News - Local/State

Saturday, Oct. 04, 2008

York car fanatic gushes over his award-winning ‘Scarlett’

YORK — For anybody who has rushed toward a setting sun at ungodly speeds in a Ford Mustang or T-Bird with a big-block V-8 roaring under the hood, your best girl beside you and Jan and Dean coming out of the speaker, this week was a big anniversary.

The car that started America’s love affair with cars, the legendary Model T, was first finished Oct. 1, 1908 — 100 years ago Wednesday.

Ask York’s 67-year-old car nut Joey Cianci. The owner of four Model Ts, Cianci has been a car body man all his life — Joey’s Fender & Frame is his business — and will tell you all you ever wanted to know about the Model T. And he will tell you all you ever wanted to know about anything else. This is a guy who started working on cars in Connecticut at age 11. His first wrecker truck had the words “Here Comes Joey” painted on the front. Joey is still coming.

“Took the poor man off the horse,” is what Cianci said of the Model T. “The poor man’s Cadillac. I’ve restored all kinds of cars. Scarlett is my favorite.”

Scarlett is his 1926 Sport Phaeton, found a wreck, in rusty pieces, behind the New Britain, Conn., firehouse in 1985. “It had sat there since 1958,” Cianci said. “But I’m a gearhead. I’ve been in this all my life. I’m an addict.”

Almost three years and many thousands of dollars later, with mostly parts he made himself, Cianci created what might be the most expensive Model T on earth. He’s won so many car shows that hundreds of trophies are on shelves, on the floor, in boxes. He’s lived in York, restoring others cars, since 2003. But Scarlett continues to rack up the accolades — including, most recently, in Clover.

“In car show talk, this one’s a giant killer,” Cianci said of Scarlett. “Guy offered me $85,000 for it, and the most ever paid for a Model T was $71,000.”

Few machines in history changed the world like the “Tin Lizzy,” or Model T.

More than 15 million were sold in the two decades it was in production, and the assembly line at the Ford Motor Co. soon after brought along the first car mass production. Almost anybody could buy a car. In 1999, the Model T was named “Car of the Century” for its impact on American life. Nowhere was that impact more important than rural South Carolina.

“Fact is the Model T put the world on wheels,” said Joe Culp of Lesslie, southeast of Rock Hill. Culp is a life-time member of the state and national Model T clubs, and his love started with his granddaddy’s Model T.

Culp has had one old heap of a Model T sitting in his barn since the day he graduated from Clemson more than 40 years ago. That car, a 1925 Touring, wood wheels and Ford emblem on the radiator, is not restored but it will be one day. Model T lovers do not gnash teeth over what it costs or how long it will take.

Model T lovers have car rallies, their own places to get parts, Web sites and clubs and more. For them, in the South, the car is a “T Model.” Cotton Howell, known best as York County’s emergency management director, restored an old T model — “Almost broke me, but what’s worth doin’ is worth doin’ right,” Howell said — that he recently sold to Nancy Anderson in Chester. Anderson wanted the car for the transportation museum in Chester, where it sits on display.

“That car is South Carolina history,” Anderson said.

There is even a place called Olar, about an hour south of Columbia — turn south on U.S. 321 in York, and don’t stop until you see the old cars — that even will have its sixth annual “Model Ts to Olar Festival” on Oct. 17 and 18.

Another guy closer to home in Lesslie, Benny Weaver, has a pair of T Models.

“A ’24, and a ’25 Roadster,” Weaver said.

The later Model Ts, beginning in 1917, had an electric starter, Cianci said, but Model Ts were famous for the hand crank in the front.

“There was a trick to it,” Weaver said. “If you didn’t know what you were doing the crank would come back and plenty of people broke arms that way.”

Howell was one of them — he said he has steel plates in his arm from handcranks gone bad.

I had heard somewhere that a Model T could run on almost any fuel that will burn, including corn liquor.

Cianci pointed at Scarlett’s 20-horsepower, four-cylinder engine, restored like new. That car, brand new, cost a whopping $280.

“The Model T was such a great car you could buy it without the body, so farmers could take the bumper crop to town,” Cianci said. “Moonshine?

Make a Model T like Scarlett here run like a top,” Cianci said.

Now that’s a car.

Andrew Dys • 329-4065 adys@heraldonline.com