If this car could talk, oh, the stories it could tell.
In a roundabout way, the dream car Ladysmith’s Ted Puska had been pursuing found its way near home again after originally belonging to a Chemainus couple.
The 1966 Lemonwood yellow Beaumont Sport Deluxe classic car Puska located in Grande Prairie, Alberta and eventually purchased started him on a chain of events to track the entire history of the car.
Puska was going through the paperwork he got with the car and discovered it was originally sold in Duncan in the summer of 1966 to Ina and Doug Williams of Chemainus. The car lot was called Redman Motors, owned by Ron Redman and located next to the Doghouse Restaurant on the Trans-Canada Highway.
Further investigation by Puska determined the car lot was open from about 1963 to 1969. Redman and his partner moved to Vancouver and closed the business in 1969.
In short order, Puska managed to track down six of the previous eight owners. He heard through the grapevine that Ina and Doug Williams had both passed away, but learned they had three daughters.
Through a stroke of luck, he called a C. Williams listed in the Chemainus phonebook who turned out to be Cora Lynne, daughter of the original owners.
“To my surprise and delight, I found the biggest piece of my puzzle,” noted Puska. “I drove the car to Chemainus to show her and she was in tears as I drove up. She said it was her mom’s ‘baby’, they had specially ordered it back in early 1966 and as an 18-year-old she remembered driving to Duncan with her mom and dad to buy the car. She gave me some old pics of her mom and dad and, of course, the car.”
“I couldn’t believe it was still on the road,” said Williams. “You’d think after 50 years the car had gone to the junkyard somewhere.
“It’s almost the same as when my mother and father had it.”
An even stranger coincidence is Puska first contacted Williams about the car on Dec. 3, 2017 that just happened to be her mother’s birthday.
“I guess it was meant to be for me to find that car and bring it home for her to see after 22 long years,” Puska reasoned.
The car is still in great shape for nearly 52 years old and only has 115,000 miles on it. “It’s about 2,500 miles a year the car’s been driven,” Puska pointed out.
The car originally cost $2,500 new from the factory in Oshawa, Ont. and shipped on May 20, 1966. There were 3,318 of the distinctive models produced.
It initially came with a 283 cubic inch motor, but had a new 350 cubic inch, 375 horsepower motor installed in 2016.
Puska discovered the car spent a few years in Duncan in the early 1990s, was in Port Alberni during the late ’90s, spent 14 years in Nanaimo, one year in Lytton in 2014 and then two and a half years between 2014 and 2017 in Grande Prairie.
Puska had a friend in Kamloops bring the car to Chilliwack where he traded for his 1967 Malibu on Sept. 30, 2017.
Meeting Williams took the process full circle for him to Chemainus and he was glad to make her day with the resurgence of fond memories.
“It’s almost like somebody’s talking to you,” said Williams.
“My mother and father bought this car before I was married. They had something fancy to take me to the church in.”
The car also ended a long search for Puska.
“For about 40 years, I was looking for a car that was Lemonwood yellow,” he noted.