In our research on the history of the Jabro last week, we came across a mention of Ed Alsbury’s mid-engine Jabro appearing in another issue of Mechanix Illustrated, a few years later in April 1962. Indeed, we had a copy of that issue in our collection and discovered a gold mine of oddities to go along with it. Normally, MI dedicated just a page or two every month to some unusual automobile – an Eastern Bloc miserymobile or some sort of homemade contraption – but it appears the magazine had a backlog of such stories, and the editors decided to have a blowout this issue.
According to our friend Geoff Hacker, who owns three Covingtons – a coupe and two convertibles – the El Tiburon coupe in the story above was later destroyed, but this very Mechanix Illustrated article influenced the original owner of Geoff’s coupe to purchase and build one of his own, though on a Porsche 356 chassis.
As for the Hickey Trail Blazer, according to Hickey’s profile over at the Off-Road Motorsports Hall of Fame, it was thanks to the Trail Blazer that Ed Cole offered Hickey a job as research and development engineer at GM, specializing in off-road vehicles. Hickey would later build a larger racing version of the Trail Blazer called the Baja Boot that would see quite a bit of success in off-road racing.
The DiDia is still around, as we saw at the 2010 Amelia Island Concours d’Elegance. Mel Gould was no stranger to the pages of Mechanix Illustrated – he was also behind the Purple People Eater Crosley.
Ah, here’s what we were looking for, Alsbury’s Jabro, though we have no idea on its current whereabouts. As for the Stiletto, coincidentally one showed up at Amelia Island in 2010 as well, though we’re going to leave it to the Stiletto experts to tell us for sure whether that one (Bob Carnes’s “factory” car, damaged in the December 1961 factory fire, then later rebuilt and eventually owned and raced by Bob Spooner) is the same one that appeared here in the pages of MI.
While the Von Dwingelo T-bird has an entry on Kustomrama, it seems all that anybody knows of him or the car is relegated the the few magazine articles done on them at this time.
