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The Gormans of Rapid City make a living salvaging junk cars, but their real passion is a blend of autos and art.

Losing a hub cap near Rapid City might be a good thing if you decide to find a replacement at A&A Auto Salvage & Museum, where you'll stumble upon a world of automobilia that verges on the artistic. Visitors are greeted in A&A's parking lot by thousands of neatly arranged hub caps, car seats, grilles and other auto parts; and by a big shiny bull made by Dan Gorman of Cadillac bumpers.

But the real treasures are inside. The salvage yard's front office has several rows of tractors, cars and other motorized memorabilia, so many that you'll think you found the museum; but the front office is only another teaser. It's where brothers Dan and Mike Gorman operate a used auto parts business, selling trannies, fenders and windshields over both the phone and the counter, their eyes glued to computer screens selling transmissions, engines, fenders, windshields and the occasional hub cap.

To reach the museum, you walk past high shelves, neatly stacked with clean used auto parts. Then you open a plain, overhead door and enter into the Detroit of the 1950s. Gleaming vintage cars resplendent in mirror-like chrome and whitewalls, some even with real exterior wood paneling, are parked as they might be in a small town main street.

Along with the cars and trucks are military memorabilia, motorbikes, fat tire bicycles, old toys and innumerable other items that were new 50 or more years ago. Most were mass-produced in America's manufacturing glory days, when wood and steel were manufacturers' materials of choice.

A two-story high elephant sculpture made of shiny chrome bumpers presides over the front of the museum. The Cadillac bull that stands outdoors was just a year's worth of work, but the elephant was a three-year project for Dan, who insists that he's a persistent welder, not an artist. "It's just doing things, just welding," he says. "I thought an elephant is an amazing animal. He can pick a peanut up off the ground with his trunk or he can lift a log. Isn't that amazing?"

Museum visitors are amazed at the entire museum, and most must wonder how it came to exist. A&A's Auto Museum can be traced to the summer of 1961 when Don and Marsha Gorman borrowed $400 from Don's dad and drove their black '51 Mercury convertible to Rapid City. "I'd seen an ad in the Rapid City newspaper about a gas station on St. Joseph Street for lease," Don says. Unbeknownst to the Gormans, St. Joe's was about to become a one-way street, and when the traffic pattern was changed the station became almost unreachable. "You could have stood out there naked and nobody would have noticed you," Don says.

They soon moved to Otto's Service at 6th and Omaha, a much better location – until the night of June 9, 1972 when a thunderburst over the mountains above the city caused Rapid Creek to flood. The Gormans had five wreckers at the time. "Tom Hennies, who was then a police lieutenant, called and said they needed us all on the other side of town because the water was rising," Don remembers. But when he saw a house floating above the intersection of Mountain View and Jackson, he realized there was little a wrecker could do to help so he sent his workers home. He returned to Otto's to lock it up, never deaming that the water would follow him downtown.

As he was counting the day's receipts, he noticed water filling Omaha Street. He continued to count, and son he saw the water reaching his parking lot. Then it came in the door, and it continued to rise. The pop machine tipped over. He'd just spent 2,000 on a tune-up machine, so he tried to keep it upright; surely the water would stop soon.

When the water reached his waist, he climbed atop a heavy diesel wrecker. "About right then I heard screams, and I looked outdoors and I could see cars floating down Omaha Street with their lights on," he recalls. "The people were screaming for help. The cars were twisting and doing tilt-a-whirls, and there was nothing I could do. I thought about trying to get a cable out there but there wasn't anything to be done."

Marsha and their four children were safe at home on higher ground. She was welcoming people who had fled from lower ground, including one of their workers who knew the station was under water. They didn't know if Don was alive or dead.

But Don was safe atop the wrecker all night long. The water finally crested at about eight feet, and the cement block gas station stood strong. At sunrise, the water began to recede and he went home. "I never got so many hugs and kisses in my life," he says. "Marsha was real happy to see me that morning."

Two hundred and thirty-eight Rapid Citians had died in the flood, however. "We lost friends and a lot of our customers that night. Marsha and I wept," Don says. "We couldn't get ahold of ourselves."

