It's HEMI time !!! Compliments of NJSteve

[njsteve]

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How do you sit still with that horseshoe still up your ***?

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Side saddle

Hey, can I help it if my car is possessed and likes to "collect" people?

[njsteve]

Yesterday I gave a copy of the Hemming Muscle Machines to my mechanic at work. He was having dinner with the Wickbergs on Friday evening and was going to give it to them.

It's 12:30pm Saturday and I just got off the phone with Richard Wickberg, Sr. He called me up and we talked for about 15 minutes. (He had to get to his grandson’s baseball game). Depending on the weather we will all get together in the next week or so. His son Richard Wickberg, Jr. is flying back in from out of town business today. They own a commercial dredging business so they are rather busy.

Richard Sr. gave me some info on the Charger. He said back in '69 he was about 30 years old and a 60 year old buddy of his had a hemi GTX. The buddy was pushing Richard to buy a hemi car, but a Plymouth not a Dodge. Richard liked the Charger body style and the dealership, Suburban Dodge was in the same parking lot in Metuchin, New Jersey, that the local bar was in. All the salesmen from Suburban would come into the bar after work and hang out. That is why Richard made the decision to order his Charger from Suburban. He mentioned that there were two salesmen he remembered, Bernie and Arnold, which he dealt with.

(Richard actually ordered the car 39 years ago, last Monday)

Richard ordered the car and took delivery in January 1970. Shortly thereafter, the buddy with the hemi GTX traded his GTX in on a 70 Superbird.

Richard remembered that he only drove the car about 3,000 miles and all he ever did was wash it and wax it. I asked him about his son “borrowing” the car and he said he found out one day when he came home from work and saw burnout marks heading INTO the garage. He said that there were tire marks all over the driveway and that his son must have almost ran it through the garage wall. His son eventually became the one who drove the car more and more over the next few years, running it into things and breaking parts.

The longest trip he ever took with the Charger was up to Syracuse, New York one warm November. He went up there for some sightseeing and got caught in a lake effect blizzard. He remembered being the last car allowed on the highway before they closed it down. It took him 14 hours to get back to Jersey, going 20 mph the whole way. He said the car had absolutely no traction on anything but dry pavement.

I asked him if he had any old photos but he said he moved several times and had a divorce in the middle, so he didn’t think he had anything left but would look. I asked him to try to write down any stories he could remember for when we meet in person.

We will be getting together with Richard, Richard Jr., the wife, kids and grandkids in the next week or so. I will keep you updated with the details.

[njsteve]

Ok, it’s 6:30 pm Saturday and I just got off the phone with Richie Wickberg Jr. (the son). He gave me some quick info on the car and we set up a reunion for tomorrow for the car and their family.

He corroborated all the various stories I have collected over the years, from the bar fight and the bottle breaking on the back window, to the crash and pushing his algebra teacher’s Mustang into a telephone pole, even down to the exit location on I-287 where the engine exploded (right alongside the Caterpillar dealership) and how the car went down the highway with flames coming out the bottom looking like a World War II fighter as it got shot down. He said after the engine block was blown apart, the car was towed to the local lot and a mechanic buddy helped him take the engine out and they junked the entire engine from carbs to oil pan.

He asked what hood it had on it when I bought it and I told him it was a blue stock hood. He said he used to run two different hoods, either a 5 inch snorkel scoop or Six Pack style hood. He ran with the dual quad Rat Roaster intake on the motor. He ran 4.56 gears in the Dana and had the trans set up with every other synchro tooth removed so it would shift faster like a crashbox.

He used to drag race the car a lot at the strip. He laughed saying that most of the 12,000 miles on the car were done at full throttle while racing.

He said the best time the car ever ran was an 11.70.

He sold the Charger to Steve Martin (the guy who later assembled the replacement engine drunk and put the pistons in backwards) in 1975 in order to buy a Corvette.

He laughed when I told him about what his Dad said about the burnouts in the driveway. He said that he used to drive the car to J.P Stevens High School in Edison for years before he had his license without his parents knowing it. Every morning his Dad would leave for work early, then his Mom would leave about 10 minutes later. He’d wait five minutes for them to get a head start and then he’d take the car and drive to school with it, terrorizing everyone along the way.

More updates as they come in!

[Xplantdad]

Neat stuff Steve...keep it going!

[njsteve]

This afternoon I had a visit from Richard Wickberg Sr., his wife, his son Richard Wickberg Jr., and his son Richard Wickberg III. It was an amazing time. All three generations got to sit behind the wheel for pictures.

