Rick Kennell, 55, Kent Lakes, N.Y.

Former Fort Wayne resident bringing back ‘Bernadine'

Rosa Salter Rodriguez The Journal Gazette

When Rick Kennell turns the key of the 1929 Model A hot rod, the engine, amazingly, kicks over right away, and, with a bang of a backfire, the acrid aroma of exhaust fills the air.

The distinctive smell immediately transports those of a certain age back to an earlier time and place – one the former Fort Wayne resident is hoping to recapture, if just a bit, by painstakingly restoring a car he watched his father put together from scratch more than 50 years ago.

“Bernadine,” as the car is named, is unlike any other, Kennell says, a “mutt rod” that was the nearly lifelong avocation of his dad, John Charles “Chuck” Kennell.

Co-owner with his brother Bud of Kennell Bros. garage and body shop in the Waynedale area, Chuck Kennell built and raced cars at the now-defunct South Anthony Speedway in the 1940s and ’50s. But Bernadine was something else – Chuck Kennell’s own creation, built from salvaged parts to satisfy a series of visions he held in his head.

“My dad and my uncle had this 1936 Pontiac race car they kept hitting the wall with,” Rick Kennell recalls of the genesis of Bernadine. “They couldn’t afford to fix it, so they took the body off the car and took the engine out. Then they split the frame in half lengthways and made it narrower and put this Model A body on it.”

With a flathead engine Chuck Kennell built himself, “Bernadine” was born. The family never really knew where the name came from, but Kennell still has a picture of the car when it won its class in the annual Fort Wayne Hot Rod Association show at Memorial Coliseum in 1958.

“I was 6 years old,” he recalls, “and we – my dad, my mom and my sister Julie and I – all had matching outfits. My grandmom made them.”

But the car then fell on hard times. When someone offered what Kennell calls “a ridiculous amount of money” for the engine at the show, his father sold it right out of the car. Then he proceeded to try to reinvent it as “Thunderchief,” a white car with an even larger engine – not to mention chrome wheels, a convertible top, power steering and air conditioning. Kennell thinks his dad might have had the idea of driving the redone car in parades.

“He had all these designs in his head, and he was the only one who knew what the puzzle picture was,” Kennell says.

When his father died at 79 on Feb. 18, 2007, the car was still unfinished. Kennell, a bass guitarist who provides financial management for others in the music business, decided the best way he could honor his father was to bring back Bernadine.

He enlisted Mike Pranger of Artisans Rods and Classics in Huntertown and his craftsmen Nick Oberley, Nick Lazoff, Jim Studinski and Scott Beaman to help.

Kennell isn’t sure the car will be up for the traditional Muddy River Run cruise through Fort Wayne, but he will be displaying the recently completed Bernadine at the show Aug. 9 and 10 at the Allen County Fairgrounds – his goal for more than a year.

He’s also documented the progress of the car at www.indiefinancialnetwork.com and recently got a jolt when he found out that the car might have been named after a Pat Boone song from 1957 called “Bernadine” that mentions a “rocket-propelled machine.”

What was your father like?

“He was a brilliant, brilliant man. Not only was he a mechanic, but he also owned properties around town. He knew everything about houses and everything about cars. He could do anything with them. In fact, one of my later memories of him was he was jacking up a house he owned to see what was wrong with the foundation. He was always collecting (car) parts – everything shiny, he collected it. He kept buying stuff at auctions and swap meets and bringing it home, and he undoubtedly was going to use it, but how it all fit together, only he and the Lord knows.”

How did you decide to do this?

“Well, after my father passed away, I was standing in the garage looking at the thing, and it was just grief, and my sister came out and tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘You know, you don’t have to finish it. It’s your car now. You can do what you want with it.’ And I thought, … well, I went home and slept on it, and I thought I would try to re-create it. He kind of had a new vision for the car, but he never said what that was, and I didn’t really ever say, ‘What are you going to do with the car?’ because I always thought I’d be there when he did it. So to bring it back to what it was, how I remember it, is the best I can do.”

Did it run when you got it?

“No. The motor ran, but it was kind of just mounted in the car; there was no drive train. These guys (Pranger and his crew) told me even if it had a drive train, it’s like a go-cart with a drag racing engine. It would have lifted the left wheel, and the torque would have buckled the frame.”

So, how did you go about deciding how to restore it?

“Well, they spent weeks scratching their head, but we finally came to the conclusion that we would use every part of the original car that’s safe. We used the rear axle, but the front axle is new. We used half the drive shaft, and the rear brakes were OK, so we used them. The headlights are from the 1936 Pontiac, but are mounted sideways, and we used a grill from a 1936 Ford truck. We’d be on the phone just about every week.”

I would imagine this has been an emotional journey for you. How do you feel, now that you see the car basically finished?

“I kind of feel like I’m on a mission. I just wanted this car to see the light of day because Dad always did. It’s brought back a lot of memories because I’d go home from school, and he’d be out in the garage and I’d hand him wrenches. I didn’t know what he was doing, but I watched him put everything in. It’s made me feel really good.”

I’ve got to ask, with this gas price crisis we’re in what does the thing run on and how’s the mileage?

(Laughs) “It’ll probably be gallons to the mile. It takes super-premium, plus additive. It doesn’t sip, that’s for sure. It guzzles.”

rsalter@jg.net