Woodbury Classic Cars

Photo: Emily J. Davis

Patty Cowell with her beloved 1936 Ford coupe. The classic car features headlights distinctive to the 1936 model, the original 1930s license plate and a beautiful dashboard.

Maybe there is some truth, after all, to the old cliché that “they don’t make them like they used to.”

Dick Raths and Steve Jobe think so, which is one reason they have spent thousands of hours and dollars restoring their 1950s vintage cars to pristine condition. It’s also why Patty and Mike Cowell have become so attached to the 1936 Ford coupe they acquired two years ago.

“Cars made during those years were very unique, with a lot of exotic, beautiful colors,” Raths says. “And all of the trim was stainless steel—a lot different from the plastic you get today.”

“Exotic” is probably the best word to describe the classic cars owned by the Raths, Cowell and Jobe families. Wherever they stop, the cars’ bright hues and shiny chrome draw curious admirers. A routine trip to the grocery store becomes a celebration.

Patty and Mike Cowell

Patty Cowell and her husband, Mike, bought their 1936 Ford coupe in 2009. It was their first classic car, but both had plenty of previous experience in buying vintage items; they’ve been longtime antique collectors and once owned an antique shop in Maryland.

Still this purchase was different, Cowell says. “It was an impulse thing; we had never done anything like that before.” They heard about the car being offered for sale, looked at it at 8 a.m. one Saturday and “went our separate ways” to think it over. Both came up with a figure they would offer, which happened to be the same, and only $500 from the amount the car’s owner, Joe Vincent of Woodbury, was seeking. They wound up buying the car that afternoon. Vincent had owned the car for 22 years, but hadn’t driven it for seven due to declining health.

The car Cowell has named “Henry” won second place in its class at the first show they took it to—last summer in Willmar. But the Cowells didn’t rest on their car-show laurels. Last fall Mike, a 3M engineer and all-around craftsman, did a complete rewiring job, installed new brakes and changed the interior of the car from dark-blue cloth upholstery to chamois-colored leather. (The exterior is burgundy.)

They’re spending a lot of time showing it off this summer at car shows and on routine drives. The car’s fully functional rumble seat is an eye-catching feature. “It’s fun to see people get excited and give us the thumbs up,” Cowell says.

Steve Jobe

Steve Jobe grew up in Afton watching his father compete at local drag strips and has “always had the car bug.” In 1995 he acquired the 1955 Chevy two-door hardtop his father, Ralph, raced back in the 1960s and ’70s. The car his father had owned since 1967 had been garaged for 20 years. Jobe went to work on a complete “frame up” restoration, installing a new 350-cubic-inch engine (replacing a 265 c.i.), new wiring, new interior and having the car painted an eye-catching burnt-cherry color with an ivory top. The car is “shaved” in gear-head parlance, meaning that the exterior door handles and locks have been removed to give the car a sleeker appearance.

Jobe doesn’t know how fast the car will go, since he’s never driven it at top speed. During warm weather months, he takes his family (wife Jennifer and children Will, Grant and Belle) for rides, and competes in car shows locally and in Wisconsin and Iowa. “Our kids have been going to car shows since they were born,” he says. A Woodbury fireman who drives trucks for a living, Jobe is in charge of first aid at the Minnesota Street Rod Association’s annual “Back to the ’50s” show at the State Fairgrounds.

Through the years, he’s helped his father restore several other cars, including a ’37 Chevy, another ’55 Chevy and a ’71 Chevelle. Jobe doesn’t know how much his current car would bring on the open market. That’s not important. “It’s got sentimental value; I was playing in it when I was a kid. It’s been part of my life since I was in diapers,” he says.

Dick Raths

Dick Raths bought his first classic car, a 1955 Ford Victoria, in 1987. It was the same car he had owned growing up in what was then Woodbury Township and the object of a concerted search by Raths. “I put out the word to people at 3M branches in the southern part of the country about what car I was looking for,” he says. He found one with about 80,000 miles on it; Raths paid $650 to a Los Angeles woman who had the ’55 originally owned by her grandmother and had it shipped to the Twin Cities.

Raths, a self-taught mechanic who grew up working on cars, rebuilt the car’s engine, transmission and suspension, had some body repairs done by a friend and had the car painted the same color as his old ’55 Ford Victoria—yellow, black and white. It took about a year. Raths sold that car 12 years ago to a friend in New Jersey for about $14,000.

Car restoration is not a hobby well-suited to impatient people; it’s a painstaking, meticulous process, with the reward at the end. Restoring cars “takes a lot of money and patience,” Raths says. Fortunately the older cars were more simply designed and easier to repair. “If you drop a wrench, it drops on the floor,” rather than getting lost in a maze of hoses, wiring and parts, as on a modern vehicle.

In 1994, Raths bought a 1955 Crown Victoria from a Big Lake man who had begun a restoration without finishing the project. “Everything was in pieces; the engine was inside the trunk of the car,” says Raths. He and a friend restored the car, which took about 18 months, and painted it an eye-catching tropical rose and white.

Twelve years ago, Raths bought a ’56 Ford convertible, another partial restoration project. He didn’t start working on it until 2003 and finished it in 2005.

Normal maintenance includes weekly cleaning, dusting and polishing, Raths says. And of course the cars spend winters in their owners’ garages. Classic car owners still gather on Friday nights in North St. Paul and on Saturday nights in Hastings or downtown St. Paul.

The Raths have driven their cars to national car shows in Chicago, Colorado and Maryland. They also belong to the Crown Victoria Association, and travel to those conventions each July, which are held in various parts of the country.

Are they ever tempted to race the car? “We drive normal speed,” Raths says. After all, for the Raths, Cowell and Jobe families, the point is to enjoy the ride, not to be the first ones to arrive.

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Summer is the season for classic car shows, and the Woodbury hobbyists all have at least one date circled on their 2010 calendars: August 27 for the Woodbury Days car show.

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