By Chris Wilson
Arkansas Farm Bureau

Jack Thomas’ car is a magnet.

Parked outside PJ’s Rainbow Cafe, a local hangout on the Mountain View square, his 1915 Dodge Brothers touring car attracts a barrage of attention.

“Did you run over that fella on the way here?” asks one man, eyeing the sombrero-wearing dummy bound to the hood.

“I thought you had a deer strapped up there,” says another.

That’s right. Thomas keeps a fake corpse tied to the hood of his car. Why?

Well, he’s glad you asked.

In 1979, Virgil “Jack” Thomas, then 45 years old, had his first heart attack. Five bypasses later, with his life at stake, Thomas’ doctors advised him to retire.

At the time, Thomas owned and operated a gas and oil distribution company, Thomas Petroleum. It was a successful venture — stressful, but at the same time satisfying — and he was not excited about the idea of early retirement. However, as Thomas puts it, he “liked the second option even less.”

He followed his doctors’ recommendation, but soon succumbed to boredom.

“I just couldn’t sit still,” he says. “I was so used to being busy. I wasn’t going to live with nothing to do, so I decided I’d get an old car to tinker with.”

Building on skills he picked up in his youth when he lacked the resources to take his car to a proper mechanic, Thomas bought and restored a 1929 Chevrolet Business Coupe.

He followed that initial project with a 1930 Chevy pickup truck, then a ’31 Chevy one-ton, and a ’27 Chevy convertible … and a ’39 Ford … and a ’41 Chrysler … and a ’72 Buick, with two other Chevrolets thrown somewhere in the mix.

Thomas had found a way to pass the time.

Around the turn of the 20th century, a man named R.C. Gilbert ran a machine shop in the small East Arkansas town of Holly Grove. An accomplished machinist, he made a name for himself as a reverse-engineer.

“Every year, John Deere would bring him a new tractor,” Thomas says, relaying the story the same way he heard it. “They’d say, ‘Mr. Gilbert, this is your tractor. You can have it. It’s yours. If you find anything you can do to it that makes it a better tractor, you just jot it down, send it to us, and we’ll do all the paperwork and get it patented for you.’”

In 1992, 13 years after his first restoration project, Thomas received a solicitation from a friend.

“My grandpa had an old car. What would you give me for it?”

The friend (his son-in-law’s brother, to be exact) had inherited an old machine shop — and apparently the pieces of a car.

“I asked what kind it was,” Thomas recalled. “He said, ‘I don’t know. It’s just stacked up in the corner of the shop. I’ve asked my dad about it, and he doesn’t know what grandpa was doing with it or why it was there.’”

Thomas was hesitant to start a project entirely from scratch, especially without even knowing what kind of car he’d be building. So, he politely turned the offer down.

His friend paused for a minute, then replied, “Well, would you just haul it off for me?”

They had a deal.

“I took a buddy, and we went out there, and we threw this thing on the back of a flatbed trailer,” Thomas says. “We took ropes and chains and tied it down and brought it home. We weren’t the least bit careful with it. It was rusty, dusty; it looked awful. It was just a pile of junk.”

Back at his shop, Thomas unloaded the parts and laid the pieces out. He put the four wheels together, then the four fenders and four doors.

“After awhile, I got to looking at it, and I thought, ‘It looks like every bit of this car is here,’” Thomas says. “Then, I noticed a Dodge Brothers emblem on the dashboard.

“After finding that, I said to myself, ‘If I could get a book, I could put this thing together.’”

Thomas wrote a letter to the Dodge Brothers Club seeking membership in the organization, and more importantly, an owner’s manual for the car. He was unsure of its year model, but had found the serial number, so he included it in his letter. He assumed that would be enough information for the club to work with.

Less than two weeks later, Thomas got a phone call. He remembers the conversation went something like this:

“Hello.”

“Mr. Thomas?”

“Yes.”

“Mr. Thomas. I’m from the Library of Congress.”

“Yes sir, what can I do for you?”

“We understand that you have a Dodge Brothers car.”

“Well, yes I do,” Thomas answered, taken aback. (At this time, not even Thomas’ wife Jane knew that his newest car was a Dodge Brothers. The only people he’d told were the Dodge Brothers Club, in his letter, he says. He reasoned that the club had red-flagged the serial number and alerted the library.)

“Mr. Thomas, we understand it’s a four-door touring car.”

“Yes. Yes it is.”

“We understand that it’s car number 3066.”

“Yep.”

“Well, Mr. Thomas, I’m excited.”

“If you saw the way it was spread out in my garage you wouldn’t be.”

“Yes sir, I would be Mr. Thomas. That car was issued to Gen. John J. ‘Blackjack’ Pershing.”

“I’ve been out of school a long time. Who was he?”

“He was in charge of all the allied troops in Europe in World War I.”

“So this car was in Europe?”

“No sir. Just before Gen. Pershing left for Europe, he went down to Mexico with 12,000 troops in search of a bandit named Pancho Villa.”

“I’ve heard of him.”

Over the next five years, Thomas devoted more than 5,000 hours to the restoration of his Dodge Brothers touring car. His correspondence with the Dodge Brothers Club paid off, but not to the extent he had hoped.

Through it, he learned that his car was a 1915 model. More exciting, he discovered that in the entire world, there were only five registered Dodge Brothers cars older than his.

Then the bad news:  Thomas found out that the owner’s manual he was looking for simply did not exist.

The club did, however, put him in touch with someone who owned a similar car. So, Thomas hopped a plane and spent a week in Putman Valley, N.Y., taking photographs of that man’s vehicle. When he got home, he had a frame of reference.

