‘21 Speedster Comes Home After 24 Years Away
They were a Marmon family, without reservation.
Through Depression and war and the family’s cross-country move, the Keeles clung devotedly to the 1920s cars with the funny names and the reputation for grace and technical superiority.
They owned six Marmons; their last, a ’21 two-seat Speedster, long after it had gone out of style.
Dad turned it into a carryall to cart his contractor’s tools. He finally sold it, the last of the family’s Marmons, in 1953.
“I don’t expect Dad got more than $100 for it,” son Malcolm Keele of North Hollywood said. “Hell, 1953. People weren’t interested in these clunkers.”
Somehow, it didn’t seem quite right to young Keele to be without a Marmon.
It was the 16-cylinder, his second Marmon, that Malcolm Keele most longed to have back. It was a real piece of engineering. He could bring it to a stop in high gear, let off the brake and it would cruise away. Polished louvers in front of the radiator closed when the engine was cold.
He bought it in ‘39, four years after he picked up a piece of property in North Hollywood for $800.
He sold it in ’49. It was a clunker then too, no doubt. But he missed it anyway. Later he started to look. He sent out feelers through the Marmon Club, whose register of 71 16-cylinder Marmons did not include his. As gently as they could, they told him it was gone, probably sold for scrap.
So wouldn’t you know he’d find the Speedster instead. Malcolm Keele was caught completely by surprise.
“I never even thought about this until I saw that ad,” he said.
Ad in Newsletter
The ad was in the May issue of Marmon News, the bimonthly newsletter of the international organization of Marmon owners. “For sale or trade--1921 Speedster--90% restored--owned since 1953,” it said.
The date struck like an electric shock. He called the owner, Steve Gilbert, a Beverly Hills manufacturer of industrial packaging.
The story unfolded with clean simplicity.
Gilbert was a college kid when he spotted the car at a used car lot at La Cienega and Pico boulevards, right where the older Keele had sold it.
He didn’t buy it right away.
“I had never heard of a Marmon before,” Gilbert said. “I was 23 years old then. I had come back from Korea and I was looking for a project, I think. I found it on the lot so I started to read up on it. I read the books and found out that it was a car that sold for twice as much as a Cadillac in the ‘20s and read about its mechanical advances. It was really an interesting vehicle.”
Gilbert and his cousin finally paid $536 for the car and drove it around for show.
“Then I took interest in the car and tore it apart to rebuild it and never quite finished,” he said.
The project has been on again and off again since then.
“I just haven’t had the time in 10 years to devote to it,” Gilbert said. “So I’d been thinking. . . . ‘It really should be on the road. I don’t want to sell it, but there’s got to be someone out there who could really get it going.’ ”
When Keele called about a month ago and said it might be his father’s car. Gilbert asked whether his father made any modifications.
Unique Wheels and Brakes
“I said, ‘Wooden wheels and four-wheel brakes,’ ” Keele said. “He said, ‘That’s it.’ ”
Final verification came from the engine number, 4902, stamped on the lower left side of the block. It matched the 1951 registration form Keele found in his father’s papers.
“From then on, I haven’t been happy until I bought it,” Keele said.
It took a while. Keele, who will be 77 in August, wasn’t exactly looking for a new project.
Gilbert had rebuilt the engine, smoothed and painted the fenders, scraped and polished the wooden spokes. On the other hand, the Speedster still needed a new cloth top and dashboard instruments. It hadn’t been started in three years and the paint was fading.
It was a tough time for Keele.
“I would wake up in the middle of the night thinking about it,” he said. The car held a lot of emotional strings.
He remembered going with his father to buy the car from the sheriff of Topeka, Kan., who had confiscated it from a bootlegger bringing whiskey from Kansas City.
“I was about 13 years old,” Keele said. “I remember going down in a dark old basement where the sheriff stored all his cars.”
That year they moved west.
“I hated to leave my girlfriend there,” Keele said. “But I guess it worked out for the best.”
Drove Out West
Keele and his father, J. W. Keele, drove out of Topeka on Aug. 10, 1927. He said they ran out of pavement just west of home. Then they followed dirt ruts and boardwalks on the Marmon’s hard, high-pressure tires.
He keeps a record of the trip in a large blue photo album.
They show the Marmon in front of Indian cliff dwellings in New Mexico, outside of a log-cabin diner called Pie Town at a self-service gas station in the desert, at the Grand Canyon Lodge and a cousin’s motel in Winslow, Ariz.
There was also a photo of father and son, posing like soldiers in Pancho Villa’s army in Oak Mint Pass beside two flat tires.
Later photos showed the two of them replacing the rings and bearings on the Speedster. A gag shot showed their mechanic adjusting the valves of another Marmon, a seven-passenger sedan, with a 16-pound sledgehammer.
Refused to Ride in It
Two shots of the car show the demise of the sedan, which stayed in the family until the ‘40s. In the first, Keele’s sister, Jerry, stands, resolutely refusing to get in it to go to school. In the second, the girl’s mother places flowers on it the day the junk man picked it up.
“This is my dad,” Keele said, showing a picture of a tall man with a pipe standing beside the Speedster, its running board covered with tool boxes and electrical paraphernalia.
A typed caption said, “The Marmon becomes a Beast of Burden.”
When he wavered about buying the car from Gilbert, Keele said, his wife and children pushed him to do it.
“I gave it up one time,” Keele said. “I said, ‘I can’t go into that. It’s just too much trouble.’ ”
Gilbert knew all along. He said he could have sold Keele the first time he called.
“I just couldn’t do it,” he said. “I really wanted it to be his decision.”
In the end, of course, he bought. Keele declined to say how much he paid for the car, though he conceded it was at least a factor of 10 greater than what his father sold it for in 1953.
He and a friend pulled it on a flatbed truck with wire come-alongs to transport it to his North Hollywood home. The brakes were so sticky it took five men to push it into Keele’s garage. Keele and a friend muscled a spare engine into Keele’s backyard.
He still has to take his truck back for a load of spare parts.
It may take a year to restore it, he said. That will be too late for the annual Marmon Muster in October.
Keele thinks he’ll have the car ready in ‘88, almost as good as new.
“Just think of what that car looked like in 1921 when the cars were so dumpy and square-cut,” Keele said. “I feel encouraged now that I have it here to look at it.”