Here they are in order: Richard I, Richard II and Richard III:

[njsteve]

When he was sitting behind the wheel I asked Richard Sr. to reach in the driver’s door map pocket and see what was in there. He did and pulled out the early 1970’s Taggart’s Driving School matchbook that has been in there since I bought the car. He then shook his head and said that was the matchbook that one of his post-divorce girlfriends used to light her cigarettes with during the Syracuse blizzard trip described in the previous thread. He said that at the time of the trip, she was the chain smoking, then-current girlfriend of an NFL player from California.

The look on his face is priceless:

[njsteve]

I asked both Sr. and Jr. if they wanted to take the car for a ride but they both opened their eyes real wide and shook their heads from side to side in unison, while vehemently shouting NOOOOOOO!

They then asked if I would take Richard III for a ride and show him what they went through years ago. I agreed and proceeded to indoctrinate Richard III into what his father’s and grandfather’s old car was able to do. They were both laughing and his grandmother was videotaping as we left the driveway and she recorded the sound as we went for the ride. When we got back to the house Richard III’s eyes were bugged out of head and he had an ear to ear grin. He just kept saying: “I never knew old cars could move that fast.” So now all three share the same bond: they were all scared to death by the same car.

Here's the three generations together by the car:

[njsteve]

This Charger is getting something of a reputation as some type of a vortex or black hole that seems to keep pulling in more people and more stories over the years. It’s sort of like the Six Degrees of Separation Theory, only this can be called Six Degrees of Hemispheration. Here’s another one from Richard, Sr., to add to the list:

In the early 1970s Richard Wickberg Sr., was helping out with a youth football camp in Putney, Vermont, his kids were attending. He knew Artie Gigantino, who was assisting at the camp and who would later become a coach with the Rams and the Raiders as well as a TV sports commentator. Wickberg was driving the hemi Charger at the time. He was asked to pick up an NFL player for the camp at Bradley Airport in Hartford, Connecticut. That player was Dick Butkus. Wickberg laughed when he commented that Butkus was “a cheap SOB” and he made Wickberg pay the tab at the diner when they stopped to eat, and didn’t even leave a tip! According to Wickberg, years later the subject of the diner stop came up with Butkus and he didn’t recall Wickberg in particular but he did recall getting picked up from the airport in the red Charger.

At that same football camp there were other NFL players there, among them Ted Hendricks, a.k.a. The Mad Stork and one of the Viking's Purple People Eaters, either Alan Page or Carl Eller (Wickberg couldn’t recall which one it was). During that camp there was some incident involving them all driving out in the Charger to a local farmer’s pond and the farmer’s daughter coming out and being shocked at seeing some 7 foot tall, Sasquatch-looking guy standing on a rock in the middle of their pond, with no bathing suit on. That guy was The Mad Stork.

[njsteve]

I asked Richard Sr., about the headers that he had the dealership install on the car. He said he wanted the dealer to put those on because he wanted the car to be as fast as it could be, since his buddy had that hemi GTX convertible and he wanted to be faster than his buddy's car. He also said that the Superbird his buddy traded that hemi GTX ragtop in for, was an orange, Hemi-powered Superbird.

Richard Sr., said that the Charger arrived at the dealership on New Year's Eve 1969 (as confirmed by the original shipping invoice) and they got a call at home from the dealer to come and pick it up. It was snowing when they got to the dealership and they thought about it but waited til the weather cleared a couple days later to take delivery.

Richard Jr., gave some more info on his racing activities. He used to run the Charger at Englishtown frequently. He had tow tabs welded on the front bumper brackets, not for towing the car to the track, but for towing it home whenever it broke down. The best time it ever ran was 11.70 with the slicks he had mounted on 15x10 rims. He noted that the Cragars I have with the car now are the ones that Steve Martin bought when he had the car. As for his racing success, Richard, Jr., recalled winning at least one trophy and some cash at Englishtown when he was a class winner.

(Does anyone have a vintage early 1970's Class Winner decal for Englishtown I could have?)

Richard Jr. provided some more details on the infamous grenading engine episode. He said he was on I-287 North running some guy with a new black and gold Trans Am, probably a 1976, and they were keeping up with each other. The only problem was that the Charger had 4.10’s in it at the time and the Trans Am probably had 3.08s. I asked him what RPMs he was turning since the car runs about 3500 RPM at 60 mph with the 4.10s. He said about 8000 rpm when it let go. The shock wave from the explosion was so severe that the entire front end of the car came off the ground at speed. They then coasted to the side of the road around exit 10 and called a tow truck.

Here is the whole Wickberg clan after I took Richard III for the test drive:

They were all still smiling and Richard III's hands were still shaking.

[thumper83]

How flippin cool is that! I love the car and the stories that go with it . Thank you for the great read.