Your support helps us bring you programs you love.

Go to WyomingPBS.org Click on support, and become a sustaining member or an annual member.

It's easy and secure.

Thank you.

- In 2016, Jeff Wandler opened the Frontier Auto Museum in Gillette.

It's an astonishing collection of old cars, gas pumps, neon signs, and indescribable assortment of other memorabilia.

You've never seen anything else like it in Wyoming, and maybe not across the United States.

We'll visit the Frontier Auto Museum, starting now - [Narrator] Funding for this program is made possible in part by the Wyoming Humanities Council, helping Wyoming take a closer look at life through the humanities.

Thinkwy.org and by the members of the WyomingPBS Foundation.

Thank you for your support.

- Hi, I'm Steve Peck with Wyoming PBS.

We're here today in Gillette with Jeff Wandler.

Jeff, tell us the name of the institution in which we now stand.

- Frontier Auto Museum.

- If you could give a ten second definition of what it is, where would you start?

- Really, it's a walk through time.

So it's a lot of memorabilia from the early 1900s up to maybe the sixties.

And when you come through here, it's like walking back through time.

Everything that you would've seen the last hundred years.

- Well, that's what we're going to do during this installment of Chronicle.

Be on our feet, moving, and seeing as much of it as we can.

One of the things that strikes the initial visitor is the truly remarkable collection of neon that's in the building.

That must be something you love, I'm guessing.

- [Jeff] Yeah.

A guy in Minnesota that had a big museum got me into neon, and I started mixing it in with all my pumps and signs and things.

So that's my latest passion, and what I really do is try to rescue Wyoming neon, and then rebuild it, restore it, and display it.

So I like if it has a story from Wyoming.

But I just love how the neon looks with all the rest of the cars and things.

- I would imagine that what I might call the smile factor is very high for people who come in here.

It's hard to believe that someone wouldn't come in and first get a glimpse of it, and just beam like you and I are doing now.

Do you find that to be true?

- Oh, people love it, and they're always very surprised at how much is in here, and what's in here.

- [Steve] And you opened the Frontier Museum when?

- 2016, we bought the old Ford dealership which was built in 1949, which is a building we're gonna be going into.

So it started out with that.

I didn't know what all was gonna become of it, but eventually we were able to buy the building behind us, which is the one we're standing in.

We remodeled it.

This was actually an old coal mine building, an administrative building.

It's a steel building.

This facility is about 20,000 square feet and we have a store that we're standing in, that's my daughter's, and kind of an antique shop and specialty store.

And then we got about...

I think around 13,000 square foot of museum space as well.

- Have you ever counted how many individual exhibit pieces and artifacts there are?

- [Jeff] I don't know really.

Hundreds of signs.

There's probably a hundred gas pumps that have been refurbished, and I think maybe around 600 original gas globes.

- Jeff, you told us that part of the plan for your museum was to build these authentic looking storefronts or town fronts.

Tell us about that, if you would.

- So anything that I had a reasonable amount of artifacts for, I decided to create a space that would display them well.

And so I decided to take them and make 'em look original so that they suited the artifacts that I had.

- So here we have a barber and beauty shop.

- This is Kerk's barber shop.

It came out of Chappell, Nebraska.

And it's all original from one man, including the pole and all, that came from Kerk.

And he cut hair till he was 90 years old, and his family didn't wanna sell the barber...

They didn't wanna part it out.

I went and looked at it, and I was willing to take the whole thing.

So in here, you'll see Kerk's clothes, his waiting chairs, his backdrop, and every tool he ever owned.

- [Steve] So it's not a recreation.

This is what he had in his shop.

- This is an actual barber shop that was moved, and it's a hundred percent all from an original barber shop from one man.

We did add the beautician equipment, 'cause he didn't have a...

So my wife added the beautician stuff up front.

- [Steve] I see there's an old baseball uniform in there.

Kerk, K-E-R-K. - Yeah.

And then I have Tammy's department store, which is my wife Tammy Wandler.

And she does a lot of that type of stuff.

The general store, the department store.

And then we have an old fashioned bicycle shop that's more a part of the store, and that's a little meeting room that people can go in.

- So who is the creative eye so to speak, behind organizing it, figuring out how to display it, placement of the large objects versus the smaller ones.

