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E BIZARRE TRUE STORY OP
KENNY WAYNE'S MISSING CHARGER
DISPLAY UNTIL 4-1-14
Printed in the U.S.A.
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APRIL 2014
BARRACUDAODEMONONEW YOR
SPEN
hen Ron Bruns entered his
senior year in high school
back in 1973, he was a typical teenage boy infatuated
with gals wearing hot pants, sports,
and cruising around with his friends in
his '66 Belvedere, which his dad had
handed down as his high school cruiser. With the muscle car years coming
to a close, having been fortunate
enough to drive a somewhat hot rodded '66 Belvedere hot rod through that
era as a teenager wasn't bad at all, and
the hardtop had served Ron quite well
up until one fateful day in the early
spring of 1973, when things got a little
out of hand — literally. Ron ended up
wrecking the Belvedere, and since it
was a few years old with a fair amount
of miles on it, the car was totaled and
his dad was none-too-pleased.
Needing a replacement vehicle at the
exact time he was graduating, and
worse still, his dad wasn't in the mood
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to buy the youth another car since he'd
wiped out the last one. That being the
case, Ron started looking around the
local dealerships for something he
could afford that would also fill the bill
as being something he wouldn't be
ashamed of being seen in. And, as
sometimes happens, fate had just such
a machine lurking nearby.
After a few stops at other dealerships with nothing too impressive
catching his eye, Ron ended up over at
Gaier's Chrysler/Plymouth in Fort
Laramie, Ohio, where the small town
dealership had recently acquired a
brand-new 1973 Duster 340 fourspeed car in JA5 Silver Frost Metallic.
Silver Frost Metallic was a new color
for '73, and combined with the black
side stripes, hood scoop, and hood
'graphics, the silver/black combo immediately caught Ron's eye sitting on the
showroom floor. The really great news
for Ron, however, was that this sales
Photos: Al Rogers
Story: Randy Holden
118 MOPAR COLLECTOR'S GUIDE
bank Plymouth had been shipped out
the door with hardly any options, meaning it had a sticker price of only
$3,244.50, despite being a seriously
good looking machine. This was made
possible because it's just a basic 340"
engine hooked to a basic Hurst stick,
which was hooked to a basic open
chunk 3.23 rear axle. The Duster had
power disc brakes, a heater, and an
AM radio, but there was no console, no
power steering, no air conditioning, no
trim packages, no light groups, no
bumper guards or spoilers, no creature
comforts or convenience options that
typically ran up the cost of a new car.
This one was plain vanilla, and it was
just the right car at just the right place
at just the right time. Without even test
driving the Duster, Ron sat down with a
salesman on March 29, 1973, and they
hammered out the arrangements for
the teenager to put his name on the
title. Ron went to the local bank right
rt's Toys and Hobbies is a
pretty well-known vendor at
most major Mopar swap
meets, and if you collect anything to do with vintage Mopar memorabilia, odds are, you've bought
some goodies from Art's treasure
trove before. When we ran into Art
late into the show season last year,
he surprised us by showing off these
downright rare original NOS Direct
Connection ladies short-waisted tshirts, probably made somewhere in
the late seventies or early eighties.
These are originals, brand-new in
their original bags and he's got them
in sizes small and medium. We were
stunned, because we hadn't seen
these things since the early eighties,
and even then we generally only saw
them being worn by the chicks in
magazine ads or on the girls working
the booths for Direct Connection at
car shows.
As the tale goes, these were
found in a marketing company's
storehouse somewhere just outside
of Detroit, along with
numerous other items
with the Direct
A
Connection logo on them. God only
knows how long this stuff had been
there (probably since it was new), but
whatever the case, Art managed to
buy most of their stock of the surviving t-shirts and he scored a number of
rather unique DC promo and advertising pieces as well. Made of stretchy
poly/cotton blend, these shirts are
made to fit snug and be form-fitting,
so these were never intended to be
worn by girls who weren't wanting to
attract attention — which is perhaps
why there were smalls and mediums
but no larges or extra larges!
