GUILDERLAND — “It’s in the blood, the Stewart blood,” said Scott Frush of Guilderland. He was referring to a love of Model Ts, and to a local family that has been collecting, building, and restoring the early Ford cars for generations.

“They’re a little bit addicting,” said Greg Stewart. “Nobody can have just one.”

Greg Stewart has three, plus a reproduction vintage camper that he built himself and that he trails behind a Model T when he goes camping. His father, Dan Stewart, 67, has three Model Ts as well as a 1911 Model Q Maxwell Roadster that belonged to his father. Dan’s brother, Charlie Stewart, 68, has three Model Ts.

Every Tuesday night, all three Stewarts and a handful of other local aficionados of the early Ford automobile can be found at Greg’s home on Gun Club Road on the edge of Altamont, working on engines, swapping stories, building parts, and eating supper, at their “Model T Tuesday” meetings.

Charlie and Dan Stewart — and their younger brother, Tom, who lives in California and also has a Model T — got their first taste as boys, when their uncle would take them for rides in his Model T. That was what “poisoned” them, Dan Stewart quipped.

Charlie and Dan’s father, who was a tool-and-die maker for General Electric in Schenectady, had also owned a couple of Model Ts in his teenage years, with his brother. “But they didn’t manage to keep any of them. By the time we came along, they had traded them for other things,” Charlie Stewart said. He recalled that his father and his uncle told him about once finding a Model T and paying $7 for it.

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Charlie and his brothers assembled a chassis, or frame, from parts and would run it around the yard.

“There wasn’t one blade of green grass left around this house,” said Dan Stewart, a quiet, affable man.

This was at the house at Gun Club Road where Greg Stewart now lives. It’s where Charlie and Dan grew up; their father built the house. Dan was 4 when the house was completed, and he remembers his father building it.

About a year after getting the chassis, the boys built their first Model T. “We collected parts and put it together,” said Dan Stewart. “Got a frame and a front axle and a rear axle from a neighbor’s farm. Found an engine somewhere. I don’t remember where,” he said.

A lot of the parts, Dan said, came from other people, “adults who had Model Ts.”

He added, ‘When we needed something, we got it from somebody, usually for free.”

As teenagers, the Stewarts built a two-car shop in back of their house, to work on their cars. The garage where they now meet every Tuesday was their father’s machine shop at the time. “He wouldn’t let us work in here,” said Dan Stewart.

The 1921 Model T truck the boys made was running by the time Charlie Stewart was 16. They also picked up a 1933 Plymouth sedan along the way.

When they got older, they said, they decided they each needed to own one of their first machines. Charlie got the Model T, Dan the ’33 sedan, and Tom in California got the chassis. Charlie still has that Model T.

“Tom got the short end of the stick,” Dan Stewart said cheerfully. “He got even, though. He still has hair.”

Charlie Stewart still owns the Model T they built as boys. “It’s not running at the moment,” he says. “It’s waiting for me to get working on it.”

Lighting the way

On a recent Tuesday evening, there were four Model Ts lined up in front of the garage on Gun Club Road. They were, in order, Dan Stewart’s 1913 touring car, a 1922 coupe belonging to Bob Miller (who wore a T-shirt that read, on the back, “Ask me about my Model T”), Scott Frush’s 1924 touring car, and Charlie Stewart’s 1925 depot hack.  

Dan Stewart gets ready to demonstrate how he lights his acetylene headlamps.He uses a flint striker, saying, “You can use a barbecue lighter, but it’s just not right with a Model T.”

The side lights and tail light are kerosene, he says, adding, “Can’t find anybody who knows how to keep them on.”

The license plate of a Model T includes the year the engine was made, Dan Stewart says.

His license plate suggests that his was made in 1914, but it is actually a 1913 model, he says; modifications on it kept it from being completed until the following year. But anyone looking at it who knows Model Ts would recognize it as a 1913, he said.

Touring and camping

On a drive with a reporter through the village of Altamont, Dan Stewart jokes, “This is the air conditioner,” gesturing toward the windshield, slanted open at the bottom, toward the front seat.

Although it’s a clear evening without much wind, there’s a lot of breeze in an open car. There’s also a pretty strong smell of gasoline.

Dan Stewart can get the Model T, which has a 20-horsepower engine and a two-speed transmission, up to about 40 miles per hour, he says, but he doesn’t like to go that fast. “Thirty-five is comfortable,” he says.

Downhill, it’s possible to go 45 or 50, he said. “But it’s not a very comfortable feeling.”

A few neighbors are gathered, talking on a street corner, and Dan honks at them, a single reedy low note. It is not the “arooga”-style horn that people often associate with old cars. Greg Stewart explains that the arooga-style horn did not come out until the advent of the Model A in 1928.

Greg Stewart also showed off his reproduction 1920s Zagelmeyer camp trailer with two beds and a kitchenette that he and friend Bob Miller built. A friend of Greg Stewart’s had a friend who had an original camper, he said. The friend built a camper on the basis of the original and made a set of plans while doing it, and later gave Greg the plans.

He made the beds six inches longer than in the original, “but not long enough,” he says.

When Greg Stewart carts the camper around, hooked to his 1916 touring car, he said, “Some people come up and go crazy over it, and other people will walk on by like it doesn’t even exist.”

Greg is the president of the local chapters of both the Model T Ford Club of America and the Model T Ford Club International. Both, he says, are international groups and have been around since the 1950s.