Who's the creative force behind that?

- Well- - I think I know the answer.

- Yeah, I guess that's me.

I'm the collector and I've just always liked things, and especially old things.

And I love displaying things and making 'em look nice.

So throughout my lifetime, I had a lot of time to create displays and look at displays, and I know if I start a room, I know where I want...

I can envision where to put things, and then I build from there.

- [Steve] So you're able see the empty space.

- Yeah.

- Know what you have.

- For sure.

- And envision it.

- Yeah.

- And you've always had this ability.

- [Jeff] Yeah, my whole life.

I don't know why, I'm good at decorating.

- Now you told me your mother even recognized it when you were a kid.

- Yeah, she would invite company to go see my bedroom, because I always had a museum in my bedroom.

I'm the guy that would display my model cars and rocks, all kinds of things.

But I always built shelves and put everything up and displayed it.

- [Steve] And you're still doing it today.

- Yeah.

- The model cars are a little bigger now.

- On a massive scale, yeah.

On steroids.

- One of the impressive parts of the museum, of the collection, is the level of detail.

And perhaps no better place is that on display than in this.

This is just the recreation of an old general store.

- Yeah, exactly.

- Hundreds, if not thousands of individual keys, and boxes, and bottles, and cups, and cases, and envelopes, just painstakingly acquired and displayed.

What does this part of the museum mean to you?

- So my wife and I always loved farm, relic type of stuff.

So we always had our house decorated like this, and I used to always pick coffee tins and stuff out of barns.

And my whole life I've scrounged stuff from old homesteads, and even dumps and things.

I've always loved the old general store theme.

So my wife did most of this, but this stuff was at our house, and we moved it here and created this space.

And I've got some very nice Wyoming ones.

I favor Wyoming stuff.

So old Wyoming lard cans and things.

A lot of Sheridan history in here.

And I grew up on a farm north of Gillette when I was young.

But when people were getting rid of stuff, I was always stashing it, and asking for it, and basically rescuing it.

And I didn't know I was gonna have this someday, but I always liked that old stuff.

- [Steve] Why do people like this kind of thing so much?

Speaking from your point of view, what's the appeal of it, the allure of it?

- I think that stuff was built very nice.

I love how stuff used to be built.

It was handmade, heavy duty, real craftsmanship.

And I love the stories, like that (indistinct) couple gave me that icebox.

That was my neighbor's icebox when I was a kid.

So I love the human connection to all these things.

So almost everything I have, has some type of story about who owned it or where it came from at least.

And I think a lot of times, if I give a tour here to especially elderly people in their nineties, these things almost bring 'em to tears because it was their life, and they remember all those things.

And they just have good memories of it.

So it seems like it was a simpler time or at least was experiences in their life that they remember well.

- We're now in what was the original room.

You've expanded from here, - Yeah.

- out.

- Basically it's a car and petroleum history, gas station history thing, with signs, and gas pumps, and globes and that type of memorabilia, and have a lot of very unique cars.

When I see a car, I know if I like it or not almost right away.

How it looks or the colors of it.

So I like collecting things that might catch my eye.

And I have a lot of gas station history from Wyoming.

The old Parco things from Sinclair, Wyoming, and a lot of Sinclair stuff.

And a lot of regional Wyoming, Montana kind of history, I love collecting that.

The Frontier Gas company outta Cheyenne, and I've got the original sign off the headquarters.

So there's only one of them, and then I've got everything that they ever made, every version of every logo, and globe, and things like that.

So that's what this is, is a kind of a petroleum type of museum on the service station and- - And these gas pumps are, is it accurate to say, fair to say, not absurd to say they're works of art practically.

- Oh, they are.

- Industrial design.

- They are, and I love how they worked mechanically, because there was great designers back during the industrial age and they kept improving things.

And so the mechanisms in them are amazing and they look great.

They were made to appeal to the eye.

Everything we have now is so utilitarian, it's just to sell the fuel.

But back then, they wanted to attract customers and things.

And they wanted you to buy their model, that American era of capitalism type of thing, where you had to compete.

So they're just very beautiful and they're all different.

There's hundreds, and hundreds, and hundreds of different kinds of gas pumps to collect.

