PHOTO BY JEFF MORRISON Phil Anderson stands with his 1940 Chevrolet Master Deluxe car at the Black Dirt Days Car Show in Conrad on Saturday. His father, Bob Anderson, bought the car, still in pristine condition, in the mid-1970s. It was later sold to another Marshalltown resident, and Phil acquired it from that estate a few years ago. A stain from a spilled drink confirmed its history.

CONRAD — It was a ghost car, a rumor, a myth.

Then, around 35 years after it was manufactured, Bob Anderson bought the like-new 1940 Chevrolet Master Deluxe, and it became a vehicle for memories his son Phil would treasure.

“I spent a lot of my childhood in the back of this one,” Phil Anderson, of Marshalltown, said. “Me and a buddy … when we’d go on car show trips to Cedar Rapids or Iowa City or Waterloo, we’d be … sitting on the floor playing Hot Wheels.”

Nearly all of the 60-plus cars on display for the car show Saturday at Conrad’s Black Dirt Days had gone through extensive and expensive restorations, but not this one. It didn’t need it, and its owner didn’t want it.

During one of those trips in Anderson’s youth, he spilled a can of Strawberry Crush in the back. Dad immediately pulled over and cleaned up what he could. “If you take the seat out, the stain is still there on the side of the upholstery and the floor.” His wife asked if he was going to clean it, and he flatly refused. That stain has a history.

Anderson has made only minor upgrades, enough to get them to car shows. Some of the interior cabling was replaced two winters ago, and those wires have a modern urethane coating designed to look like the original cotton insulation. It has Bluetooth, which is important since it didn’t come with a radio.

The fenders were repainted poorly while Bob Anderson owned it, and they haven’t been touched since. Phil Anderson is “looking for the right body guy” but doesn’t want anything painted unless the painter can get just the right shade of black.

This Master Deluxe was manufactured in January 1940 and delivered from the General Motors factory in St. Louis (“3” in the pre-VIN-era serial number) to Malcolm Bros. Chevrolet in Belle Plaine. But Iowa farm country was still in the grip of the Great Depression, and everyone knew war was coming. As Anderson tells it, one of the salesmen there ended up buying the car as an investment in case of steel rationing, stored it in a garage in Chelsea, and never drove it.

The car whiled away the years hidden away to the point its existence became a legend, Anderson said. “Then Dad, I don’t know how, finally found it” in the mid-1970s.

Not too long after Bob Anderson bought it, he drove to West Virginia. “I can’t imagine how he did that,” Phil Anderson said, since today the car doesn’t like to go above 45 mph. “It was the first time that it was actually out in the public being driven.”

Anderson lost touch with the car after it was sold, and figured it was gone for good. Then, around 15 years ago, he and his wife were looking for a garage sale in western Marshalltown and pulled into a cul-de-sac to turn around. A garage door there was halfway open, “and I looked, and it was the back end of this car, and I said, there’s no way.” When he inquired and looked further, he could tell it was the same model because there was a clock installed on the glove compartment door. About 10 years after that encounter, the owner died of COVID-19.

Anderson was in Des Moines for a daughter’s wedding rehearsal one day and received a photo of the car with no other message. “One of the sons knew I wanted it.” He texted back “?” and got the response: “Do you want it or not?” Since he hadn’t seen it in a decade, he wanted to look it over. Underneath the car, while checking for leaks, he found a wrench in a nook — not just any wrench, but one marked with electrical tape just like his brother did on his wrench set. “I’m like, yeah, we’ve got to have this.”

There’s a dent at the junction of the left rear fender and door. In the time between Bob and Phil Anderson’s ownership, a drunk driver hit the cinder-block wall of the building it was in, and pushed the wall into a car between it and the Chevrolet, and that car bumped this one.

All the other blemishes are purely products of time. The vulcanized rubber has melted in places and flaked off the running boards. This was the last Chevrolet sedan to have running boards, distinguishing it from the 1941 and 1942 models (the latter only having half a year of manufacture because, well, you know).

Festival organizers for Conrad’s Black Dirt Days and Gladbrook’s Corn Carnival, 12 miles apart, independently came up with nearly the same themes for the same weekend in 2025: “Born in the USA” for the former, “Corn in the USA” for the latter. It’s been 85 years and 70,508 miles since Anderson’s car was “born” in the United States, but it’s still a winner. The car won “Best GM” in the Black Dirt Days car show.

With some tender loving care, this nearly-all-original Chevrolet could start up at age 100.

Besides, Anderson said, “it holds antifreeze better than any of my other vehicles.”

Jeff Morrison is the writer behind the website “Iowa Highway Ends.” He grew up in Traer and now lives in Cedar Rapids. A version of this column was originally published in the Between Two Rivers newsletter on Substack, betweentworivers.substack.com (http://betweentworivers.substack.com/). It is republished here through the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative. Please consider subscribing to the collaborative at iowawriters.substack.com (http://iowawriters.substack.com/) and the authors’ blogs to support their work.