Bob Schmeichel Page

This picture was taken on Sunday afternoon January 22, 1967. I had just had John Holland weld up my equal length header pipes to flanges I bought at Teal's body shop the day before. The following weekend I had Bob Schriever weld up 4 bolt collectors on my headers and hook them to my exhaust so I could drive it. All thru 1966 and 1967 this was the outside appearance of my car that I cruised Sioux Falls with and frequented the Barrell Drive in with all the time. French fries were my favorite there.. I hung out with Dave Johnson earlier in 1966 and rode around with him in his orange 57 Chevy "Cotton Chevrolet" lettered up, radiused rear wheel wells race appearing car. I loved the attention the race car appearance brought--so I did the same to my car with lettering it up and also later radiusing the rear wheel openings to clear for slicks when I changed the rear end out to one I bought from Ron Downs coming out of his 40 Willy's drag racer with 5:13 gears. Even with those gears it was a driver, with its bored and balanced 394" Olds engine with a real genuine manually 4 speed shifted B&M hydro. With yellow tinted windows to look like Plexiglas, the engine had a fairly wild for the street Crower solid lifter cam with adjustable push rods, a big old AFB and an electric fuel pump that enabled it to see 7200 rpm on my Sun tach all the time at Thunder Valley between shifts while getting 3mpg to drive out there and back. Later when I stripped the car down to one bucket seat and a 3 point roll bar inside, I realized it was still too heavy (3900 pounds) to really go real fast at Thunder Valley with 14 flat at 95mph, yet it was still a rush for a 17 year old to drive on the street with the rough sounding valve train engine noise and cruising the loop down town playing around..... and eventually going south to park in the Barrell Drive Inn. Many people, even today out of the clear blue, who used to hang out at the Barrell , will ask me what ever happened to the "Stump Puller" while telling me how mean it sounded as I idled by. I my freshman year in college in 1967, I changed the rear end to one out of a 62 Olds that allowed better gas mileage by slowing the engine down a bunch while driving back and forth to college. I also painted the car Seara Fawn that same year, which was a 1967 Chevy gold color, installed a black interior, tinted the windows blue, put full hubcaps on that were off a 68 Pontiac making it look like a Bonneville racer, and installed a blue metaflake stripe on the side of the front fenders with a "442" badge at the bottom of the stripe. I sold the car in 1968 to a guy going to Yankton College who was from Chicago, in order to order a 1968 Nova from the factory. I definitely miss the car and the memories it gave me from that time in my life. An old class mate of mine forwarded a recent for sale picture of my old Olds he found on line. Talking with the guy who had it for sale, who is like the third owner in the Chicago area and has done numerous drive train changes over the years just racing it, claimed the car came out of Sioux Falls South Dakota originally in the 60's. Even though the car is sold, what do you suppose the odds are it is the same car?