- Our videographer, Matt Wright and I paid $4.05 a gallon on our way up - Yeah.

- this morning.

I see each one of the pumps has price per gallon on it.

Does that correspond to the year of the pump?

How closely did you do the research there?

- There's one there from the thirties that's 11 cents a gallon.

That kind of thing.

I've heard that gas was 25 cents a gallon in the sixties at different times.

- Depends.

- I've heard that, but a lot of these are 13 cents, 15 cents, 20 cents.

So certainly gas was pennies back then and not dollars.

- What was your first car that you drove when you were a kid?

- A '67 Camaro.

- Well, you got me beat.

Mine was a 1977 Ford Pinto.

And I'm looking around here and I ask myself, "Will my '77 Pinto ever be in a museum?"

I kind of doubt it, but on the other hand, looking at some of the vehicles you have here, they were in their day, - Yeah.

- I'm not saying run of the mill, but they were standard consumer vehicles, and you just happened to have some really good examples of it.

- Sure.

- You have in here different makes and models of cars.

We're about to see the Hudsons, which I know are family favorite, but here's a Chandler, and there's a Crosley, and there's a Packard, a couple of Studebaker.

- Yeah.

- These names of American car manufacturers that have come and gone.

It used to be a much more diverse industry than it is now.

- It was.

I heard there was something like...

There was either 600 or 800 different car companies, and this was one of 'em, this Chandler.

It was a smaller car company, and went out of business during the depression, I think in 1929.

So these cars are very rare, but there was lots of companies like the Chandler Car Company, and they either went completely out or they got absorbed by the big car companies, yeah.

- The museum is more than about just looking at static objects.

Although that in itself is pretty incredible because there's so much to see.

But here's an example of something you can do while you're in the museum.

This is a setup of an old drive-in movie.

- Yeah.

- And there's a movie playing on a screen, - Yeah.

- and if people want to, they could sit and watch it.

- Yep.

- Is that right?

- That's exactly right.

So we wanted to do a drive-in theater, a version of it, a small version of it.

And we play three or four old movies, and we change 'em every month, so some of our customers come in.

They know what time they start, and they come in and just sit and watch a movie.

- Sit and watch the movie.

- Yeah.

We did the old chairs and- - We happen to be watching "To Catch a Thief" right now, with Cary Grant and Grace Kelly, one of my favorites.

- Yeah.

- Now you were saying that this vehicle has particular significance as well to the museum.

- So this is our family favorite.

This was my dad's '49 convertible Hudson.

He always wanted one, and he found this one in a tree row in Nebraska, and it was just a complete heap of junk.

Probably just needed crushed, but he...

It was full of leaves, and it was all rusted out and dented up and he turned it back into this.

It took him 25 years.

We tore this apart when I was 10 years old.

- And he did the work, you did the work.

- Yeah, he did all the work.

Yeah.

We helped him a little bit, but he basically rebuilt this car.

Once all of us kids moved out, he focused on this, and he got it done, and it's beautiful.

So of course our family loves this car.

- And he was able to drive it?

- Yeah, he drove it quite a bit.

He drove it to Hudson meets all around the United States and things, and he loved this car.

- So it's a convertible, a soft top.

So this comes.

- Yeah, it's got electric windows and electric top.

It was the first time that they had done this, and so you push a button and this top comes up.

Yeah, it was a very luxury car.

It drives beautiful too.

- And we have more of the facade facsimile storefronts here.

- Yeah, so I like to do stuff after family.

So we did a dry cleaner, a tailor, and that's named after my grandson, my middle grandson Chandler.

And then we did Owen's shoe and clock repair, which is my oldest grandson.

And we made this building very fancy.

By this time we had done a few of these, so we really went crazy on this one.

And then I did a late 1800s Leon's Winchester shop, which is named after my dad.

- But also - Yeah.

- a grandson.

- Yeah, my last grandson.

My youngest one is named Leon after his grandpa.

Great grandpa.

Now he's got his own shop too.

And then we did a Sinclair gas station, which looks exactly like an old gas station inside and out.

Old sink, that type of stuff.

And then my mom was Betty.

So we did Betty's drug store.

And that's a pharmacy and drug store from the forties kind of thing, so.

