By: Tony Sunderland

We all have that first garage where we hung out and learned.  This is mine. As a youngster I did start to have an interest in cars and in Stockton, NJ, 4 miles from home, there was a 3 bay, father and son garage that was the go-to place for foreign cars and the cars that no one else could fix. The family was Bavarian and specialized in German cars, especially Porsches, but could fix anything. About 10 miles away, just outside Doylestown, Pa, was one of the early Porsche dealerships, Holbert Porsche and the connection between Holbert’s and the garage, Schuck’s Garage, made the place all that more attractive.

Bob Holbert was also one of the premier Porsche drivers in the world. Richard Schuck, Dick, was also an excellent race driver and this combination of circumstances drew me like a moth to a flame. This garage and the cars attracted me so much that before I even had a driver’s license, I would walk the 4 miles down to the garage just to hang out and walk back home after 10 at night when the garage closed. I asked incessant questions and most likely just to get me to stop; the owners would give me small tasks to get me out of their hair. No nice jobs but one was washing parts. This gives one a familiarity with the pieces of cars, transmissions, and engines. It was a good training ground. This was the beginning of a 30 year, off and on friendship with Dick Schuck. On weekends and in summertime when not in school, I was at Schuck’s Garage. This was the genesis of my lifelong interest in, and work on, sports cars, and antique and classic cars.

During summers when off from college and working at Schuck’s, I helped Dick Shuck with his race cars. Anton Schuck had immigrated to this country and made it through the Depression with his wife, Bertha, running his small country garage. The garage was in the middle of a Y intersection, the union of Rt 29, the River Road that ran beside the Delaware, and Rt 523 that went up to Flemington, the county seat for Hunterdon County.

During the Depression, Anton and Bertha would pray that a car would need a flat fixed for the 5 cents that would bring in. This struggle caused Anton to have a very strong work ethic. The garage was open from 8 to 12, 1 to 6, and 7 to 10, six days a week; on Sunday they took it easy, they weren’t open 7 to 10!

Dick raced in what was called the PHA, Pennsylvania Hillclimb Association. These were timed runs, one car at a time, conducted mostly on public roads. Pennsylvania allowed such races, so long as once an hour the public was allowed through for 5 minutes. There was practice time on Saturday morning, 2 runs for each car. Dick had to work early Saturday, so after working on the car Friday night, after 10 PM closing time, the car would be loaded on to a trailer, towed by a 1956 Dodge pickup and off I would go to the race sites in Eastern and Central Pa. I would take a sleeping bag with me and sleep out in the fields that served as the pits, the parking area for the race cars. Saturday morning, I would get the car off the trailer and start it so it was ready for Dick to come out and take his practice runs and race on Sunday.

Dick raced a Porsche Speedster and later a former Cooper Formula Junior car into which he installed an Alfa Romeo 4 cylinder engine. This car had had its chassis shortened by a foot by people who tried using it as a dirt track race car.

When Dick bought it, it had no engine or transmission and no body. After putting the missing foot of chassis back in, Dick took a VW Beetle transmission, turned it upside down and this meant it powered the car in the right direction. Cheap and useful, like a lot of Dick’s work for his race cars. He used plywood for a base structure for the body shape, covered this with Styrofoam and rasped it to final form and covered this with fiberglass. This fiberglass created a female rendition for the actual fiberglass body that we then made. Helping with this was a real revelation. The class in which Dick raced this Cooper in required he use a 1300 cc engine, but Dick put a 1600 cc cylinder head on it as this had larger valves that would help it make more power.

Dick was an excellent driver; he had a gift for finding the limits of grip and was able to take a car there again and again. He would often post better times than more powerful cars in higher classes. At about this time, I bought a 1956 VW Beetle with Porsche brakes, lowered suspension front and rear, adjustable Koni shock absorbers, and a modified Porsche engine. At one race, this time an actual road race with other cars, held on the grounds of Reading Airport, Dick was racing his Porsche Speedster and the engine broke on Saturday morning. I got in the Dodge pickup, drove back to Stockton, and took the engine out of my car.

Dick’s wife helped me load the engine into the bed of the Dodge and I drove back to Reading. The pits were in the infield of the course, so I had to wait and we only had one race before Dick needed to run his race. Dick and a friend had pulled the engine out of the Speedster and it was a mad dash to get my engine installed but we did it. 

This was the only time this happened, but there were many other great experiences at this series of races. I helped with the race cars, mostly transport to and from the race sites, but overall they were wonderful experiences. Sleeping in the sleeping bag in the cold and occasional rain was not so much fun.

Anton and Dick found the illogical aspect of British cars did not suit them, so they refused to work on British cars, but they worked on a wide range of various cars from a Mercedes Benz 300SL Gullwing Coupe, a Citroen DS 19 and Citroen SM, Alfa Romeo’s, Ferrari’s, and also an assortment of antique and classic cars from the area. Bucks County, Pa, just across the Delaware, was a center of sports car and antique car interest ever since World War 2. Anton had long had an interest in old cars, especially unique ones, and I later learned that he was a founding member of the AACA, Antique Automobile Club of America, the foremost club of its sort in the US and perhaps the world.

Epilogue:

Schuck’s Garage was a hell of a place. One customer, a contractor who lived down the street had a 300SL Gullwing. I did not get to even touch that car, but I did get to drive, for parts runs, a Citroen SM and an MB 300 SEL 6.3, which was like a BMW 2002 on steroids. They repaired radiators themselves, gas tanks too using a large piece of copper on a handle which one heated with an oxy acetylene torch so that just using the hot copper did not expose the gas tank to open flame, and this was after the empty tank was flushed with exhaust gases (pre catalytic convertor days) to fill the tank with non-volatile gases. There was this old carriage in the back room and I was amazed that the father, Anton, one afternoon, took all the stuff piled on top of this carriage, pumped up the tires, filled up the fluids, got his wife and went on an about 10 mile drive before taking this up to his barn for storage. It was a 1905 Autocar. Anton was a self-taught mechanic and his quote was “the guy who designed this and the guy who built it had two hands and one brain. You have two hands, how’s your brain doing?”. It was a great place to learn and I have been very lucky to have been around them and others in my life. I just wish I had listened better.

Tony AKA Antiqueynot