The Dwarf Car Museum Salutes the Era When American Cars Stood Tall
If your idea of a museum is the Met or the Louvre, or any collection of artifacts presented in a reverent manner inside a stately building, you may not be drawn to the Dwarf Car Museum in Maricopa, Arizona.
If your dream museum resembles a gas station that was abandoned in 1957, visiting the Dwarf Car Museum could be the best five bucks you spend this year.
The Dwarf Car Museum, unsurprisingly, features dwarf cars — eight of them, and not a dull generic SUV in sight. No, these all hark back to the days when automobiles had style and personality.
You don’t have to be a motorhead to marvel at the beauty of a 1940 Mercury Coupe, its iridescent red Candy Brandy paint glistening over wide whitewall tires.
Once upon a time, even regular cars could look like this. Those days are as gone as running boards in our present age, when pretty much all cars look pretty much like all other cars.
Ernie Adams, founder, owner and proprietor of the Dwarf Car Museum, clearly appreciates great (American) cars, which is why he has spent most of his life replicating some of his favorites in smaller form.
More specifically, Adams’s cars are roughly 5/8 the size of the originals they recreate. It’s like you put your 1939 Chevy Sedan into the washing machine and accidentally ran it on the hot cycle. When it’s finished, it looks exactly the same, only now it’s shrunken to about 60% of its original size.
And what do you do with a dwarf car, besides admire it? Well, Adams has registered some of his cars and he drives them into town.
At one time, 1983 to be exact, he also organized the first dwarf car race, with 12 entrants zipping around an oval track as part of an automotive doubleheader with a demolition derby. That first race has since blossomed into something of a circuit, in which four-cylinder engines push the cars above 100 mph.
Adams isn’t involved with the racing circuit now, though some lovely race cars are on display in the museum. Many of the dwarf racing cars advertised these days on the dwarf car Facebook page aren’t the kind of replicas Adams creates. They look like race cars, which is fine, but doesn’t seem to be where Adams prefers to focus.
The Dwarf Car Museum is more about great everyday cars, like the kind in which Dad would drive Mom to the grocery store on Friday night to do the weekly shopping. Or like the 1934 Ford Sedan that closely resembles the model in which Clyde Barrow drove Bonnie Parker on their business trips.
The most recent model in the museum is a 1954 Chevy Belair, which was the best-selling car in America in 1954. Baby blue body, white top.
Adams started building cars in grade school, out of wooden crates. He had graduated to metal by 1965, when he built the first dwarf car, a replica of a 1928 Ford sedan, from the sheet metal in nine old refrigerators. His primary tool in this rather low-tech operation was a homemade hacksaw.
The 1928 Ford, which still runs, is now known as Grandpa Dwarf because it was the first dwarf car ever. Its seven subsequent siblings also have some names, though the names feel pretty secondary. What name could possibly sound more impressive than “1942 Ford Convertible”?
Full disclosure, that 1942 Ford Convertible has a Toyota Corolla engine. It’s been street-legal for 26 years and in 2003 Adams drove it from Maricopa to Wauconda, Illinois (not to be confused with the Marvel Comics Wakanda). It has bucket seats, a stereo and a clock — which, if Adams were going to adhere strictly to the history of clocks in old-time American cars, would by now have stopped working.
It also has those great little triangular glass vents at the front of the driver’s and front passenger’s windows. Usually called “wings,” though they had a few other names like “scuffers,” they were a splendid way to direct a modest stream of fresh air into cars. Sometime in the ’80s they disappeared, for reasons that probably involved cost. At the Dwarf Car Museum, they live.
In response to a potential question, yes, it would be possible for most visitors to fit into a dwarf car. But you would have to either buy or build your own, because museum visitors are asked not to sit in the dwarf cars here. This restriction does not apply, however, if you are Jay Leno, the car nut who judging from all the pictures on the walls had a grand old time touring the Dwarf Car Museum.
It should also be noted that while dwarf cars are the stars here, the whole operation is really more of a stroll through 20th century America — a trip that starts with the Burma Shave signs along the dusty driveway that winds its way to the gas pumps, where the gas would be really cheap if the pumps were connected to anything.
Inside, the walls are covered — and covered is the correct term — with old gas station signs, parking directives, rotary dial phones and memorabilia that runs from joke postcards to Matchbox cars to automobile ads ripped from magazines. A page from the August 6, 1932, Literary Digest, for instance, offers a 90-horsepower Graham Eight for $975, which is up to $200 off retail if you pick it up at the factory.
Visitors can walk through the workshop where Adams repurposes used metal into living history. Along the way they can see the machines he built to build his cars, because that isn’t the kind of machinery you can just pick up at Home Depot. He also builds and displays motorcycles, and in keeping with gas station tradition, there’s a fair amount of random rusty old metal just lying around.
As a sort of bonus, the Dwarf Car Museum houses a small but full-size old-school barber shop where until a few years ago Ernie’s wife Ginger practiced haircutting. Now it’s mostly used for photo-ops, while Ginger handles the $5 admission counter and the gift shop that features, you got it, T-shirts with pictures of fine old cars.
Just for perspective, let’s call it a longshot that anyone in the year 2090 will be running a museum featuring Dwarf Toyota Rav4s, Honda CR-Vs and Ford Explorers.
The Dwarf Car Museum, 52954 West Halfmoon Road, Maricopa, Arizona 85139. Open daily 9 a.m.-4 p.m. Ernie Adams almost always on premises. Phone (520) 424–3158. It’s about an hour west of Phoenix on the I-10 in rural Arizona, which itself is disappearing.
