On the road again
RALPH BARTHOLDT/Press The Turners’ Olds 98 was purchased from a showroom floor in Chinook, Mont., in 1966 and used to travel to country music concerts from Nashville to music halls in Canada throughout the 1960s and 70s.
RALPH BARTHOLDT/Press Carolyn and Gordon Turner of Kingston stand alongside the 1966 Olds 98 that Carolyn inherited from her Uncle Bob, an avid music fan who used the car to travel to shows from his home on Montana’s High Line.
In 1966 Bob Spoonheim drove his brand new Olds 98 to Nashvilee where he met Hank Williams Jr. Submitted photo
RALPH BARTHOLDT/Press A Great Falls Tribune story that highlighted poor road conditions on Montana’s High Line earned Bob Spoonheim a seat on the local highway commission.
KINGSTON — In the fall of 1966, Bob Spoonheim drove a brand new Oldsmobile 98 from Saco, Mont., to Nashville, where he had his picture taken with Hank Williams Jr.
By then, Spoonheim already had enjoyed a good year.
His picture was awash in newspapers across the country after The Associated Press ran a story about him, a bad road, a rail car and a white Oldsmobile 98 with a record player — dealer-installed — under the glove box.
Framed in polished chrome and faintly whiffing still of a Chinook, Mont., dealership, the car luxuriates these days inside the Kingston garage of Carolyn and Gordon Turner.
The couple advertised the car for sale on Craigslist and a Facebook group this week, hoping for a quick sale.
“I’m looking forward to getting the garage back,” Carolyn said.
If the 98 doesn’t sell, the couple likely will enter the vintage automobile in summer oldies car shows where they can tell the story of the porcelain white luxury cruiser and how its 81,000 miles were accrued by Uncle Bob on his way to Tennessee from northern Montana to see another beloved artist, Hank Snow, perform at the Opry or at venues from Great Falls to Central Canada.
“Hank Snow was his favorite,” Carolyn said.”If he played anywhere nearby, Uncle Bob was there.”
The Oldsmobile was Spoonheim’s — or rather, Uncle Bob’s — only mode of transportation on those narrow blacktop highways. He often traveled at night, the miles absorbed by the big block 425 motor, the passing of each noted by the dim light of the steadily spinning odometer.
His other vehicles, a Ford pickup truck and, later, an Oldsmobile Toronado, were his day-to-day vehicles.
“This was his traveling car,” Carolyn said of the 98. “We weren’t allowed to smoke in it, eat or drink in it. This was his baby.”
For a moment in the muddy, frost-blistered spring of 1966, the car — then a pristine white-walled gem fresh from the showroom of Ryan Olds in Chinook — became a national phenomenon because of an ill-maintained Montana backroad.
Since buying the Oldsmobile and driving it home in the winter, spring had arrived. To Spoonheim’s dismay, the gravel road — ice-covered and smooth as a windstorm in winter — had deteriorated. Chuck holes, rocks and ruts littered the 35 miles of ranch road from Turner to the pavement at Harlem.
The road was unworthy of the pristine 98 with its shimmering chrome, plush furnishings and the RCA record player under the jockey box. In an effort to protest the poor maintenance by the highway department, Spoonheim enlisted a railroad agent, a former high school classmate, to help.
“The road was so bad he had the 98 loaded on a flat bed rail car and shipped to Saco,” Carolyn said, having absorbed the story from old newspaper clippings and the family’s oral history.
A local newspaper took notice.
The Great Falls Tribune picked up the story, and soon Spoonheim’s tale of a man’s effort to save his car from the maw of an unmaintained and tax-funded Montana road system made it to the Seattle Times, then onward to The Associated Press.
Its dateline was a dog-ear corner of the country that locals referred to as the High Line, and, specifically, a grain silo town called Turner (no relation to Carolyn’s married name). It brought Spoonheim immediate notoriety.
By the end of the next election, Spoonheim was the latest addition to the local highway board. Within a couple years, the Turner-Harlem ranch road had been splendidly paved and made worthy of its highway designation.
The new road allowed Spoonheim, a carpenter and rancher by trade, to freely head south to Nashville when his craving for country music took hold.
Spoonheim, 86 when he died a couple years ago, left a barnful of vehicles.
When it came to material possessions, the family treasured cars above most things. In the glovebox of the Oldsmobile, Carolyn found meticulous service records, the original dealership sticker and photographs of the Olds in a variety of cities and settings, all snapped when Uncle Bob was on the road.
“Our family photo albums are mostly filled with pictures of cars,” she said.
Since acquiring the 98 this year, the Turners have driven to the Snake Pit restaurant and around the Silver Valley, where they live.
It is a plush, enduring ride.
There’s no need to flip on the Wunderbar dashboard radio because of the RCA record player — a factory option that added more than $100 to the sticker price. The upper deck speakers cost another $53.
Uncle Bob liked his music. “That was a lot of money back then,” Carolyn said.
The Turners’ advertisements — their asking price for the Olds is $10,000 — have returned a few inquiries but no solid bites yet, Carolyn said.
The Toronado, which she also inherited, was a first generation front-wheel drive. She has a buyer for it in Michigan.
“There is a lot of history in these cars,” she said.