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In 1959 my father, John Heidemann, bought his first antique car, a 1926 Studebaker.
I was 11 years old at the time. In 1961, he was a rookie member of the Fox Valley Chapter of AACA in Illinois. At a club auction,
he was mister nice guy and put in an opening bid of $20 for some crates of old speedometers. Well, nobody else bid, and he
ended up taking home over 400 speedometers, mostly New Old Stock.
In 1962, he set me up as President of the speedometer
shop, and we started advertising in Hemmings. We sold them for around $8 and repaired them for around $4. Remember, we only
paid a nickle each for them!
I've had the speedometer bug ever since. As time went on, my dad specialized in 1902-1931
speedometers, and I did 1931 and up. In 1999, Dad died very suddenly. The last conversation we had, he asked me to finish
up the one that was spread out on his workbench. So I went down to Florida, picked up all of his stuff and brought it back
to Ohio. I finished the one he was working on, and before I knew it, all of the brass era car people wanted me to work on
their speedometers and drives. So I shifted my focus to brass and specialized in that for the for 11 years. Now that
I have retired from my day job (Mechanical Engineer) I can now return to working on all American speedometers from 1902-1988.
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