In the weeks to follow, the city declared that all businesses had to move from the flood plain, so the Gormans faced another business decision.. "A realtor friend of mine helped me find a new place and we started over with the towing company and added a repair shop. Thousands of cars were damaged by the floodwaters, and Gorman was irked when he discovered that many of them were being salvaged and sold for parts. One day, he bought a used rear end and found it plugged with mud. So he found some land on the outskirts of the city. "We bought a Ford tractor and a posthole digger and the boys and I put up a fence, and then we started our own salvage yard. They were involved right from the start. When they (Dan and Mike) got back from college we went from handwritten inventory cards to entering every item of every dismantled vehicle on the computers."

Even as he began to fill the salvage yard with auto wrecks and rejects, Don dreamed of having a museum of collectible autos and motorcycles in which everything actually worked — and that's just what A&A has grown to become. It's an oddity – several thousand scrap cars, rusty, dented and sometimes even charred, surrounding a big building that houses dozens of the prettiest pieces of steel ever attached to four wheels.

The collection was decades in the making. Don started as a kid, and so did his sons. Dan drove a '36 Chevy pickup with a 750-horse motor as a student at Central High School. He developed a special affection for 1920s gas pumps, especially the gaudy coin-a-matics that provided self-service fuel delivery long before credit cards were devised. He owns dozens of them, and most have been meticulously restored. Barber chairs, gas station signs, farm tractors, railroad items and other memorabilia slowly started to fill the family's storage sheds and garages.

The Gormans travel the Midwest, looking for certain items. Many of Dan's gas pumps were found in a barn near Freeman, a foot deep in manure. Other times, interesting items are right under their noses. Dean Robinson of Rapid City donated his antique chain saw collection, for example.

Of course, old cars are the main attraction. Some are nearly as unusual as an auto museum in a salvage yard. Only two '51 Frazier convertibles are known to exist, and one is at A&A. Don brought it back from Michigan. The family's 1942 White Half Track, complete with a .50 caliber gun, belonged to a Rapid City fire inspector.

A '50 Ford Custom Station Wagon has real wood trim, and a 1917 Harley Davidson bicycle has wood rims. "Both the Indian and Harley Davidson motorcycle companies made bicycles before they went to motorcycles," explains Don, who enjoys his role as part-time curator and tour guide of the museum. The motorcycle exhibit also has Triumphs, a Moto Guzzi and even a red Honda Moped from the 1960s.

Marsha's favorite car is a polar white'54 Corvette convertible. Don's likes them all, but if he could keep just one it would be the tan 1947 Chrysler Town & Country, another "woody" with mahogany, white ash and oak trim. Every car runs, and to keep the cobwebs away, Don and Dan take them for regular spins, usually on a back road to Ellsworth Air Base, a 10-mile roundtrip.

Don and Marsha live near Hermosa, where another many other cars await Don's restorative touch. "I'm a collector," he admits with a laugh. "We had the collection long before the museum but I didn't have any way to share them with people. And they aren't doing any good sitting in the barn at home."

Even with a backlog of body and engine work, he's still tempted to acquire more cars. "I'd really like to have a 1953 Buick Riveria convertible," he muses. "You can find them but some are up to $200,000. That's high priced."

The Gormans don't look at the collection as an investment. "We just like them. And we like sharing them," Dan explains. "Best of all, you get to meet a lot of interesting people. You get to hear their stories and you can share your stories. You can always tell if somebody's heart is in it. Our heart is in it."

Most of the museum visitors are middle age and older. "They seem to like it better than the younger people," Dan says. "Eventually it's going to be a lost deal." He foresees a day, decades from now, when a '57 Chevy two-door hardtop will lose its nostalgic value, and he questions whether the vanilla cars of today will tug at the next generation's heart strings.

Maybe and maybe not; but the elephant will always be a novelty – and so will be the Gormans because survivors always make museums interesting.



A&A Auto Museum is open Monday through Saturday during regular business hours. Take Exit 59 off I-90 (near the Rushmore Mall) and follow the road east to 1525 Seger Drive. There is an admission charge. Call 800-341-5865 for more information.

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