone, a Spoiler II with only 17,000 miles on it.
Bill Weddle, when he shows it off, strokes its fenders and chrome with the same tenderness he bestows on the retractables.
The Cyclone is not yet 25 years old, the age a car must be to qualify for vintage tags, but it is the car Bill Weddle bought, new, for $3,600 when he got out of the Navy and returned to Floyd 23 years ago.
It is also the car he was driving that very warm March night in 1971 when he took Fran, on their first date. She wore green bell-bottom britches and a matching top. They motored that night to Roanoke where they dined on burgers and fries at Lendy's on Williamson Road. Then they drove to Mill Mountain and, together, enjoyed the view from that mountain top.
For both, it was a date with destiny, a date that lives on in the Weddles' Floyd garage, a date frozen in the untouched and quiet beauty of a rare, but not so flashy car that is a decade or more younger than the beloved retractables.
Fran, while listening to Bill reminisce about the old Mercury, stepped out of the shadowy garage and swung open the door of her blue and white '58. The engine gushed to life.
"Let's roll 'em out," she challenged in a squeal that felt more like that night of '71 than an afternoon in '92. Her V-8 thundered. Bill Weddle went to his '57, cranked it, and the two powerful motors thumpity-thumped in unison.
Then, slowly, the Weddles, Fran in the lead, rolled out, headed for an afternoon joy ride, the kind of ride most of us had to leave behind many, many summers ago.