Art has a limited number of
these shirts available for sale, but if
you want one, don't wait. These
aren't reproductions, they're not back
in production, so once these are
gone, they're gone. If you want a
saucy bit of Mopar history, these are
guaranteed to attract just as much (or
more) attention than they did when
they were first released. Since Art's a
busy boy, the easiest way to catch
him outside of hitting him at a car
show is to check out his eBay seller's
store, which you'll find on eBay by
searching for "actionline69." 014
after that, and thanks to 1973 being a
simpler time than what we live in these
days, since he and his family were well
known in the area, he easily secured a
loan to buy the Duster. He returned to
Gaier's Plymouth on March 30th to pick
up his gleaming new silver steed, and
they had it all shined up, gassed up,
and ready to hit the road. He left the lot
that afternoon with a brand-new hot rod
and a bank book to remind him about
making payments, and at eighteenyears-old, Ron Bruns had done all of
this by himself — imagine such a thing
being possible today?
Being a typical all-American
teenage boy, Ron then quickly proceeded to do exactly what most
120 MOPAR COLLECTOR'S GUIDE
teenage boys did with 340 Dusters — "I
beat the hell out of that car!" Of course,
everybody's idea of exactly what that
phrase entails is different, and in Ron's
case, it basically means he and his
friends got into a number of misadventures with the Duster in its early years
and he did a fair amount of fast shifting,
but he wasn't ramping it off of train
tracks or taking off across corn fields,
like some other well-known muscle car
collectors we could name at this point.
"Looking back at that time, it's a wonder
I didn't wreck this one too, because I
drove it everywhere, took a few road
trips with it, and we did a lot of partying
in that car." In short, Ron slapped some
mags and fat tires on the silver Duster
and lived out the normal life of a youth
in the early-to-mid-seventies, wearing
his "Keep on Truckin'" t-shirt and chuckling at the guys who were busy building
custom vans all over the place.
Since this one left the factory
with a 3.23 open rear axle, and the
340 had been notably detuned for
1973, the silver Duster was never
an exceptionally fast car and Ron
had enough street smarts to realize that from the day he drove it off
the lot. Since it was a stick car,
yes, it had more than enough
power to do smoky burnouts and
lay black stripes down on the
pavement, and the car did more
than its fair share of that throughout the seventies. Ron is very
quick today to point out that "This
thing was never beat, not one
time, on the drag strip." That's a
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on had these rather amusing vintage photos
with him at the MCACN show where we first
saw his Duster. The pictures were taken in the
summer of 1974, when Ron and three friends
loaded up in the Duster and took a road trip to
Colorado. While leaving the state, Ron was
exceeding the speed limit just a bit, and there
might have been some drinking going on in the
car as well (amongst his friends). A State Trooper
pulled Ron over to have a few words and give
him a friendly citation, and during all that, one of
his friends took off up the hill and started taking
photos of the whole thing! Ron never knew these
photos existed until he began restoring the car
and his friend offered them to him, and they serve
as a great reminder of what the car looked like in
its heyday and the fun times they had in it. And
by the way, that darn ticket blew off the dash and
got sucked right out the window about five miles
farther down the road, never to be seen again! q■
big statement, but it's absolutely true,
because this Duster 340 has never
(not one time) been on a drag strip its
entire life! While he certainly enjoyed
the Duster and delighted in what a
great looking car it was, Ron was
smart enough to know it was far from
the fastest car on the block, so he
never modified the factory original 340
and he never really got into street racing it because he knew he wouldn't
have much success with the car.
There were occasional stoplight
shootouts through the years, but those
were very rare, and Ron was careful to
size up the competition well before he
decided to take on a challenge.
Since the Duster served as
his daily driver for the first three or four
years of its life, most of its current
80,000 original miles were put in place
before the calendar flipped over to
1980. Somewhere around 1976,
since the winter snows were already
showing signs of punishing the silver
car, Ron bought the first in a long succession of "beater" cars he could drive
during the icy Ohio winters, allowing
him to garage the Duster until the
snows thawed and the car wouldn't
have to brave the salty and snowpacked streets just outside of Dayton.
