Fully-Equipped

When we first moved to Harrisburg in 1976 there was, on US15 just south of Camp Hill, an old Holiday Inn that predated the Holiday Inn franchise and didn’t look like a Holiday Inn, because it wasn’t. Sort of an institution in the area, in part as I recall because they were a “one-off” in a celebrated ongoing spat with “the real Holiday Inn” over the name, seems to me it was at the interchange of US15 and Pennsylvania Turnpike. However, we’re talking some 37 years ago when I was forty, and more -- aware. But memory is that they offered a lovely Sunday brunch buffet. We enjoyed it the first time, but returned from time to time because as well as motel and restaurant they also had an antique automobile museum.

Then as now, my favorite car era is the nineteen-twenties and thirties. Some of the twenties cars are spectacular classics, Pierce, Packard, Deusenberg, Marmon, Cadillac, Lincoln, Chrysler Imperial, Peerless and others. Having grown up with thirties cars on the road, they are still and always my topmost lifelong favorite though. The early-mid thirties saw major shift in automobile design, with the passing from fabric roofs over wood slats to the one-piece all steel roof that GM called the Turret Top. But also, most noticeably with the 1934 Chrysler Airflow, the placement of the engine over the front axle instead of behind it, which made a tremendous difference in the potential for car length and maneuverability. This design change is easily spotted in seeing whether a car has the front radiator grill right up at the front bumper, or a foot to maybe a foot-and-a-half behind the bumper.

Back on track. In that antique car museum they had an enormous Lincoln limousine sedan from the early 1920s; remember, this was 37 years ago, but I’m saying about 1924. It had been custom designed and built for a wealthy man, as expensive cars often were in that day. This Lincoln car had a toilet, a very large, oversize commode, right in the center of the rear passenger compartment, sitting high like a throne. My memory said it was built for Diamond Jim Brady, but he died in 1917, so it was for someone else. Or, if it was a 1917 model it might have been for Brady.

We lived in Harrisburg for eight years, summer 1976 to summer 1984, and during that time the old Holiday Inn museum was closed and the cars auctioned off. No doubt the building is gone now, it was on prime real estate.

In my menagerie there have been several Lincoln cars, a huge Continental Town Car with suicide doors that I bought used for $1400 from the Lincoln dealer in Mechanicsburg in the day when a brand new Lincoln was $6200. A Lincoln Versailles -- which I bought used from the Ford dealer in Port St. Joe and had refurbished into a lovely bit of art, but which I best remember because of (1) the giant spider that scooted under the seat once just as I opened the door and (2) body leaks that developed in the cowl and I discovered that the dealer had knowingly sold me a car that had been flooded in a hurricane and subsequently rusted out --. And a 1991 Lincoln Continental with two air bags that we bought for Tass while she was in college, because of her daddy’s obsession with her safety.

We never had a Lincoln with a toilet.

Lincolns from 1917 (Henry Leland era) and 1924 and 1927 (after Lincoln was purchased by Henry Ford)