Denny Schwartz's 1959 Rambler Cross Country

Here are a few pictures of my Great Uncles’ 1959 Rambler Cross Country Wagon that he purchased new.

This car was originally driven by his wife to and from work in a small town in Central Illinois, after a few years, my uncle took it for his daily driver on the nearby farm. Growing up down the road, I recall seeing him go by on a regular basis with a bag of feed or a bale of hay in the back to feed a cow or horse.

Uncle Elmer was partial to the color yellow as he owned a yellow house, barn, and several yellow automobiles over the years.

This particular shade of yellow, I find to have a very retro look of the 50’s. I had long since left my hometown of Marshall, Illinois, and my Great Uncle passed away back in 1990 at 90 years old. He had a habit of not trading a vehicle in when he purchased a new one. I guess that is where I may have partially inherited the label of never meeting an automobile that I didn’t like and want to keep. However, somewhere over the years he sold this car to a local body repairman and he started a restoration project in his free time between insurance jobs. Through correspondence with my Uncle’s daughter, I found out that the body repairman still had the car. During a visit to my hometown during July of 2005 something caused my car to turn into the driveway of the elderly gentleman that had the car in storage in the back of a building that he once operated as a body shop.

His eyes lit up when I re introduced myself after 30 years and inquired about the car. Thirty minutes later I was the proud owner of what could loosely be construed as a one family owned Rambler.

I trailered the car home to Ohio in August of 2005 and started planning on what the car needed. It was in a little poorer shape than I expected, but after a radiator re-core, exhaust pipe, some mechanical work, and a complete paint job, (including the refurbishing of the stainless and chrome).  I have a real keeper.

Everyone who has done work on the car has commented on how solid and clean it is. I had the paint taken down to bare metal and there was absolutely no rust. The stainless trim and chrome all came off with very little effort, and none of the clips were rusted, in fact I re used most of them.