Fountainhead Antique Auto Museum: Biddle Restoration - On to ...

by Nancy DeWitt


Five years ago we purchased a very rare 1918 Biddle Series H Town Car from Charles "Chuck" Riker. Mr. Riker, who was?instrumental in designing circuitry for General Electric, was friends with legendary automobile collector?Henry Austin Clark, Jr. It was Clark who?discovered this Biddle in 1952 in a two-car garage at the Southampton estate of Henry Huddleston Rogers, Jr., son of a Standard Oil executive and railroad magnate. Rogers had given the car to his gardener, who intended to turn it into a truck. Apparently a broken cylinder thwarted that plan and the car sat deteriorating after the garage's roof was blown off during a devastating hurricane in 1938.

Clark had Bill Hoffman perform a restoration on the Biddle, taking it from this:

To this:

Our Biddle is powered by a 4-cylinder Buda engine (#1061-A) rated at 24 hp. Later models carried a 70 hp, 4-cylinder walking-beam Duesenberg or Rochester-Duesenberg engine.?

Of the slightly more than 4,000 Biddle automobiles produced between 1915 and 1922, only four are known to survive. Ours is the only Town Car left, and we are looking forward to seeing it arrive in Fairbanks by mid-October.

Source: http://fountainheadauto.blogspot.com/2012/08/biddle-restoration-on-to-pebble-beach.html

chuck elisabeth hasselbeck fran drescher scarlett o hara pat sajak vanna white michael robinson