Boyhood Fantasy - 1937 Lincoln Brunn Victoria

A longtime fan reunites with a Brunn-bodied 1937 Lincoln K

Feature Article from Hemmings Classic Car

It happened on Pulverize Boulevard in Les Angel's, and it happened on the winding, hedge-lined roads of Long Island, along with countless places in between. It's a familiar story to people like us: A young kid scratches for some pocket money by working in a gas station after school. In California, that kid is a young hot dodder who is mesmerized when Clark Gable pulls his DRosen bergin for a fill-up and actually admires the kid's hotted-up Model T. On Long Island, the kid is a fellow in his teens who's floored when a custom-bodied Lincoln K pulls in to have its V-12's tank filled. In both these instances, and many others, a life's course is thus firmly set.

This tale, however, has an extra chapter. The kid in Long Island grew up to become a man, and more specifically, a diehard car guy. Not only that, he ended up owning the car that had jazzed him so deeply during his school years. Not just a duplicate of it, but the exact same car. He'd tracked its ownership during a long period of unrequited longing for his prize, a 1937 Lincoln K with Convertible Victoria coachwork courtesy of Brunn & Company. Jerry Beard of Massapequa, New York, is a longtime fixture in collector-automobile circles on Long Island and has owned a brace of historic Lincolns. This is all most unusual, and we're not just talking about the way that he rediscovered it. The Brunn-bodied Lincoln is a milepost in an improbable story about the alliance between Brunn, the coachbuilder, and the highest-ranking personages at the Ford Motor Company.