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Dream weaver: Joe Bortz – part 1

Out of all the vehicle collections we’ve come across, that of Joe Bortz should surely rank as one of the most unique. Granted, like some collectors, Joe has chosen a theme for his, but it’s not like most. Whereas some might like to acquire a 1969 Camaro SS in every colour offered by the factory or an example of each Shelby Mustang produced, Joe’s approach has been to celebrate and preserve ‘milestone’ vehicles of a different kind, namely the unique show cars that used to grace turntables at auto shows and travelling events during Detroit’s golden age (1953-70), as well as vehicles recognised as milestones of style and design.

Among the cars Joe has amassed over the years, GM’s Motorama machines and Chrysler’s dream cars created under Virgil Exner are perhaps the most shining examples, though there are others that have come and gone over the years. In fact, as it stands, Bortz says he’s got about 15 ‘dream’ cars currently in his stewardship, with 15 others that he’s saved and passed on to other collections, examples of which include five of the nine surviving GM Futurliner buses (built for the Parade of Progress travelling Expos) as well as the original 1964 Dodge Charger show car, which was not too long ago sold at auction and featured in last month’s magazine.

When you talk to Joe it becomes apparent that although he’s clearly not just a serious car collector (he’s been at it more than 50 years), he also considers himself a custodian of automotive history, with a goal of saving many one-of-a-kind specials from the junkyard and the crusher.

“To me, the GM Motorama cars and the Chrysler show cars, represent the likes of an era that had never before been seen and probably never will be again. These cars symbolised America at its best, a time when everybody was optimistic about the present and even more so about the future. They were created without concessions to safety, emissions or fuel economy standards. They’re truly the hopes and dreams of the men that created them and to me, represent the concept of the automobile, in perhaps the purest sense. That’s why I feel honoured to have been able to save and preserve these cars so their memory will live on.”

But whereas some are enticed with cars because of their performance, speed or low production numbers, in Joe’s case even though many of the cars he owns are one-offs, it’s mostly about style. “I appreciate good design in an automobile,” he says, “the architecture that goes into it, imagine a three-dimensional Rembrandt or Van Gogh.” Growing up in the Forties, Fifties and Sixties, Bortz witnessed firsthand Detroit’s golden era. In fact his earliest memories go back to around age three, a time when America was still involved in the Second World War. “Even then I was obsessed with cars,” says Joe. “My parents told me I could recognise many of them and by age five I knew most of the makes and models on the road.”

Beginning of the Golden Age

“Around 1950, when I was about eight or nine years old, I started going to the annual auto shows myself. I’d hop on the buses and street cars and head over to the old International Amphitheatre in Chicago,” he says.

This was of course the time when fins and chrome were the coming trends and General Motors was just kicking off its travelling Motorama spectacles, which for the next decade would be highlighted by GM dream cars such as the Buick Wildcat I and Wildcat II, Olds F-88, Cadillac El Camino, Chevrolet Biscayne, Chevrolet Corvette, Pontiac X-400, Pontiac Banshee XP833, Pontiac Parisienne and XP-21 Firebird among others.

Needless to say, it was a tremendous time to be a car enthusiast and as an impressionable young lad, the flashy new offerings from Detroit had a huge effect on Joe, arguably more than most. “I guess I was in the right place, at the right time and the right age,” he recollects today. “I’d grab all the new car brochures I could get my hands on, but never in a million years thought I’d actually one day get to sit in and drive some of the very cars I saw at those shows as a boy.”

A couple of years later Bortz was already well versed in the realm of his own self-propelled transportation. At age 10 he started working for a Polish poultry store and used some of the money he earned to have his (Sears) J C Higgens bicycle fitted with a two-stroke, one-cylinder Travis motor. “It sat over the front wheel, with a lever you pushed down to drive the bike. It could get up to a speed of about 20mph,” says Joe. The Higgens was followed by a Whizzer Pacemaker at age 12 and then the following year; a real motorcycle in the shape of a NSU ‘Max’ 250. “You did need a licence to ride a motorcycle back then, but the police never bothered you. Looking back I’m amazed I was able to talk my dad into letting me have it.”

But even as a speed obsessed young teen, four wheels remained a passion and Joe knew he wanted a car of his own. His dad bought a new 1955 Chevrolet Bel Air convertible and later a used 1955 Corvette, which Joe, unintentionally wrecked the first day his father brought it home. “I was 15 years old and decided to take the car down the street. Trying to avoid oncoming traffic, I drove too close to the kerb. The bumper from a parked car touched the right front wheel and I gouged the entire side of the Corvette. It took four weeks to get it fixed. Needless to say my dad wasn’t too happy. He didn’t let me drive it again until I turned 18, three years later.” But despite such experiences, nothing could temper the younger Bortz from the desire to get his own ride. “It represented freedom and I wanted a car of my own more than anything else.”

The first one he actually purchased; in 1957 when he was 16, was a 1950 Oldsmobile Futuramic 88 Bubbletop, with the 303cu in overhead valve V8 and Hydramatic four-speed transmission. “It was black and advertised in the Chicago Tribune. I had saved up $175 and used that money to buy the car. I remember walking five blocks to get it; the Oldsmobile belonged to a 45-year-old lady schoolteacher who’d bought it brand new. I knew it was a ‘factory hot rod’ but didn’t realise how fast it was until I drove it home. I loved that car and so did my friends Sid Kahn and Al Gartzmann, to the point that, after riding in mine they each bought their own, Sid a green one, Al a grey one.

