Full disclosure: I recently accepted an invitation to join the advisory board at McPherson College, the Kansas college that specializes in teaching automotive restoration to students. And Jeff Stone, who contributed to this story, recently graduated from McPherson.
What does that mean? Really, just that both Jeff and I are total old car freaks.
This story begins long before Stone, 41, was enrolled at McPherson, back to when he was just eight years old. “A friend of my father’s, Mark Palmer, bought this old car, a 1928 12 B Franklin,” Stone says, who today works in the auto parts business. “He asked my dad to help him pull it out of the barn, so I went with him.”
Stone inherited his love for old cars—Model T and Model A Fords—from his father. “My father was always into Model As, and his ’64 Chevy pickup,” he says. Old cars were a favorite Stone-family activity, so helping a friend retrieve an old car was the perfect way for the father and son to spend a Saturday.
Stone spent much of his youth accompanying his father on automotive excursions throughout the Midwest, resurrecting one car or another. “Apparently the owner of the Franklin had passed away,” Stone says. “He had been a plumber, so we had to shift lots of plumbing materials before the car could be moved.”
When he was just eight years old, Jeff Stone and his father helped family friend Mark Palmer move a 1928 Franklin out of a barn. This is what it looked like when it appeared at Palmer’s home. MARK PALMER
Buyer Mark Palmer confirms this. “It was buried in stuff,” Palmer says, who first saw the car in 1976 but bought it in 1980. “It was buried up to its windows in plumbing and heating junk.” So father and son helped move the Franklin to Palmer’s house. And that was the last Stone had seen or heard of that car for decades.
Deciding the barn-find Franklin required too much work, Palmer bought a second Franklin; this one. The original barn-find car was donated to McPherson College, where students are restoring it. MARK PALMER
In his 30s, Stone had what he calls his “midlife crisis,” and enrolled in McPherson College’s auto restoration program. “Some people buy a Corvette, but I went to restoration school,” he says. There, students learn hands-on fabrication, painting, mechanics, electrical systems, and upholstery. Additionally, students must learn automotive history and business.
Stone graduated McPherson with a Business degree in Automotive Restoration Management. While studying there, he often visited his parents’ home in nearby Wichita. One day he mentioned to his father that he was working on an old four-door Franklin in the school’s shop.
“I told my dad that we had replaced the structural wood in the body and repaired and test-fit new sheet metal,” Stone says. Between Stone and his father, they surmised that the old sedan was actually the Franklin that they had extracted from a barn decades earlier. A call to Palmer confirmed their suspicion. “Mr. Palmer donated the car to the college in 1998,” Stone says.
“Franklins are rare and hard to get parts for,” Palmer adds. “Plus, I realized that I was not an auto restorer. The car deserved a proper restoration, so I donated it to the college.”
And at the same time, a 1928 automobile was able to introduce the 41-year-old John Stone to his eight-year-old self.