All period correct lighting, and ceilings, and all those kind of things, so.

Another facade.

- We might not see all of it during our 30 minutes, but inside we have a couple dozen old clocks.

- Yeah.

- We have shoe making equipment, shoe repair equipment.

- Cobbler, yeah.

- We have an old laundry equipment from the period.

- Yeah.

- The firearms of course.

- Yeah.

- And in the pharmacy you have authentic products from the day.

Pinball machines in there, a jukebox in there.

- Jukebox, yeah.

And we've got a 1920s original ice cream bar that came out of Denver, and it was in Cheyenne when I found it.

So kind of the old soda jerk days.

So, yeah, all that stuff's in there and all the original tools and things like that, that they used.

- And most of the vehicles in this room are the Hudsons.

- Yeah.

So this is an emphasis on Hudsons.

I do have one Studebaker in here just because I'm outta room, but there's two, four.

There's six Hudsons in here.

So from 1929 and 1949.

- A Hudson I know from a family story that I have, involving my parents getting a Hudson automobile as a wedding present in 1949, no longer exists, and it was the subject of a merger with another company.

- Yeah.

- Which became...

It was Nash I believe.

- [Jeff] Yeah, American Motors, Nash Rambler.

- They became American Motors.

- They made all those cars, yeah.

- And everywhere we look, we're never out of eyesight, eye line, of one of these fantastic old gas pumps.

- Yeah.

- Some of which are actual pumps.

- Right, visibles, yeah.

- Visibles.

- Yeah, so they would pump the gas up in a 10 gallon cylinder, and then they would- - Using elbow grease - Yeah.

- and then gravity would- - It was a manual pump and then they would run that out in your car.

And I have a lot of different models of those.

They're very different mechanically, made by different companies.

I'm very fond of Sinclair because they had a refinery here in Sinclair, Wyoming.

So I have everything that Sinclair ever made, starting from their original logos and going clear up into the Dino that we know today, that's still being used.

- Also here, hanging throughout the facility, the museum, are these incredible signs with great color, great graphics on them.

And they've become incredibly valuable now, haven't they?

- Oh, yeah.

It's not a hobby anymore.

It's more of a business really.

So I'm glad I collected when I did, because it would be very, very hard to duplicate this collection now.

They just made great artwork back then because they branded things back then.

And there was lots of small companies.

There was 8,000 different mom-and-pop gas station companies across the United States back then.

- And so part of the motivation for creating a sign that looks like that one, was to attract attention, - Yep.

- and establish brand loyalty - Yep.

- based on something that was eye-catching.

- Yeah exactly.

- We are standing in front of a very tall Sinclair services attendant.

What's the story behind this sign?

- Well, I think it's something I also saw and loved, but a man built this.

And so they had some things like this, but a man recreated this and I just loved it.

So I went ahead and bought it.

It went good in here with all the Sinclair stuff.

- And how about the Sinclair sign.

- Yeah, so that I got outta Lander, and that was an original sign off the top of a gas station.

So it probably was in Lander at one time.

It was hanging on a fence when I found it.

Somebody had used it to make a fence out of in their front yard.

So I bought it and had it all restored, so that it had glass on it again.

- I know that the Sinclair name means a lot to you, a lot to the museum, a lot to Wyoming.

- Yeah.

- Outside, we can see from here a Sinclair oil mural that you had commissioned to be painted on your building based on an original.

- Yeah, so I saw that in Hudson, Wyoming.

There's still one painted on an old brick gas station, and it's a little faint, but you can still see it.

And I always loved that, and it goes with this sign here actually.

That's the old black and red logo from New York Sinclair, which is where Sinclair was originally from.

So I contacted Sinclair Oil and got permission to use their old artwork.

Sinclair's very particular about using their artwork.

So they gave me permission to paint that on the side of the building and that idea I got from the one that's still left in Wyoming.

- So most of the Hudsons that we see are in what I would call, I guess their sort of commercial presentation.

Here's one you've dolled up a little bit.

Tell us about it.

- So this is my dad's driver car.

And so he would just drive this randomly.

It's kind of the one he would drive to work and stuff sometimes.

And it happens to be a '51 Hornet, which is what Doc Hudson is off the "Cars" cartoon.