We were like the three amigos, we were the talk of our local high school; they used to call us the Bubbletop Triplets. We spent many nights cruising and racing in our nearly identical Oldsmobiles.”

But while going faster was the main preoccupation for lots of young men in the late Fifties and early Sixties, Joe was more drawn to the styling of cars, rather than what lay under the hood. “My Olds was a fast car in its day, but was also a great design. Even then I appreciated good styling and form. It was something I found in a lot of the older, prewar cars. They had a magnificence to them.” Joe would go on to buy new cars, including a ’60 Corvette which he traded the Olds for and drove hard; at one time crashing it into the guardrail on US1 between San Francisco and Los Angeles. “It almost went off the edge of the cliff,” he says. But even still, it was the older stuff that continued to inspire and capture his real interest.

Consequently, when Joe decided to buy his first “collector car,” as he puts it, he chose something older. “It was a 1928 Chevrolet Landau coupe. I was 19 when I bought it and because the car didn’t run I remember we had to tow it home behind my dad’s ’55 Chevy with a 30-foot rope for 30 miles – try doing that today!” After that Joe managed to get his hands on a 1930 Chrysler Model 70 and then, what he describes as his first “real classic,” a 1931 Cadillac V8 convertible coupe.

“I paid $1500 for this car, which was a lot of money back in the early Sixties and I remember that it needed new tyres. You couldn’t find replacement 18- or 19-inch passenger car tyres at the time, so I bought some blackwall truck tyres and painted on the whitewalls,” he laughs. “However, the black rubber would actually bleed through the white paint, so about every two weeks or so I ended up with ‘brownwall’ tyres and had to repaint them again.”

From the Cadillac it was onward and upward, Joe getting more and more into high-end Thirties era classics. By 1963, even though he was still in his early twenties, he was becoming quite the serious collector.

“At the time, the only cars that were really being sought out were those from the brass era but I really fell for the classics. I bought a 1930 Cadillac V-16, then a 1935 Packard Dual-Cowl Phaeton, a 1931 Dusenberg Rollston Victoria and a 1931 Auburn Boat Tail Salon. That last one was actually my first restoration project and in order to fund it I would sell one of my other cars and use the money from that to keep the project moving.”

Joe ultimately proved to be a pioneer, in fact by the late Sixties interest in Thirties era cars was at an all-time high, but Bortz felt the market was peaking and started looking in other directions. “By the early Seventies I felt my interest in classics had started to wane and I started looking toward Fifties vehicles, cars which, that at the time, nobody really had an interest in. Most of the great ones were still around and were just used cars, even the limited-production two-door hardtops and convertibles. People thought I was crazy, going after things like ’53 Cadillac Eldorados, 1954 Buick Skylarks and 1957 Chrysler 300s but they were (and still are,) great looking cars, the Skylark especially, there’s a lot of detail in that one.”

Dare to dream

By the late Seventies Bortz had amassed a rather impressive stable of prime Fifties Detroit Steel, but ever the curious collector, was always on the lookout for rare and interesting cars: “I began reading about the dream cars, the factory prototypes and concepts that had stunned me as a kid back in the Fifties. I thought they had all been destroyed, but then I discovered something very interesting. I heard about a car called the Pontiac X-400; this must have been around 1980. I was told it was a rare, modified convertible, but I didn’t think it was real dream car, until I called the owner. He had the documentation to prove that it was an original, factory GM dream car and when I found out, that was that; I just had to have it.”

Not long afterwards, Bortz heard about another, the 1954 Bonneville Special. “I was talking with Fran Roxas, the famous classic car restorer and he told me that it was still around. It turned out the car had been preserved by the Detroit Historical Society for the last 20 years and had been on display, but the society had a new curator and he wanted it put away. The car was actually on loan to the DHS from a GM executive and when he said he didn’t want it to be put out of public view he decided to sell the car. I didn’t waste any time and went over there with a flatbed truck.”

But even though he’d managed to get his hands on a pair of real, GM show cars, Bortz thought it was a fluke. “It was normal for General Motors to scrap the cars after they were no longer useful, because of liability reasons. These were one-off automobiles, designed and built without the constraints required for production.” But he soon discovered that a number of others were still extant, albeit left for dead or lying around in bits at Warhoops Auto Parts Inc, a salvage yard not far from the GM Technical Centre in Warren, Michigan.

“I couldn’t believe it,” says Joe, “just how many of them had actually survived.”

Another factor, which aided his task of tracking down the surviving dream cars, was the fact that many were given (or taken) by GM executives and hidden for 25 years or more until Bortz discovered them. Consequently, by the early Eighties more and more reports of still extant prototypes and show cars began turning up. Yet, in that era with the US grappling with high inflation and unemployment, there just weren’t many people in the market for vehicles like this. “My timing probably couldn’t have been better,” says Joe, “simply because I was really the only one interested in collecting these cars back then. My friends said, are you crazy? Selling some of your great classics so you can buy those silly (concept) dream cars!”

Well, as it turned out Joe happened to be on to something and, as we shall see in our next instalment, not only did he track down and rescue a number of surviving dream cars, he was also able to painstakingly restore them to their former glory, which in some cases took decades. In addition, besides the Bortz car collection growing to become one of the most significant and interesting in the world, Joe also became actively involved in promoting and keeping the spirit of these one-off show cars alive, by taking them to exhibits around the United States, as well as finding some of them worthy new homes in prominent museums and collections.

Thank you

The author would like to extend a very big thank you to Joe Bortz and Debbie Powless for their assistance with this story.

Words: Huw Evans
Images: Bortz Auto Collection & GM Media Archive