10 | MAY 2020
www.connectornews.ca
Seniors and their vintage cars By Dick Parkes, Kamloops chapter of the Vintage Car Club of Canada
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Don and Lil Potts with their 1953 Plymouth Belvedere convertible.
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on Potts was born and raised in Duncan, on Vancouver Island, and began his long association with all things automotive in 1955 with the purchase of a $15 Austin A-10 2-door sedan. An after-school job at the local Red and White store would eventually result in a life-long career in the grocery business and, in 1956, Don quit school and started work in the meat department of the Duncan Super Value store. After hours, Don, his brother and his cousin, who owned an auto wrecking firm and a car hauler, would make trips to the Prairies, filling up the car hauler with old vehicles and taking them back to the Island, where they were either fixed up and sold or parted out. It would have been nice to have shared some photos of these events, but they were all destroyed when a house Don was living in burned down. In 1957, Don transferred to Courtney with Super Value to help open a new store and around this time went through several vehicles, including a 1950 Chevrolet, a 1951 Monarch and a 1934 Chev pickup. On a visit to the local GM dealership, Don spotted a brand new Oldsmobile 98 four-door sedan on the showroom floor and put
that on his wish list. The next year, Don transferred to Campbell River to open another new Super Value store and, on a weekend, dropped by the Courtney GM dealership again, just to see if the Oldsmobile was still there. It was. The salesman caught him looking at it and Don ended up trading the ’34 Chev pickup for what became his first new car. In the early 1960s, Don moved to Kamloops, transferring to the North Kamloops Super Value. This is when he met Lillian Armstrong. They were married in 1966 and Lil became a big supporter of Don’s automotive projects. Lil was born in Kamloops, growing up at 903 Columbia St. She became a music teacher, a secretary for the provincial assessor and the mother of their two daughters: Jennifer and Candice. I spent my high school years at Kam High and sometime about Grade 12, I was heading home on the school bus one afternoon and I noticed a very different car in the backyard of the house on the corner of Ninth Avenue and Columbia Street (remember that house at 903 Columbia St.?). The vehicle had a very German staff car look about it and we were never sure if was a Mercedes, a Horch or some other obscure marque. It even still had the flag holders on the front fenders, so the rumours were rife that maybe it was one of Hitler’s cars! It disappeared from Columbia Street
about a year or so later. Fast forward about 55 years and Don and I were having a chat over a cup of coffee, naturally talking about old cars. Somehow the subject came around to that same German car and it turned out that it belonged to Don at that time, when I saw it sitting in his mother-in-law’s backyard. Learning the history of your old car is one of the attractions of the hobby and I probed Don for the story. It is one of the best I have ever heard. The meat-cutting business has its hazards and, in 1964, Don seriously sliced his thumb with the bandsaw. The accident resulted in a six-hour emergency surgery session. While Dr. French, the operating surgeon, was rebuilding Don’s thumb, the conversation turned to cars and it just happened that the doctor talked about a 1939 Audi Cabriolet he had in storage that Don became interested in. This car had apparently been hidden by a serviceman during the Second World War and, after the war, he unearthed it and brought it back to Canada. Dr. French somehow ended up with it and had it stored in a barn in Barnhartvale. A few months after Don’s surgery, a firefighter friend phoned him up in the middle of the night to inform him that the barn containing the Audi was on fire — if he wanted to save it, he should get right out there. Don raced up
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