Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Das Auto

I was watching one of my favorite TV shows the other day, American Pickers, and Frank and Mike found a 1929 roadster. What does this have to do with Dick Powell you ask? Well, it reminded me of the car that Dick Powell drove into Hollywood for the first time, a canary yellow roadster!


Now I have never seen photos of Dick's car, so I can only make assumptions about what it looked like, but wouldn't it be awesome to find out that this is the car that Dick drove? It would bring up the value on Frank's car, which he was told he overpaid for by the appraiser. (I would have thought it was worth more too.)


Speaking of cars though, a friend named Bob e-mailed me with a list of the cars Dick owned over the years complete with photos. I will now share them with you.

Here is Dick's 1932 Packard Convertible Victoria.


Here he is in a 1934 DeSoto series SE Airflow sedan. (DeSotos always remind me of Groucho Marx. "Tell 'em Groucho sent you!")


Dick and wife Joan Blondell in a 1936 Cord 810.


And this is possibly his most famous car, a 1953 Nash Healy Convertible. It was used to film episodes of Superman and later Sabrina and The Fast and the Furious movies.

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

I'm Back! (Sort of)

I have had many inquiries about my website, www.dickpowell.net and whether I have chosen to shut it down. The answer is NO, a million times NO. 

In April, I planned a tribute to my friend Bob Powell on the anniversary of his death. That morning, I logged onto the website to update, and it was down.  While I was frustrated, this was nothing new to me. The site had gone down for a few days at a time before. I planned to wait it out.

But the site never came back up. I asked my friend, whose server was hosting the website, what was going on, and he informed me that the server crashed and it would be very expensive to fix it.

The crash seemed a mild blessing in disguise, as I was planning my wedding, and the fewer distractions I had, the better. But now that the wedding is over, I am anxious to get back to Dick Powell. So while the site is down, this will be its temporary home.

Thanks for the inquiries. I really appreciate all of your support.