“Difficulty-wise, the Dodge Brothers was harder than all my other restorations put together,” Thomas says. “A lot of the parts, I had no idea what they were. Like the gravitational fuel pump, I’d never seen one like that before. To me, it looked like an old-time basketball pump.”

With patience, Thomas worked through the many intricacies and unique features of the car, a process that sometimes required creative solutions.

“When I got ready for a clearance light — back then, they had clearance lights instead of brake lights — the glass wasn’t there. So, I measured the diameter of what I needed, went into the house, got all of Jane’s drinking glasses, and found one that would fit.

“Then, I cut it in two and put red fingernail polish on the inside of it. So, my brake light, my wife used to drink tea out of that.”

Another discovery he made while putting the car back together was that the odometer worked, and the car had only 10,967 miles on it. A lack of wear on the gears, drive train and steering gave Thomas confidence that the mileage was correct. To him, this was a clue.

“I think I know why it was torn apart,” he says. “R.C. Gilbert, the man who owned the machine shop, my thought is he somehow got a hold of this car through the military, and he decided he would tear it apart like he did the tractors. Then, maybe he died before he got it put back together.

“I can’t think of any other reason it would be in pieces.”

The Library of Congress helped fill in some of the pieces of the car’s history as well. Over the years, Thomas has received a great deal of information and photos from there.

For instance, through the library, he learned that Pershing’s personal chauffeurs on his campaign in Mexico were war heroes George Patton and Eddie Rickenbacker, who both were U.S. Army lieutenants at the time.

In his quest to learn more about the car’s past, Thomas also contacted the Army. That inquiry wasn’t quite as fruitful. Because of incomplete documentation, the Army didn’t have enough evidence to say definitively that Thomas’ car once belonged to Pershing.

On the other hand, there wasn’t enough to say it didn’t belong to him either.

So, officially:

“It probably was the car,” Thomas says with a chuckle.

Sitting on a shelf in the back of Thomas’ shop are dozens of dusty trophies.

“I’ve been all over the United States with this car for shows and contests,” he says. “I also took it up to Pershing’s birthplace in Laclede, Mo., for a festival.”

Rightfully so, Thomas is proud of the awards his hard work has brought him. He does have a secret weapon, though. He notes that Mason-jar brake lights don’t typically pass muster in car competitions.

“No judge had ever seen one of these cars before, so I kinda had something on ’em.”

Thomas is reflective, and nostalgic, about his trophies. His car has seen better days.

“It couldn’t win anything now, because I really can’t take care of it,” he says. “It’s got to be clean to win first place, so I don’t even enter it.

“Do you see that little bit of rust around the springs there? That wouldn’t work at all in a car show. I just can’t bend and get around and do those things anymore.”

Aware that at some point he won’t be able to take care of the car at all, Thomas has already put it in his son Randy’s name.

“He’s respectful of the car’s history, and I’ve worked with him and worked with him to teach him how to shift it without tearing it up.

“That took a while. It’s really difficult.”

Out in front of PJ’s Rainbow Cafe, people move their cars to make sure Jack Thomas has a place to park. This is where he does his business.

Last year, he wrote a book, a collection of personal stories titled, “Life in the Heart of the Ozarks.” It speaks affectionately of his life on South Sylamore Creek, a spring-fed stream just five miles north of his favorite parking spot.

On any given weekend, you can find Thomas in front of the restaurant, answering questions about his Dodge Brothers car and, if he’s lucky, selling a book or two.

“Most people, if I sat out here with just a couple of books, they’d say, ‘Well, who’s Jack Thomas?’ But I park that car and it draws a crowd.”

It does. It always does.

“He’s got a silver tongue,” Jane says, noting her husband’s natural talent for promotion.

Which bring us back to the car, more specifically, the “dead body” tied to its hood.

At one point during his correspondence with the Library of Congress, Thomas received this passage:

“One of the most successful motorized operations (of Pershing’s Mexico expedition) was a supply mission that unintentionally turned into a combat operation. In May, Pershing ordered his aide, Lt. George S. Patton, to take three Dodge cars and several soldiers to a nearby ranch to buy grain for the cavalry.

“Before returning, Patton decided to drive by another ranch where Villistas had been previously spotted. As they drove through the hacienda gate, three mounted men opened fire. Patton, who would become famous for his ivory-handled pistols and his exploits in World War II, drew his revolver and shot one of the riders out of the saddle.

“In the ensuing firefight, the other two Mexicans were killed, including one of Villa’s high-ranking subordinates, General Julio Cardenas. Patton returned to Pershing’s headquarters with the bodies of the three bandits tied to the hoods of the automobiles.”

Thomas’ instinct for marketing took care of the rest.

“Whenever they sent me that story, I said, ‘Hey! I’m going to make one and put him on there, and that’ll draw people. If they ask a question, I can sell some books!’”

So, he and Jane used some chicken wire and about $10 worth of clothing from a local second-hand store to fashion an effigy of a dead Mexican bandit and tied him to the hood of the car.

As to the political-correctness of it all, or lack thereof, Thomas quickly points out that on more than one occasion, he’s had Mexican-Americans, like everyone else, approach the car to ask questions.

“I made a point to ask them if they found it offensive,” he says. “They’d laugh and say ‘No, they never did catch Pancho Villa.’”

On the square in Mountain View, a town famous for its folk music and festivals, it’s common for bands to strike up at a moment’s notice and draw crowds just as quickly. On occasion, you’ll find the city center filled with small groups of people, each gathered and focused on one of the numerous jam sessions taking place around them.

At the center of one of these crowds, you won’t find any music at all. Just Jack Thomas, showing off his 12-volt starter system (“You can’t even hear it start. Can you?”).

That’s what he does.

“I can’t dance, sing or whistle,” he says. “But I’ve got this car.”