Information from two newspaper articles:
Mothballed car museum to reopen in Provo
Jerry Woodward's museum treasures include the 1957-built Thunder Rod II and the Vortex X-2000, which he constructed in 1962 and was dubbed the "car of the next century."
The museum was open for about three years in the mid-1990s, but closed when Woodward needed more space for his business, Ace and Jerry's Auto Glass, which was started by his father. Woodward now runs the business with his own sons.
Woodward plans to reopen the museum on Jan. 23 in downtown Provo.
"I've had so many people who have wanted to see the vehicles that I thought I'd open it up again for a couple of years," Woodward told Provo's Daily Herald.
The 81-year-old Woodward built the Thunder Rod II from the chassis and body of a 1929 Ford Model A. The car's turbocharged engine earned it a record quarter-mile time in street drag races for five years and garnered the 1957 Most Beautiful Roadster Award at the Grand National Roadster Show in Sacramento, Calif.
The car's dual-headlight design caught the interest of manufacturers and became the standard headlight design on Peterbuilt trucks, Woodward said.
Designers also loved the elements of the 1962 Vortex. A three-wheeled car with a sleek, triangular shape, the Vortex has recessed headlights and a full-width tail light. Ford Motor Co. used the same design in its 1965 Thunderbirds and it has since become the industry standard, Woodward said.
Woodward won a Grand National Car Show award for the design. In all, he's won six such awards for his combination of ingenuity and skill.
— Associated Press
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Car and driver: Auto enthusiast Jerry Woodward to reopen museum at shop in Provo
He could have gone to Hollywood. Jerry Woodward, owner of Ace& Jerry Auto Glass in Provo, faced a moment of decision after claiming the America’s Most Beautiful Roadster award at the Grand National Roadster Show in 1957 for his Thunder Rod. “Jerry was almost on TV,” said his wife, Denise Woodward. The producers of the detective series “77 Sunset Strip” wanted to feature the winning car in their new show, set to debut on ABC the following year.
Woodward, who’s now 81 and lives in Orem, thought it over and ultimately said no. The producers of “77 Sunset Strip” wanted him to move to California, Denise Woodward said, and “he just didn’t feel that he could stay down there. His heart was with his dad.”Woodward, who was in his 20s at the time, chose to stay in Provo and help his father — the Ace in Ace & Jerry Auto Glass —operate the family business.
In 2012, he’s still in Provo and still at the shop, now with his own sons, Val and Jon. Former Provo mayor Lewis Billings, a longtime Ace & Jerry customer, said that the longevity of the business has always impressed him. “You have to take your hat off to somebody who’s able to survive as a small business in downtown Provo through the decades,” Billings said.
The Thunder Rod is still here, too: It’s one of four cars designed and built from scratch by Woodward that are part of a new museum at Ace & Jerry Auto Glass, Utah’s Museum of National Award Vehicles.
Woodward previously displayed the cars for a few years in the mid-1990s, and said that he’s spent parts of the last two years working to reopen the small museum area at Ace & Jerry. (The doors to the museum will reopen Jan. 23.)
“I’ve had so many people who have wanted to see the vehicles that I thought I’d open it up again for a couple of years,” he said. And after that? Maybe he’ll let people drive the vehicles around town. The cars have all won awards, but they weren’t built to be museum pieces.
“When we were first married, the roadster is the one that I drove most,” Denise Woodward said. “I used to have a lot of fun in it.” (Marriage was another benefit to staying in Provo: Jerry and Denise were wed in 1961 and have four daughters and two sons, 17 grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.)
Hanging around dad’s shop
Woodward said that he doesn’t drive too much anymore, but he used to have fun in the Thunder Rod, too, competing in drag races at the old Salt Lake City Municipal Airport (now Salt Lake City International Airport). One time as he drove back to Provo along the new and largely empty Interstate 15, he said, another driver pulled up alongside the Thunder Rod in a Corvette convertible.
“He had his girlfriend with him, and he pulled up beside me and just laughed, then took off,” Woodward said.