So we went ahead and took this car, and stickered it up like a race car.

Hudsons were famous for racing, especially oval track racing.

And so we made a fastest car in the west, Frontier Auto Racing, gave it to number 16.

That's the year we opened, that's for the number 16.

So it's our own version of Doc Hudson, but- - From the Disney movie.

- Yeah, from the Disney movie, yes.

Yes, so it's just a car for fun and we'll drive it around.

- It's eye-catching.

- Yeah.

- Jeff, here's a favorite of yours in the museum, a horse-drawn oil tank.

What is it?

- Yeah.

So the Standard Oil Company had 10,000 of these and they basically drew these around with horses and fueled farm tractors and things like that.

So this was farm fuel.

And what I like about this, is it had the unit number on it when I sandblasted it, and it even had this lettering.

It says that it's for motor cars.

- Motor cars.

- So he was just starting to sell fuel to automobiles.

So this is a very vintage, old, historic piece.

I got it in Omaha, Nebraska from the original owner, from a boat plant.

He was 90 years old when I bought it from him, and that was in the late nineties when I got this.

So I've always loved this piece.

My dad and I restored this.

So I collected a lot of mining stuff, and I ended up collecting coal signs.

We worked all over the world.

We worked on equipment everywhere.

So I got all around and just liked fossils and mining things.

I've collected coal signs, 'cause I always liked the coal mining industry.

- People might be noticing the light changing a little bit in the room and that's partly due to this big railroad diorama with a functioning modeled railroad in it, and a town, and industrial equipment, and farm scenes as well, and it works.

- Yeah.

- May I press the button?

- Yeah please.

- I'm gonna press the button.

- Yeah that's kind of a Gillette thing.

We got a coal mine and we've got a ranch and some of the stuff from our town, I even put a little version of our machine shop in here, so.

And some of the local stores and things like that.

We made some of the buildings like what was in Gillette, so.

Just something fun for the area.

- People who might not have thought about it too much may fail to recognize that Gillette is one of the great train towns - Oh yeah.

- in north America.

- [Jeff] Yeah, I can remember when 50 trains a day left out of Gillette.

50 coal trains, yeah.

- A big part of the museum is automobiles.

They've been beautifully restored, but this portion tells us more about how that happens.

You've recreated a garage.

- Yeah.

- A service station.

Got a couple of cars on a lift here.

A completed mercury V8 pickup, not a Ford.

It looks like a Ford, but it isn't.

- Yeah.

Right.

- What was important to you about this display?

- So I grew up working on cars, and drag racing, and stuff, but we always had a garage and we always worked on automobiles, but I wanted to recreate a...

I call this my Goober's garage off Andy Griffith, but it's a full service bay.

And it's got a lube bay, and a tire bay, and a tuneup bay in it.

But what you would've seen back in the day we remember, I even remember when you'd pull in, and they had garages at gas stations, you could get your car worked on or serviced.

So I just wanted to do that, and I had a lot of this nice old stuff that made that.

So I made this whole thing like a full service garage back here.

- Now there's another... Also near the mural that we're gonna see, which is a huge sign in the shape of a boot, - Yeah.

- which you've mentioned to me earlier as well, which has real meaning for you.

- Yeah, so I got that boot.

I was in Spokane, Washington visiting a cousin.

Saw that laying by the road with some yard art stuff.

So I went and talked to him, and I managed to buy that and get it down here.

It's 15 foot tall, and the toe to heel is 10 foot.

So it's a pretty large boot, and we restored it to be a landmark for downtown Gillette, and it'll be all neon-ed too.

So the neon's gotta go up on it.

So at night it'll light up.

But yeah, we're proud of that accomplishment to make a landmark.

- And part of the idea is to provide more attractions for Gillette as a community.

Is that right?

- Yeah.

I hope so.

I didn't know when we started what this would turn into, but now this is a world class display of this type of stuff, and it deserves to be an attraction in the state, and the town, and the county, that kind of thing.

So we're hoping to cause awareness, so that people know what's here to look at.

So certainly it's an attraction in a non-tourist town, but we're hoping that between the buffalo ranch, and the coal mines and some other good businesses here, that we can get more tourists to come here.