“We wanted to come down last year, but it rained,” Kerry said. “Brass and rain do not mix.”
The Buchenroths have owned the car for two years, he said, and have rebuilt it from the frame up.
The couple has been collecting and restoring antique cars for about a decade, they said, and have three Model T Fords, but that particular model has been a recent addiction.
“We kept buying all these ‘basket cars,’” Kim said, “where a lot of the pieces are in a basket and you hold one up and say, ‘What is this for?’
“So I said let’s get something simpler, so we bought this one and now we can’t stop.”
But, her husband added, they still have one more Model T to go because they want to have one for each of their four grandchildren.
The trophy for the oldest car in the 56th annual edition of the parade was a 1910 Maxwell, currently owned by Scott Vaaler, a Hamilton native now living in Glendale.
Vaaler said that the Maxwell has been in 55 of the 56 parades, driven before him by his father and grandfather. The only year the car wasn’t in the parade was the year after a cousin drove it and the engine had a meltdown and so spent the next year in the shop.
Vaaler has been driving it in the parade since 1980, and it was the lead car in 1984.
The Judge’s Choice trophy went to this year’s lead car, a 1911 Cadillac Model 30, owned by Thomas Wallace of Dayton.
Wallace said he purchased the car, which was the last Cadillac to have a crank starter, at an auction in Milford in 2003. It had been in storage since 1922.
“From what I knew, the ol4d caddy looked complete, but in sad shape,” Wallace said.
Contact this reporter at (513) 820-2188 or rjones@coxohio.com.
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