I will miss Ron. He was a quality person through and through. He loved his wife (who passed a few years back), his mother (who lived to 103+ years old) and Model A’s.
A phone call with Ron would last a minimum of 30 minutes. He would talk about what he had learned while restoring A1276, his early ’28 light delivery. He would talk about the man he had met who worked on the assembly line while Model A’s were made. He would talk about the evolution of Model A’s particularly the early ones.
I visited Ron in his hometown of Quincy, CA. After a long drive down a winding river canyon you would get to his place. He always kept himself busy with projects at his home. In his 80’s Ron would talk about the work he did on the steep hillside behind his house to reduce the chance of it catching on fire. I remember that towards the end of a phone call that year he said something about being sorry to cut the phone call short but he needed to shovel his mom’s sidewalk.
In 2011 Ron and I roomed together at the San Diego national MARC meet. This was the first meet that he brought A1276 to. Though he did great work, it didn’t score what it could have because he restored it, not to the Judging Standards, but to the way he found it. In 2017 he told me that he was going to make some changes to it for the Reno meet. For San Diego he did not have an enclosed trailer, so he brought it to San Diego from Quincy on an open trailer. To protect it from road debris he placed a 4’ by 8’ sheet of plywood in front of A1276. By the way, Ron and his son donated A1276 to the Smithsonian Museum.
Ron had a good heart and was a good, good man. His last name was Rude but he was anything but that. He always was considerate of other people. I will miss Ron.
