To say this car has been around is an understatement. It has had owners in both Canada and the United States and has now been brought back to Canada by the seventh owner who is also now the 22nd owner.
That story is featured on a website that has had over 5,000 hits from all over the world. A Brazilian car magazine is preparing a story on the vintage hot rod.
In 1955, Michael O’Byrne of Dorchester, Ont., wanted a hot rod similar to the hemi-powered 1932 Ford cabriolet built by the two brothers who owned Rossini’s Speed Shop in nearby Chatham. He bought a derelict 1932 Ford roadster for $35 and installed the 272-cubic-inch V8 engine and automatic transmission from a nearly new wrecked 1955 Ford purchased by his Ford-dealer father.
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Michael O’Byrne, original builder of the T Bird Deuce, in 1956.
PNG Merlin Archive, Driving
He painted the car Sherwood Green and put it on the road. He soon decided it wasn’t fast enough and installed a new 312-cubic-inch Thunderbird Special “crate” motor acquired through his father’s dealership.
The early hot rod was a fixture cruising London’s Dundas Street. On Sundays, it ran the drag strips at Cayuga, St. Thomas or Grand Bend.
Because of the Thunderbird engine and dashboard featuring the speedometer, clock and tachometer from a 1956 Ford Thunderbird, the hot rod became known as the T Bird Deuce.
After five years, the builder traded the car off and it went through several owners, ending up at a Chrysler dealership in Petrolia. The dealer donated the car to a fundraiser for local sports. The winner was a woman who took the cash prize instead of the hot rod. The car was subsequently sold to a used-car dealer.
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John Willoughby in 2011 back with the hot rod he sold 47 years earlier.
PNG Merlin Archive, Driving
John Willioughby had bought raffle tickets and was disappointed when he didn’t win the hot rod. He was amazed while making stops as an auto parts salesman to see the car for sale on a used car lot in Sarnia. He became the seventh owner of the hot rod in the early 1960s.
“I grew up in London and remember this car. It was just like the hot rods we would see in the movies and magazines from California and, when I found out it was sale, I just had to have it,” John recalls.
He entered it in shows in Toronto, London, Chatham and Detroit as well as drag racing it at Grand Bend and Indianapolis.
His “deuce” roadster was right at home in the Pacemakers hot rod club shop on Talbot Street in London where a group of enthusiasts shared information and talent building, driving and drag racing their cars.
By 1965, John Willoughby and two partners were campaigning a modified Anglia drag race car and he reluctantly sold his hot rod. It would change hands many times in the years to come as it crossed the border into Michigan with a series of owners there.
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The T Bird Deuce displayed at the London Autorama Car Show in 1964 by owner John Willoughby who would enter the car in the same show 48 years later.
PNG Merlin Archive, Driving
John Willoughby became obsessed with finding the old hot rod he had originally purchased more than half a century ago and began an exhaustive international search.
“I never got it out of my head. The winters are long here and I thought about my old hot rod all the time.”
Other people who remember the car got involved in the search which, after 18 months, led to Roy Klann, the second Michigan resident to own the car. But he had no recollection of who he sold it to. Several months later, Roy called to say he had located an old insurance card with the seven-digit serial number of the old car. That information was shared with Karl Chase, who had originally imported the car to Michigan. It was Karl who sent the serial number to a law librarian in Denver, Colo., who solved the puzzle.
“Karl Chase called me and asked if I was sitting down,” John Willoughby recalls of the day in 2011 he would reconnect with his old car. The current owner had been found and John immediately made plans to head to Waterford, Mich., to meet the current owner, Roy Breault.
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The T Bird Deuce when it was owned by Michigan resident Don Roe, owner 19.
PNG Merlin Archive, Driving
“It took me about 20 seconds to recognize that this was the car I had seen for the first time 47 years before,” Willoughby says. “After going through all those owners, a lot was still the way Michael O’Byrne had built it with the $35 chrome dropped front axle, steering from a 1953 Ford pickup and drum brakes that nobody had changed to discs.”
Buying his hot rod back has deep meaning for Willoughby and his wife.
“It’s much more than having the physical vehicle. It’s led to reconnecting with old friends from back in the day and making new friends who see the car at shows and may remember it,” he says. “People have read the history, friendships have been made, doors opened and that’s the plus of the whole thing.”
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