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We brought the now restored Cadillac back to the site it
left in 1989.
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An old-school junkyard, Warhoops Auto and Truck Parts squats
on 15.5 acres of dirt speckled with the detritus of our throwaway culture. A
Cadillac propped against a tree exposes its Northstar to the sky. Bent buses
and crumpled cop cars line up against a white fence. It’s forgettable real
estate except for one key attribute: location.
Tucked out of sight in an industrial area in the working
class Detroit suburb of Sterling Heights, Michigan, across the road from a Ford
transmission factory and just a little north of the plant where Chrysler
assembles the 200—and a straight shot up Mound Road from the General Motors
Technical Center in Warren—the yard has been a fixture in the area since 1955.
Founded by Harry Warholak Sr. the same year GM moved its Research and Design
operations into the Tech Center, Warhoops is steeped in local car lore. Yet the
wider automotive world will forever know it as the place GM sent its Motorama
dream cars for their unceremonious burial.
Current-day proprietor Harry Warholak Jr. invites us to sit
in his car for an interview because there’s no room and no privacy in his small
office, which is little more than a warm shed packed with a counter, a desk,
scattered memorabilia, and a door to hide some plumbing in the corner. Warholak
explains that “Warhoops” was a nickname acquired by his dad during World War
II, based on his Polish surname. The elder Warholak earned a Bronze Star as a
mechanic tending B-17 bombers. Until he died in 1997, some people still called
him Harry Warhoops, even after he turned the nickname into a trademark.
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Warhoops proprietor Harry Warholak and the Cadillac Town
Car today.
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“I was in high school, probably 14 or 15, when Dad took me
with him down to Warren to see these cars,” Warholak remembers. “It was all the
Motorama dream cars, by that big steel-roof dome they’ve got at the Tech
Center. I was too young to be involved in the negotiation, but you can imagine
how my eyes got like saucers. These dream cars–the Buick Wildcats, Cadillacs,
La Salles, Firebirds, everything–and he told me they were coming to our yard.”
That would have been 1958, in the midst of a recession, when
GM contacted Warhoops to scrap its show cars. The Motorama show itself, a
rolling extravaganza of fantasy sheetmetal, had been victimized by the
downturn. Canceled in 1957, there would be only two more, for ’59 and ’61, and
those revolved around dressed-up production models with custom paint and fancy
interiors—faint efforts compared with the dream cars of earlier years.
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“The way Harry Warhoops told it to me,” remembers Joe Bortz,
whose 1988 “discovery” and acquisition of intact cars from the yard has grown
into legend in collector-car circles due to Bortz’s tenacity, luck, and timing,
“there was a big downturn in sales in ’57 and ’58 and some accountants at GM
looking to save money said, ‘Look, we’re paying to store all these cars and
we’re not using them. So just scrap them.’ ”
According to several staffers of that era, it was standard
practice at GM Design to dismantle unwanted property and call a metal dealer to
haul off the scrap. “But these ones were mostly fiberglass. Many didn’t have
engines, some didn’t even have metal frames,” says Warholak. “So maybe that’s
why the salvage guy they normally used wasn’t interested. I never got that
whole story, but the upshot is they called Dad.”
source: http://www.caranddriver.com/features/their-ghosts-still-haunt-the-place-how-four-gm-motorama-show-cars-were-saved-from-the-scrap-heap-featureby Kevin A. Wilson
http://www.fzrestoration.com
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