No matter what it may have been, an enthusiast’s first car is always memorable because of the personal freedom it represented
and the adventures it likely accommodated. There are few of us who haven’t thought, at one point or another in our later lives, how fun it might be to find a similar car to our first, so we could try to recapture those youthful feelings–but few have actually done so. For those who have–like the owner of this incredible unrestored 1940 Buick Special Four-Door Touring Sedan–the reward can last a lifetime.
In the mid-1950s, Williamstown, Massachusetts, native Steve Bullock was attending Williams College locally. Four days of working on campus, during a 1956 parents’ weekend, earned him $27, and as he explains, he had a plan for that paycheck. “My friend Dan had run an ad in the campus newsletter saying he wanted to sell a 1940 Buick sedan for $25. I called him and asked about it,” he remembers.
“He said, ‘It runs good, but it doesn’t stop very well and it’s hard to steer, so I think I’ll have to sell it for $15.’ I said, ‘Gee, well, I’ll buy it. If it doesn’t run well as a car, my dad may need a tractor for his farm–Do you think it would make a good tractor?’ He said, ‘I don’t know, but it has a big engine–I’ll bring it out to your farm.’ Dan drove it over, and it surprised my dad,” Steve recalls. “He said, ‘My gosh, that’s a Buick!’ I asked if they were any good, and he said, ‘Oh yeah, Buicks are good cars.’”
That $15 outlay bought Steve a 16-year-old Special Four-Door Touring Sedan, painted black. The Buick received a lot of polishing over the weeks the student saved up for insurance, and its problems were soon sorted. “We added some brake fluid, and that took care of the brake problem, while the front end was fixed with replacement kingpins,” he says. “It used a ton of oil, getting about 60 miles to a quart. This was a real deterrent, until my buddies at the local garage started giving me their used oil. I kept two eight-quart cans in the trunk, and I’d put in four quarts of oil with each tank of gas. It smoked like crazy!
“I wanted to find out the gas mileage, so I enlisted my friend Andrew, who later became a NASA scientist,” Steve continues. “We drove the car from South Williamstown up to Bennington, Vermont, and on the way back, I coasted as much as I could. We backed up to the gas pump and filled it up again, to find out precisely how much gas it’d used. Andrew said, ‘You got 12.1773 MPG!’ I thought, ‘Oh, I can’t afford this car,’ even though gas was 19 cents a gallon. I got over that with everybody chipping in for rides. I drove the thing for about 20,000 miles, going all over the place–down to Washington, over to Boston and Rochester, up to Maine. It was a lot of fun!” After he graduated and joined the Navy, Steve would replace the Buick with a Volkswagen. “What a change–gosh, the VW got 28 MPG when the Buick never did more than 13!”
The Volkswagen might have been a fine, efficient little car, but it didn’t stay with Steve like the classic Buick. By 2012, he had the itch to find another 1940 Model 40 Special, and turned up the incredibly original Touring Sedan on these pages. Having traveled just 63,000 miles in the past 75 years, it’s a virtual time capsule. “I think I’m the fourth owner,” he muses. “While my first Buick came from Detroit, this one was built in Canada.”
Buick was a major player in the medium price field in those prewar years, and this most practical Special variant cost $996 in 1940. Riding on a 121-inch wheelbase and stretching to a generous 204 inches overall, the Fisher-bodied, 3,660-pound Four-Door Touring Sedan sported newly integrated sealed beam headlamps and clean, attractive styling. It was powered by an overhead-valve, 248-cu.in. straight-eight engine that used a 6.1:1 compression ratio and two-barrel Stromberg carburetor to make 107hp at 3,400 RPM and 203-lb.ft. of torque at 2,000 RPM. A column-shifted three-speed manual helped direct power to the rear wheels.
Those sealed beam headlamps were one of a number of new-for-1940 features introduced in this GM division’s highest production year to date. 1940 was also the year Buick built its four-millionth vehicle. Also standard equipment on both of Steve’s 1940 Specials were a dual-diaphragm fuel pump offering improved vacuum function for wipers, a “Kleer-Kleen” engine oil filter and “Fore-N-Aft Flash-Way” turn signals, replacing 1939’s rear-only signals. These niceties made the Four-Door Touring Sedan quite popular, to the tune of 67,308 built–and Steve’s latest acquisition meant he could personally account for two of those.
