Bill Tunnell’s Legacy SuperSports

Tell me a bit about your early Crosley years.

Interview with Bill Tunnell, Amherst, MA

My ’51 Crosley Super Sports has been in my family since the early 1950’s.  I grew up in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, sister city to Los Alamos NM and home to the Manhattan Project for the development of the atomic bomb during WWII.  Oak Ridge was known as the “Secret City” because of its highly secretive and critical role during the war. My dad, Bill Tunnell Sr., worked there as a design engineer, starting in 1943, and could build or fix just about anything. As a kid I loved to “help” him tinker on things in his shop.

 My Uncle Harry, who also lived and worked in Oak Ridge, was a car guy.  My dad bought the Crosley from him around 1956, when I was 4, so the car and I are the same age.  Dad put a silly, wind-up key on the back for tooling around town with the top down. (See photo.)

Tell me about your introduction to the Crosley world.

When I turned 16, he offered me the keys if I would learn how to work on it.  He had a storage room full of Crosley parts, including a spare engine which I rebuilt and exhibited in a high school science fair.  He also had acquired an old chassis with a pre-war Waukesha 2-cylinder engine, which I and a friend managed to get running one summer.

Fast Times at Oak Ridge High

Like everyone else in high school in the mid-60’s, I had dreams of muscle cars, and when I started driving the Crosley my senior year, I thought it looked foolish – so I took dad’s wind-up key off and repainted the car British Racing Green – crudely – with a brush.

One memory stands out from that year.  When the family car wasn’t available, my girlfriend and I would go on dates in the wintertime with the Crosley’s convertible top up.  The heater worked incredibly well in that tiny Super Sports cabin!  I’m a tall guy, and any romantic activity required some SERIOUS contortions, and the windows would steam up completely…oh, and because the wipers barely worked, it was often impossible to see to drive home.  So - even though it wasn’t the coolest car, and it broke down from time to time, I loved it!

After my HS phase of wanting a muscle car, I gradually realized my Crosley was actually a totally cool car. The universal reaction today is: It makes people smile!… It was a delightful thing then and now.

College and Later

When I started going to the University of Tennessee, twenty miles away, I made the trip a few times in the Crosley doing 60 mph on the interstate, getting blown all over the road by tractor trailers, and realized it wasn’t practical to have the car at college. So, it got parked in the basement of the family home and stayed there for the next 25 years.  Although trained as an engineer, my dad was also a frustrated architect, and he designed that house somewhat in the “Prairie School” style of Frank Lloyd Wright, who he admired and who later inspired me to become an architect.  Interestingly, Wright was a huge Crosley fan and owned a fleet of them himself.

Fast forward to adulthood: I was married with two kids and living in Atlanta when my dad died in 1993 and it came time to dispose of the family home.  After selling most of the Crosley parts stash, I rented a trailer and hauled the car to Atlanta where it stayed in MY basement for several years.  When I finally found time to fool with it, I took it apart with restoration in mind.  It then sat in boxes for another 5 years.  Around 2003, my good friend James Wiley (an MG nut) invited me to use the tricked-out garage/shop he built behind his house (dubbed the ‘Garage Majal’) as a place to put the car back together.  Over the course of many weekends, we reassembled the car, rebuilt the engine (with the help of another friend, Neil Estes, Atlanta’s undisputed best vintage British car repair guy), got stuff re-chromed, upholstery redone, and repainted the car its original Crosley color ‘Canto Cream’.  May not have been showroom perfect, but the Super Sports had a new lease on life!  For the next fifteen years in Atlanta, I kept her running with a lot of help from yet another friend and fellow Crosley owner, Jerry Summey, who made many a rescue trip with his trailer.

My wife of 46 years, Karen, and I moved to Amherst four years ago, where both of our children (Dylan, b. ‘83, and Leila, ’88) now live with their families.  In the design of the house we built here, I made sure there was a place for the Crosley.  I have two grandsons and two granddaughters nearby.  One of the boys, Reese (now 5), when he was little, didn’t like loud noises and was terrified when I started her up.  But he loved to sit at the wheel and “drive”, and his explanation of how the engine works is still a classic.  His 2 year-old  brother, Cassidy, is now the “driver”.  Maybe one of them will want to keep her alive when they get a little older.  Karen enjoys cruising around town with me when she (the car, not my wife) is not threatening to break down.  Karen mostly thinks it’s an impractical indulgence, however.  We have an agreement that whenever I spend money on repairs, she can donate an equivalent amount to her favorite charity.

The Crosley now has a place of honor in my barn/garage, which often serves as the front entrance to our home.  The car is like an old friend.  Visitors always ask “what is that?” And I get to tell my Crosley story.  It has been an important part of my 74 years growing up in an America that knew how to make stuff.