Because Jason Skufca was 14 years old, he quickly became bored during his parent’s trip to a local Ohio Vineyard in 1986.
“After about an hour of watching grownups enjoying accordion music and cheese samples, I got bored,” Skufca says. So he decided to explore the vineyard grounds and surrounding woods.
He soon forgot his boredom. He found an abandoned and collapsed house deep in the woods, and behind it a collapsed garage. From a distance, he saw a glimpse of a red fender and a wide-white-wall tire. He ran to the opening and realized it was a 1950 Mercury.
“My grandfather had given me a stack of old custom car magazines,” he says. “I was obsessed with customizers George and Sam Barris.”
The car was in sad shape; it had been parked on a wooden floor, which had rotted, so the car had sunk into the ground. Part of the garage rafters had collapsed, and they were gently resting on the car’s roof, though they hadn’t done too much damage. “The house’s chimney had fallen over and the bricks damaged one door pretty hard,” Skufca says. “And there was no interior except for a rotted front seat.”
The hot rod Mercury had once been in a shed, but that building had long since fallen down when Jason Skufca stumbled upon the custom car at the abandoned homesite. JASON SKUFCA
But when he opened the hood, he realized that this was not just a stock Mercury; in place of the original flathead V-8 sat a “nail-head” Buick engine. And the emblems had been shaved from the hood. “This was a mild custom that had just been abandoned,” Skufca says.
To his credit, Skufca held onto the car since discovering the 1950 Merc in 1986. Little by little, he is restoring the car to its lead sled roots. JASON SKUFCA
He hurried back to the winery and told his father of his discovery. After verifying his son’s story, Skufca’s father asked the winery owners about the car. “The Merc had belonged to the vineyard owner’s brother,” Skufca says, “and they said the house, garage, and car was to be plowed over by a bulldozer in the near future.”
For the Skufcas, that just wasn’t acceptable. So they made a quick call to the brother, and a $50 purchase was finalized. The real challenge now was removing the car since the house and garage had collapsed around it, and many trees had grown since the car was parked there decades earlier.
“My father loaded tools, sledgehammers, saws, and chains into his Jeep,” he says. “We removed the rear wall of the garage and after cutting down several trees, chained the Mercury to the Jeep and pulled it out backward into a nearby field.”
Later that week, they hired a flatbed truck to pick up the car and deliver it to the Skufca house. “In 1986, old lead-sleds were not as popular in Ohio as they were on the West Coast,” Skufca says. “It was just a rotted old car and people pretty much thought we were nuts.”
Over the years, Skufca shuffled the Mercury from one storage building to another. But even though he’s had many offers to sell, he and his father have slowly been working on the car. The rotted floors have been replaced, along with much of the lower half of the body.
“We installed a new drivetrain and chopped the top,” he says. “I will never forget that summer. I felt like an explorer who just stumbled upon an undiscovered tomb.”