Our feature Driveable Dream bears a “General Motors of Canada Limited” plaque under the hood, indicating it’s a Model 44-19. And one of the items that was found in the car’s glovebox was a neat bit of historic documentation: the original Owner Service Policy card, which the purchaser would show to receive warranty service. It indicates that this Touring Sedan was delivered on May 31, 1940, and that its selling dealership was Lawson Motors Limited, in St. Stephen, New Brunswick. This “import” is nearly identical to a U.S.-built version, although different hubcaps and upholstery patterns are distinguishing identifiers.
“The first owner of this blue Sedan was a Canadian who, I think, used it as a summer car on the Canada/Maine border. He stored it well, and no mice got into it. The second owner was an older man in northern Maine, and I think he’d tried for years to get a hold of the car. He, in turn, sold it to the guy I bought the car from, in the Springfield, Massachusetts, area, and that man could tell me very little about its background, save for the town it came from.”
Steve continues; “A few months ago, I was reading the Buick Club’s Buick Bugle magazine, and saw an ad for a 1940 Buick, placed by a man in that Maine town. I called him up on the off chance that he might have been the previous owner of my current car, and he was! He told me he’d bought it from the original owner, and was sorry he’d let it go. He never had to do a thing to it. I asked if he’d repainted it, and he said, ‘No, I didn’t need to. It was nice.’ That old lacquer paint looks good. The upholstery, floor mat and carpets are original, too. I think the engine’s had some work done to it, though, because it’s been painted, it runs well and has great oil pressure for 63,000 miles.”
While the Special has been largely trouble free, its current owner has done a bit of work to ensure its continued reliability, including replacing the tired factory-installed wiring harness, the voltage regulator and the battery. “Right now, the generator isn’t hooked up right, so I’ve been charging the battery after each use of the car,” he explains. “The radio and clock don’t work, the speedometer squawks and sticks, and I’ve never tried to use the heater. But mechanically, I’ve had very good luck with it; it runs very well and steers very well, and the radiator and brakes are good. It’s not rusty–it’s been very well tended to.”
And this car’s owner is keeping up with the maintenance this automotive septuagenarian requires, ensuring its non-detergent oil is changed and that the chassis is lubricated every spring (“My very good friend Ray Hartman has a lift!”). Steve keeps a shine on the old lacquer paint by using a mild cleaner and polish, and he points out where the finish wasn’t protected and is showing age. “It’s kind of worn on the hood and the center of the roof. Whoever owned it probably couldn’t reach across the top of the car, because you have to get on the running board to do so, it’s so tall.” Steve jokingly calls himself a “preservationist and cosmetologist,” and says with a smile, “I don’t know how to fix ’em, but I can shine ’em up!”
His Special runs beautifully, the straight-eight starting almost instantly and settling down into a smooth, quiet “chuff-chuff” idle. We got to experience its bountiful low-end torque as the car climbed hills in top gear, and Steve noted that this reduced the need to downshift–supposedly a benefit to female drivers–although the car’s non-assisted steering makes low-speed maneuvering a bear for everyone. He adds roughly 1,000 miles a year, primarily taking it to local shows and on short trips around town, and yes, that’s a dump permit you see in the window.
“The most fun I have with this car now is when little kids get in and ask all kinds of questions. They want to know about the ‘A’ sticker and the running boards and how the windows open and why the ceiling is so high. They look at you kind of funny when you explain about gas and tire rationing, about step-in height and ground clearance over rough roads, about hand-cranked windows and how people all wore hats back then,” he says with a grin.
While Steve’s first 1940 Special likely didn’t survive much beyond his ownership, he treasures its many-years-removed replacement. “It’s amazing to have something that is 75 years old, but still so operable and good looking. My grandchildren get to enjoy it now, and I plan on keeping it. If the weather isn’t nice, I don’t take it out of the barn. This way, I suppose it should last at least 120 years…”