Cars from their era

A couple of weeks later, the Stewarts and a group of other aficionados are gathered at Our Lady of Mercy Life Center in Guilderland, which is still known colloquially by its former name, Mercy Care. The men have brought seven or eight Model Ts, a 1956 two-tone green VW bus, and a 1941 Oldsmobile, and have lined up the cars in the lot directly across from the front door so that the center’s elderly residents can come out to see them.

Dan Stewart has brought, not his favorite Model T, which is the 1913 touring car, but another one, a depot hack. He brought the hack because, before he bought it, it belonged to his old friends, the late Morris Safford and his wife, Mary Jane Safford, of Guilderland Center. The Safford children grew up riding in that car, and then Dan Stewart’s children did, too. Dan Stewart knew that Mary Jane Safford had recently moved into Mercy Care, and he thought she might like to see the car again.

Seated in front of the car she once owned, Mary Jane Safford said, with tears in her eyes, that she was happy to see it again. “And the people with it,” she said.

Model T details

Several of the Model Ts parked at Mercy Care had a couple of spare tires perched on their running boards, each barely wider than a tire on a mountain bike. Some running boards are outfitted with toolboxes.

One of Dan Stewart’s running boards holds three large plastic jugs of water and an old gas can. His engine doesn’t overheat, he said, but, when he plans to ride with others, he brings extra water in case someone’s engine runs into trouble.

What looks like a hood ornament is actually, a motometer accessory for the radiator cap, which contains a useful temperature gauge. Dan Stewart bought his at a flea market and added it. It would have been available as an accessory to Model T drivers of the era.

There is no gas gauge on the dashboard. Dan Stewart lifts up the leather cushion of the front seat to reveal a circular cap that he unscrews to show the gas tank. He inserts a reproduction wooden dipstick, saying, “You have to be mindful of how far you drive. And when you have the opportunity, you check it.”

Originally, the same key fit all Model Ts, Dan Stewart says. Later, it was changed so that there were 24 different types. “So maybe yours was a 12, and your buddy’s was a 17,” he said. “All you had to do was get a 17 and you could steal your buddy’s car.”

Model Ts have three foot pedals. The right is the brake; the middle puts the car in reverse; and the left is for going forward. The very first Model Ts, in 1909, had just two pedals, with a lever for reverse. The Model T was made until 1927, said Greg Stewart.

Collectors of Model Ts approach their hobby in different ways, said Greg Stewart. Some don’t care about authenticity, and are happy if the car just runs. Others are into very high-quality, finely detailed restoration. Another group, like Stewart and his family, want all the details to be accurate for a particular year.

It’s always nice when you can find an original part, Greg Stewart said. But there are also many individuals who manufacture and sell parts for the Model T, and in some cases these can be as good as or of better quality than the originals, he said.

The outing to Mercy Care ended with a caravan of Model Ts taking a long and intentionally roundabout route over back roads to Duck Pond Farms on Western Turnpike for ice cream.

Scott Frush remarked, “Ice cream tastes better when you drive to it in a Model T.”

Into the future

“It continues to evolve, from one generation to the next,” said Charlie Stewart of love for the Model T.

Three of his grandsons are frequent visitors to the Model T Tuesday meetings at their uncle Greg’s house. Sebastian, who is 17; Cardell, 15; and Carter, 12, are all Iarusso boys, the sons of Charlie’s daughter, Gini Iarusso.

They live in Knox and they have a Model T chassis, around which, Charlie Stewart says, they built a wooden box as a body. The chassis was given to them by family friend Bill Clough, also of Knox. Clough asked the boys at the time if they thought he should keep it, or scrap it. He was just kidding, Cardell explained. “He was playing around with us.”

They played along at the time, teasing him back, saying, “You should give it to us.” At the time, Cardell said, Clough was actually planning to give it to them.

They also have a 1927 touring car, given to them about six years ago by their great-uncle, Dan Stewart. It is also a work-in-progress. “We still haven’t gotten that completely together. It has an engine at the moment,” said Cardell. “But it’s not the right year. It runs, but it’s not done, and it’s not the correct engine. The engine for it is in the garage. It needs to be assembled.”

The Iarusso boys have a number of engines in different stages of construction.

Adults who love Model Ts give the boys engines and parts, just as adults did for their grandfather and his brothers when they were young.

One Tuesday night in August, the teenagers were working on on fitting a transmission to a different engine, which one explains they put together “from parts we found all over the place.”

Asked if he already knows how to drive, the youngest boy, 12-year-old Carter, replied with a confident shrug, “Oh, yeah.”

“They’re good boys,” said Charlie Stewart. “They’re boys that are not in front of a screen all day,” Charlie continued of his grandkids. “They’re mechanical. They’d rather be working on something.”

Sebastian is studying heating and cooling systems in a Board of Cooperative Educational Services program. Cardell will also be starting in a BOCES program soon but is not sure what he will study. “Maybe electrical,” he said.

Seventh-grader Carter has started tech class this year, although he and his brothers did not sound too excited about it. They described it as “little wood projects.”

A lot of their friends don’t know what a Model T is, said Cardell.

“Sometimes you hear about it in social studies. Everybody knows Henry Ford. I don’t usually know a lot about social studies,” Sebastian said. He recalled a time, in second grade, when he had done a cardboard display with pictures of Henry Ford, and facts about him.

His grandfather brought his Model T to school, and all the kids got to go outside and sit in it.

Cardell said that his friends think his hobby is cool and added that he takes them for rides around the property and teaches them how to drive.

He and his brothers always knew they would have Model Ts, said Cardell.

“It just runs in our family,” Sebastian concluded.