The Trunk

I ain’t got no junk in the trunk, kitten…just krazy, hip & wild purple velvet velour snakeskin print panels and royal purple carpet! Get a load of this crazy jazz…

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So, here’s the deal with the trunk. When I bought the car in 1990, the trunk was full of weeds, an old beer can (not old enough to be interesting), dirt, remains of the original rug, a spare tire that hadn’t held air in 40 years and had no tread, and a lot of rust. The trunk floor was almost gone, with large areas rusted out. The spare tire well was an open-air affair, and in the 70s or 80s someone had used a New Jersey license plate (the 70’s yellow kind) to “fix” the hole. Ok, that was so incredibly silly I decided to leave it, and it’s till on the car now. But the rest of the trunk I gutted, scraped out the rust, and fiberglassed in a new floor. Yes, in the 80s we used fiberglass to fix things, as neither my father nor I knew much about metal working, plus metal was expensive and hard to find ( for us because we didn’t know what we were doing). A sheet of fiberglass and a can of resin was less than five bucks at the local Rickle’s hardware store. So, there.

When I first restored the car in 1990, I did the interior in brown. We got a remnant of brown shag rug from the same Rickle’s Home Center for I think $5.00. It was enough to do the whole interior, plus the trunk. So I had a shag carpeted trunk. We manage to somehow plug up the leaks that had led to the rust, so I had a nice dry trunk, with a shag carpet. Did I mention we bought a shag carpet and used it in the car? It stayed like that for 10 years.

When I moved to FL in 2000 and started the next resto/custom job, I ripped all the rug out. With it came 10 years of beach sand from going to Jersey Shore towns like Ocean City and Margate, a few small shells, a couple of old maps, some rust, an assortment of brochures for South Jersey attractions like Lucy the Elephant, and a bottle of 30-weight oil that I’d bought in 1990.

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Unfortunately, I don’t have any “before” pix of the trunk. At the time, I wasn’t interested in documenting every little thing with the car, plus I was using either actual film, or digital cameras that held 10 or 12 low res photos. My how times have changed.

Anyway, when I put the purple rug in the car in 2005, I bought enough extra to do the trunk. I also found this wild purple leopard faux furrish material, and went nuts. Took a while to get it done, like everything else, and I finished it in 2014. No point in saying much more than that, this is how the trunk still is now, complete with a cooler in the spare tire well and an auxiliary battery hidden behind a matching leopard box. Here you go…

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