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Jean Brown felt zero apprehension at the prospect of traversing Canada with husband Norm in their 83-year-old DeSoto Airflow, as the June 29 start of the Coasters Cross Canada Tour fast approached.Dan Proudfoot

Jean Brown remembers so clearly her father's fondness for saying he sold the family farm because he was done with needing to stay home to milk the cows.

To which her mother, Ethel, would interject: Why would George say such a thing, when she and the hired hand did most of the milking?

Whatever the case, the consequence was Jean Brown grew up being at ease with perpetual motion: her parents took to driving like few others after moving into Gorrie, in southwestern Ontario, where George opened a welding shop.

And so she felt zero apprehension at the prospect of traversing Canada with husband Norm in their 83-year-old DeSoto Airflow, as the June 29 start of the Coasters Cross Canada Tour fast approached. Why would she, after marking Canada's centennial in 1967 in the first such tour, when the Browns' 1929 Chrysler kept a-chugging without fail.

Holiday excursions into Northern Ontario and Muskoka were predecessors to the centennial drive, organized by the Historical Automobile Club of Canada and dubbed Normoskas. The 60th edition runs to Manitoulin Island this Aug. 19-26. Jean was a passenger on the first 13 Normoskas.

She turned 15 in Russell, Man., as the family made their way to the start at Vancouver Island, visiting friends who had moved west, some of them as travelling threshing crews.

She still remembers the ancient Chrysler's mohair upholstery being way too scratchy for shorts, but that was as bad as it got. Although only nine of 125 entries made it all the way to St. John's (the Browns dropped out at Expo 67 because Jean's brother was getting married), she has only a faint memory of making one stop at a dealership for some part or other.

Trains with more than 100 cars stretching across the prairies were a revelation – "our town got two-to-four-car freights once or twice a week." The beauty of endless undulating fields was another gift, "not just seeing to the edge of a 100-acre farm, but for miles.

"I learned to be really proud of being Canadian – it was a fabulous time to be a teenager, fabulous seeing the country and Expo 67. The world was coming to Canada!"

Her parents sang along as the Chrysler held a steady 45 miles an hour. "My mother said it was a passenger's duty to keep the driver awake. Old-time hymns, popular songs. One my dad loved to sing was Betsy Brown, 'There was a little girl/She lived in town … '"

The family paused for community centennial celebrations and joined the local parades. Riding the bicycle-propelled outhouse provided by the fire department in Marathon, Ont., was a screamer for Joan; the door would pop open and a fireman would emerge with a hose to spray onlookers.

Old cars were the continuum in her father's life – old cars made fit as a fiddle, bought and sold – bridging now into Jean and Norm's lives. George and Ethel towed the Airflow that's to take them from Saanich to St. John's, home from Placerville, Calif., in the late 1970s. Placerville had been the heart of gold rush country almost a century earlier; finding an Airflow was a golden moment for George Brown.

"He'd owned an Airflow in the forties, and decided he had to have another," Jean says. "He just liked the way it looked, the way it ran."

Mind, the Airflow neither runs the way her late father would remember, nor looks quite the same either. Norm's eight-year build granted it a Dodge Ram V-8, a suspension adjustable at each corner with four dash-mounted buttons and, for Jean, power steering.

Looks? When the Airflow made its debut at the 1934 New York auto show, the Market Research Corp. of America asked visitors which new car they thought best and worst: The Airflow topped both categories. Dire sales resulted in Chrysler shutting down production three years later.

The Acqua Minerale Blue finish Jean and Norm chose to accent the curves makes it near impossible to avert your eyes. "It's ugly, it's beautiful," Jean says. "If you think of it coming out so soon after Ford's Model A, a very boxy car, it was, 'Holy cow, what is this thing?' The common man wasn't quite there yet."

All across Canada, the refrain will be heard yet again this summer: "Holy cow, what is this thing?

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