The Thunder Rod, like Han Solo’s Millennium Falcon, may not look like much, but it’s got it where it counts. “Nothing could beat it,” Woodward said. Responding to the challenge, he “opened it up,”and soon caught up to the Corvette. After pacing his challenger for a moment at somewhere close to 125 MPH, Woodward said, he stepped on it, leaving the Corvette in the dust: “You could see his mouth drop open.”
Denise Woodward, 69, said that her husband has an inquisitive mind and has always been interested in designing and building things. He built the couple’s home, a round structure with a dome-shaped roof, in Orem. “We’ve lived in it since 1965,” she said. As a boy growing up in Kansas, she said, her husband amused himself by building a wooden gun that would shoot pieces of rubber from tire tubes.
Woodward said that he picked up his love of cars by hanging around his father’s shop. “I’d leave school and go straight over and help at the shop,” he said. He learned about cars from his father. “Dad was a welder, a body man, a painter, a mechanic and an auto glass specialist,” Woodward said. “He knew it all.”
Billings said that Woodward is the same way: “The guy can make anything. He can fix anything.”
Maybe because he got such an early start: Well before his family moved from Kansas to Provo in 1950, Woodward built his first car.“I built a complete car from the ground up,” he said. “I started on it when I was 14 and spent about two years on it.” He still has photos of the finished vehicle at Ace & Jerry, but it’s the only car he ever built that he doesn’t still own.
“I sold it. I wish I still had it,” Woodward said. “A captain in the war, after World War II, bought it.” (If he’d waited a couple of decades, the captain might have taken a long look at Woodward’s Army Ant, a fully armored off-road vehicle with portholes for guns.)
Where do you get your ideas?
Woodward’s unique designs have frequently attracted interest from universities over the years and he said that he hopes reopening his museum will inspire students and other auto enthusiasts to innovate and create. He also hopes that visitors will gain a clear sense of what he believes to be his strongest source of inspiration. “I’ve always had quite a bit of creativity,”he said. “I was blessed by the Lord to receive certain gifts.”
(Woodward said that he’s Christian in his beliefs, but prefers not to be more specific than that — he wants that part of what he shares with the world to be as universal as possible.)
Even with the benefit of a creative soul, you can’t just decide to build a car one day and knock something together in a couple of months. Woodward spent six years and, by his estimate, 6,000 hours building his Vortex-2000, a three-wheeled car featured in Popular Mechanics magazine in 1962. He worked on it whenever he wasn’t attending to his day job, including after hours, or on lunch breaks.
“Generally I’d spend about six to eight hours a week working on it,” he said.
Val Woodward said that his father has tremendous patience when he’s working on a car. And though Woodward has devoted plenty of attention to his own designs over the years, Val Woodward said that his father never hesitates to help guide other people’s projects.
“He’s always very open and free about sharing his knowledge,”Val Woodward said. “He’s probably done more work for other people over the year than he has on his own cars.”
Billings said that he’s benefited from the Woodward family’s accumulated automotive knowledge more than once. “I’ve restored some old cars, and I’ve talked to them about how to do different things,” he said.
In addition to having an avid interest in racing in his younger years, Woodward has spent considerable time going off-road. (His favorite place to explore is in the Utah-Nevada borderlands near Wheeler Peak.) It only makes sense that one of his cars, the five-wheeled Scorpion Delta 5, with four front wheels and one rear wheel, would be the ultimate off-road vehicle.
Because of its unique suspension and wheel alignment, Woodward said, the car can drive over fallen logs up to two feet high. “It just climbs right over,” he said.
Not only that, but, as Val Woodward put it, “The Scorpion is the funnest and most wild to drive.” That’s the way Woodward would want it. Even when you’re building the car of the future, it should still be fun to drive.
If you go:
Utah’s Museum of National Award Vehicles at Ace & Jerry Auto Glass
Grand reopening: Jan. 23
Museum hours: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday, 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday; occasionally open until 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday
Where: 407 W. 100 South, Provo
Age restriction: Visitors younger than 12 must be supervised by an adult
Cost: $3 age 12 and older, $2 ages 5-11, ages 4 and younger admitted free
Info: (801) 373-3040 (ask for Jerry),aceandjerryautoglass.com
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