AJC CAR NEWS
Antique car auction ends an era for Stone Mountain museum owner
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Friday, March 13, 2009
The parade of antique and muscle cars, a gleaming string of hand-rubbed wax jobs and American pride, will roll out at a stately pace on surface roads headed west from Conyers this Thursday afternoon.
Bobby Protsman is shown below an antique carousel horse among many other collectibles up for auction at the Stone Mountain Antique Car and Treasure Museum.
JASON GETZ / jgetz@ajc.com
Protsman drives a 1923 Model T Roadster into the warehouse at the Stone Mountain museum in Stone Mountain. The Model T was owned by Georgia Gov. Lester Maddox from 1950 until 2002.
JASON GETZ / jgetz@ajc.com
Protsman bought the car from Maddox a few months before he died in 2003. He won't say how much he paid, as it might affect the bidding.
JASON GETZ / jgetz@ajc.com
A detail of a glass eye of an antique Dentzel Giraffe carousel animal.
JASON GETZ / jgetz@ajc.com
Bobby Protsman, who owns everything in the parade except the police escort’s motorcycles, will be behind the wheel of his 1955 Studebaker President Speedster, with diamond-stitched leather interior. He’s letting his pastor, Harold Savage of the Snellville Church of Christ, drive his silver ‘82 Corvette. Son-in-law Vaughn Brown will slip into the 1932 Packard, so cherry it practically leaks sweet juice, while his friend Tom Hanson will tool along in a 1966 Corvair convertible, the car that made Ralph Nader famous when he dubbed it unsafe at any speed.
They’ll keep it under 30 miles per hour — “we want it to last a little bit,” jokes Protsman in his low-key way — and finally pull into the tent next to Protsman’s Antique Car and Treasure Museum in Stone Mountain Park.
And by sundown Sunday, they’ll all be gone, dispersed to new owners, along with former Gov. Lester Maddox’s 1923 Model T Ford and more than a thousand items from the Protsman family’s bulging collection. The auction Saturday and Sunday of the shuttered museum’s contents will be a two-day nostalgia wallow of old cars, vintage bicycles, Coca-Cola memorabilia, carousel animals, signed baseballs, jukeboxes, old-fashioned barber chairs, antique toys and more.
“I’m almost 72,” explains Protsman. who quietly closed the museum in December, and plans to use the money generated to travel with his wife Ruthie. “I been doing this 46 years. It’s time for someone else to have some fun with it.”
Rich Penn, owner of the auction company handling the sale, guesses the bidding might bring between $1 million and $2 million. But it’s hard to know, he says, because many of the items are so rare.
“Seventy-five percent of the better things, you can’t find any reference on; nothing similar has sold at auction in the last 10 years,” Penn says.
“I don’t even think about it,” Protsman says of his potential payoff. “With the economy the way it is, all I can hope is the guys who still have the money will come.”
Protsman’s father Tommy opened the museum in 1963. He had a growing collection of antique cars he had bought cheap and restored, and the newly opened state park outside Atlanta had few attractions. The park put up the building and Protsman, first father and then son, provided the contents.
“I was more practical about buying stuff than Daddy was, but he was a better collector,” Protsman says. “He never got into anything halfway. He’d go to Lakewood [Antiques Market] once a month. If he saw somebody selling women’s beaded handbags, he wouldn’t just buy the ones on display. He’d ask how many they had, and if it was 300, he’d buy all 300.”
On a good weekend in the mid-’90s, the museum might pull in 900 customers. In those days, the cavernous, exceedingly plain building was packed with more than 40 antique cars, 100-plus jukeboxes, big glass display cases full of vintage toys, and huge, gorgeously painted band organs that once provided music for merry-go-rounds, and would still play if you popped in four quarters.
But the park added a lot of new, flashier entertainment, including a mountain of artificial snow for sledders, and people started expecting more for their entertainment dollar than static exhibits. Attendance fell, to 250 on a busy weekend.
“It’s just the way things are winding down,” Protsman says.
On a recent afternoon, the museum is in a halfway stage of semi-chaos between its glory days and its end days. Restorers work on a 100-year-old barber chair, an array of old clocks are laid out face up on the floor, and nothing is placed where it used to be, or where it will be this weekend.
Protsman climbs into the driver’s seat of the Maddox Model T, which is parked inside. He starts it up, and after some serious choogling, off he chugs, out the door to the parking lot to do some doughnuts. The horn sounds that distinctive “aw-ooga.”
“My daddy and some other people restored it for Lester Maddox,” he recalls. “He drove it up until about 2000, but it had been sitting in his basement and it wouldn’t run. When he got sick, he wanted the car to be where the public could see it.”
Protsman bought the car from Maddox a few months before he died in 2003. He won’t say how much he paid, as it might affect the bidding. But don’t bother asking about mileage; it’s never had an odometer in its 86 years.
Protsman says he won’t be emotional watching his and his father’s collection auctioned off. But, he allows, “this is my last hurrah.”
AUCTION
Spring Spectacular at Protsman’s Antique Car and Treasure Museum
Public previews noon-6 p.m. Friday and 8-9 a.m. Saturday-Sunday. Auctions begin at 9 a.m. Saturday and Sunday with half of items sold each day. Bidding also online at www.richpennauctions.com. Stone Mountain Park. Park admission $8 per car.5 AUCTION FINDS
1. 1950s Coke machine from Alabama, modified by someone to add “white” and colored” drinking fountains on opposite sides. Coke did not make the machine this way.
2. Working 1890s Columbia gramophone with “morning glory horn” and oak case.
3. Antique oak barber chair used in the 1960 movie “The Time Machine” as the actual seat in the machine.
4. Coin-operated arcade machine called a mutoscope that uses flip cards to simulate motion. Stars Hoot Gibson in “Shoot Out.” Early 20th century.
5. Coin-operated Wurlitzer pipe organ from a carousel in Asbury Park, N.J., eight-feet-by-seven-feet, hand-carved scroll work, working condition.
.JPG)
Services »
