SAN JOSE — Nestled in a back corner of Kelley Park off Phelan Avenue and Senter Road, Allan Greenberg squinted at a radiator on a Ford Model TT belonging to the Santa Clara Fire Department while his colleague, Bob Meneely, munched on a Snicker’s bar. The radiator had been overheating, and despite weeks of tweaking, nothing worked.
But Greenberg, and a random assortment of other retired men who meet every Thursday from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the shop, refused to give up. The group, who work in a cavernous metal garage filled with electric saws and paint cans, restore antique vehicles for historical groups and law enforcement agencies, from an 1887 Studebaker Wagon and a 1905 Fire Chief’s Cadillac for the San Jose Fire Museum to a horse cart for the Saratoga Historic Museum. Some of the guys even own Model Ts.
And despite their extensive work on restoring vehicles, none of them came from such a background.
Meneely was an engineer at NASA, Frank Dorr worked in construction, Ed Del Prete, who is often found doodling sketches of project designs on pieces of paper at a bench in the middle of the shop, was a graphic designer. Greenberg worked at IBM for 30 years as an engineer.
But each man’s hobbies or their unique talents bring something crucial to their weekly meetings. Be it woodwork, carpentry or painting, somehow everybody’s abilities weld together to help restore beautiful pieces that would otherwise have been left to rot in scrap yards.
Each project that the group works on can take months, sometimes years to complete, and none of the men are paid. The projects they work on aren’t funded either, and most of the time, the group will find discarded pieces of wood or metal or brings tools, nails and screws from home to help complete a piece that would have otherwise languished until some amount of money was donated.
“Beg, borrow, steal. That’s how we get things done,” Dorr joked.
While the group waits their next project to arrive — a 1932 Twin Coach Model 15 bus, which is set to get to San Jose sometime in April — the men will continue to tinker on the pesky radiator on the Model TT and dabble in other projects that may come along.