South side auto rough but running

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BROOKINGS – When about 150 present and former Brookings south side residents gathered for their annual reunion and potluck, on Saturday at the Veterans of Foreign Wars Post home downtown, an object of interest was an old auto – a 1934 Ford Coupe Deluxe – driven by one of their own in the 1950s.

Loren Leitzke moved to the south side of Brookings with his family in 1945. 

“It was a good place to live,” he said. “We raised all good people out of there.” Now an Aberdeen resident, he hasn’t lived on the south side since 1958.

Leitzke bought the car in 1953 from Don Crapser. 

“I paid a .22 rifle and $15 for it. I drove it a little bit. And then when I went into the military (the Army, from 1955 to 1958), my younger brothers kind of took care of it for a few years and had it pretty well tore apart.

“Then when I came back from the military and got a job up by Aberdeen, I finally come and got it and brought it home and put it in the shed up there.”

Continuing, he explained that he and Scott Seas “belonged to the same Ford club. He seen I had this Ford and he kept pestering me about it for a long time and I finally sold it to him last year.”

It’s Seas’ second Ford of that make and model, albeit the Ford he bought from Leitzke is in a bit rougher condition. However, Seas called it “a running and driving car.”

Register photo: Loren Leitzke (left) and Scott Seas show off the 1934 Ford Coupe Deluxe that Leitzke bought for $15 and a .22 caliber rifle in 1953 while living on the south side of Brookings. Last year he sold the car to Seas, who already owned the same model.