Page 131 - a-columbia-county-boys-recollections-and-memories-of-columbia-county-florida-(2012)-lenvil-h-dicks

A Columbia County Boy's Recollections and Memories of Columbia County Florida (2012) Lenvil H. Dicks

lost interest or gave up on it, and Leamon found out that all ofthe stuff he had in connection with that
car could be bought for $500.00. We took a pick-up truck pulling a large trailer to Jacksonville, to
purchase the Model A the man wanted to sell, and we hauled it back from Jacksonville in large card­
board boxes on the back of the truck and on the trailer. You would never have dreamed, looking at that
pile of stuff, that there was an entire Model A Ford there.

We brought it back to Leamon’s place and he began to put it back together and get ready to restore it.

It was about this time, I believe somewhere around 1995, give or lake, that I took Leamon on a trip with
me up to the Smokey Mountains. Leamon had never been any further from Lake City than Homerville,
Georgia, and had never seen a mountain in his entire life, and it was a very pleasant experience for me to
see Leamon’s eyes bug open with some of the things that we saw. He apparently really enjoyed the trip,
as did 1, and an interesting thing happened on the way back to Florida, in connection with the Model A
Ford that we had brought back from Jacksonville in boxes.

We were driving back to lake City and were going through the town in north Georgia known as
Gainesville, Georgia, and we noticed an older gentleman sitting outside of an old out-of-service filling
station, where a couple of nice looking Model A’s were parked. About a block or two down the street
Leamon said, “Lenvil, turn around and go back there. 1 want to look at those cars and talk to that old
man”, so I did and we drove back up and got out of the car and started a conversation with the
gentleman and he and Leamon talked the same language. It did not take very long for Leamon and him
to realize that they were each in the presence of another highly educated Model A man. In a few minutes
the man told Leamon that he had a whole warehouse full of Model A parts back behind the old service
station where we were sitting and talking, but he never allowed anybody to go in that warehouse. We
did not pursue the subject with him, although Leamon was dying to get back there and see what he had.
The conversation went on for awhile, and finally the old gentleman decided that he had finally found
someone who could look at the things he had back there in his warehouse with a proper degree of
appreciation for what he had.

So he took Leamon back into the warehouse, and I just sal there in the rocking chair where we had been
sitting, and watched the traffic go by. After about 30 minutes Leamon came out carrying a card board
box which was about of a sufficient size to cany a small tombstone. And I asked Leamon what he had
and he said in a sawmill whisper, “I’ll tell you about it later”.

It developed that the Model A that we had brought back from Jacksonville all disassembled, had one
extremely important part missing. It did not have a radiator. Leamon had found back in the old
gentleman’s warehouse, a brand new Model A Ford radiator, in the original packing carton from Ford
Motor Company, which had never been opened. In it was the absolutely exact radiator and radiator shell
that we had to have for our car. It turned out that Leamon had given him $50.00 for the old radiator,
which was really a new radiator, and a new one from an antique car parts dealer would have cost several
times that. 1 think the old gentleman just let Leamon have it for $50.00 because he had grown to like
him in the short time we had been there.

That old Model A which we brought back from Jacksonville was totally put back together and restored
by Leamon, and he put a paint job on it that was belter than the one that was on it when it sat in the
showroom brand new. You could not tell that car from one that had just come off the assembly line,
except that, if anything, it looked a lot better. 1 do not know how many dollars worth of labor Leamon
had in that car, but I do know that we made a profit of $11,500.00 on it, due to the fact that we were able
to sell it for $12,000.00.

1 don’t believe that there is a person in the United States who would be any better at restoring cars than
Leamon Robinson would have been, and not only that, but Leamon was a very good friend. He was the

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