This continued to be the normal pattern up until 1982, when Ron finally
got married, settled down, and the
Duster became more and more of a
back-burner car as each passing year
progressed. The paint faded, rust
bubbles began to appear in the quarter panels and around the rear window, and his faithful old friend simply
got tired and began to seriously show
its age as the decade wore on. By
1990, the Plymouth was looking (and
sounding) seriously worn-out, so
despite the growing enthusiasm for
muscle cars, Ron finally parked the
Duster for good, yanked the battery
www.moparcollectorsguide.com 121
out, and there the car remained
untouched in his garage for the next
twelve years.
The thought of selling the 340
car never really crossed his mind,
throughout all those years, and from
day one, Ron knew he would eventually get around to fixing the car back up
and revamping it to its former glory of
the mid-seventies. His kids bugged
him to restore the old family heirloom
from time-to-time, as did his friends
who all remembered it from their youth
as well, and who had often taken part
in many of the late night misadventures
which the Plymouth had enabled.
Finally, in 2002, Ron went out to the
garage and started taking the Duster
apart for what he initially envisioned
would be a basic makeover and
restoration that would return the car to
122 MOPAR COLLECTOR'S GUIDE
being a driver-quality fun weekend
cruiser. The more he pulled apart, the
more little nagging problems he found
and the more hidden rust he uncovered, but for the most part, there were
no major surprises. Then, some real
life issues intervened which sidelined
the project and caused the Plymouth to
remain in a state of semi-disassembled
suspended animation for the next three
years.
In late 2005, life had stabilized
again and this allowed Ron to head
back out to the garage and pick up
where he'd left off. Finding and organizing all the scattered parts took a considerable amount of time in itself, but
Ron's very much a "hands-on" kinda'
guy who likes to do his own work, so
he never got in a hurry during the
whole project. By early 2006, it was
obvious to Ron and everybody who
was paying attention that his initial
plans of doing a simple restoration had
gone out the window, as he had the car
stripped down to nothing but a bare
shell with parts lying all over his garage
and filling his basement as well!
Buying a lot of tools and equipment,
Ron literally took on the task of blasting
the whole car, right down to every last
nut and bolt, then he re-zinced and replated every part of the car that had
been cadmium plated or coated with
something special when built, from
nose-to-tail. He enlisted the help of his
friends at Carriage Works in St. Henry,
Ohio to do the paint and body work on
the Duster, which essentially involved
just some minor rust repair in the lower
sections of the body. They then
applied multiple coats of the rich Silver
Frost Metallic, and the car shone better
than it had when Ron picked it up
brand-new. For the 340, Ron did some
of the work himself, but also enlisted
the help of Hillson Automotive in
Chickasaw, Ohio, as they beefed up
the block's internals, boosting the compression, performed a bit of head work,
and basically gave this stock-looking
1973 340 much more of the attitude
you'd expect to find in a 1969 version
of the engine.
Work progressed slowly and
steadily with Ron doing most of it in his
garage in his spare time, until the guys
at the Muscle Car and Corvette
Nationals (MCACN) show heard about this
one-owner do-it-yourself restoration project and wanted to debut the car at the
2013 MCACN show in Chicago. Since
that's such a prestigious event and it's a
major honor to be invited to display there,
Ron was shocked that his rather plain little
Duster received an enthusiastic offer, so
he worked feverishly to get the A-body
completely reassembled and ready for the
big unveiling. He finished with time to
spare, finishing the restoration three
weeks before the event, but he didn't allow
anyone to see the reborn car until it was at
the MCACN show, where they literally had
a big tarp over the Duster and they did a
formal unveiling before an assembled
mass of Mopar fanatics, all of whom couldn't believe this true OEM-quality restoration was done by Ron and a few friends,
mostly in the garage behind his house!
Despite being his first full-bore restoration,
this one turned out just as fine as anything
you could've gotten at any restoration
shop in the land, and as of this writing, the
revived 340 Duster only has nine miles on
the rebuilt and recalibrated speedometer!
Ron tells us he plans to show the
Duster quite a bit throughout 2014, but
then he's going to put it back on the street
and relive his teenage years; which was
the whole point in restoring this thing.
Having only paid $3,244 for this one new,
and having kept it all these years, we'd
dare say, Ron Bruns has definitely gotten
his money's worth out of this little
Plymouth! C