Mayfield Used Cars – customs, furrin’ stuff, ‘n odd racers

Our recent posts on used car dealerships that specialize in custom and special interest cars jarred loose a few photos and memories from the collection of Bob Gurr. Faithful blog readers might remember Bob as the designer of the Australian Woodill Wildfire, but Bob is more widely known as a Disney Imagineer and designer of such Disneyland conveyances as the monorail and the Autopia cars.

But before that, in about 1947-1949, he was just, in his words, a “young, penniless student” at the Art Center College of Design, and he and his friends would often tramp down to Mayfield’s, a car lot on the northwest corner of Hollywood Way and Riverside Drive, to check out the used cars on display there.

“At that time, there were several places around town where there were interesting cars,” Bob said. “After World War II, a lot of these cars that weren’t scrapped and were just stuffed away in garages because they were gas guzzlers, they came out of the woodwork. This was before there was any real interest in what we now call collector cars – they were really just used cars then.”

For Bob, who then drove around in a 1926 Buick he purchased for $50, the asking prices on the cars at Mayfield’s – usually in the $1,500 range – put them out of his grasp, but looking and taking pictures didn’t cost him a dime.

These cars all seem distinctive enough not to have fallen through the cracks over the years. Anybody know where some of them might be today?

As for Mayfield’s, that location now seems to be a gas station in the shadow of a Disney tower.