By By MARCIA STEFFENS / Dowagiac Daily News
CASSOPOLIS -- The love affair of Americans and their cars may have started with the first Model T. Since then, cars still come in black and nearly every other shade.
The interiors have added many bells and whistles and additional safety features have been designed along with the increased speed.
Car shows, where vehicles are parked in a line to be shown off to other car owners, have become increasingly popular in the past 10 years, said Don Wroblewski of Niles.
He started showing his pride and joy at the K mart parking lot on Wednesday nights in Niles, until the store closed and the group moved down to the Wal-Mart lot.
Wroblewski got his cherry red 1955 Chevy 210 Sedan about five years ago.
It was all "cobbled up," he said. So he redid some of the parts and made a few changes to the interior and "general nuts and bolts cleaning," making it look "they way it should be."
Often the owners travel on the weekends to different shows. Dee picked up the flyer about the first Cassopolis Days car show at her job at Midwest Energy in Cassopolis. So last weekend they were there parked in the lot behind the Cass County Courthouse.
The Howard Township couple always attend the Niles' RIverfest and Apple Festival too. Coming up is one of the largest shows, he said, in Centerville, though they only go for a day instead of three as do many of the other car owners.
They look forward to the Rod and Roll show in Dowagiac in August. After all, Wroblewski can then check out the condition of the downtown streetscape and bricks, which he helped work on. "I poured the concrete," he said. He works for Midwest Northern Construction Services in Niles and plans to retire in a few years.
Once Wroblewski. who grew up near Ironwood and Bertrand, once had a maroon 1933 Plymouth coupe. When he decided to get back into this hobby, he first looked for a street rod from the '20s or '40s, but unfortunately the $40 to $50 thousand was out of his price range.
The 1955 Chevy he found in Goshen was similar to the '55 Chevy he had as a kid, except it was a four-door. He had gotten got it right after he graduated from Niles High School in 1959.
Someone once made him a really good offer on his Chevy, "but she wouldn't let me sell it," he said referring to his wife. "You put too much work into it," she told him.