Driving Mr. Jay: Vancouver man, his Model T hang with Leno

When Clayton Paddison was a seasoned 3-year-old, he pointed to a vehicle on the street and announced: ” ’63 Falcon Futura!”

While those weren’t literally his first words, they probably could have been. Paddison’s earliest education about life on Earth was a seminar in automobiles. “What kind of car is that?” was a primary conversation topic for generations of Paddison men, he said.

In the summer of 2016, Paddison was privileged to geek out about his own beloved 1927 Model T Ford with a special new friend — but first he had to haul the beast from his Lake Shore neighborhood home to Hollywood.

Paddison and his Model T appeared as guests on a summer 2016 episode of “Jay Leno’s Garage,” the vintage car lover’s talk show and video playground. The episode was nominated for an Emmy Award in the Creative Arts — Short Form Nonfiction or Reality category.

The Creative Arts Emmys, a huge slate of awards that mostly focus on technical matters, were announced last weekend and aired on the FX network Saturday; “Jay Leno’s Garage” didn’t win. The main Emmy broadcast is tonight.

But watch the episode on video and you’ll see why it was nominated: the famous TV star and the humble car dude from Clark County click immediately, digging into the details and tales behind this particular car as well as the history of automotion in America.

The down-to-Earth Paddison obviously knows his stuff and never seems star-struck; he even corrects the cheery Leno on a fact or two.

“I have a clockwork mind,” Paddison told The Columbian. “Let me look at some blueprints, and I don’t forget.” (When he’s not working on cars, he works for a maritime electronics manufacturer in Portland.)

It’s a pretty technical conversation, and you may get a little lost if you’re not a fellow car geek — but there’s no resisting Paddison’s enthusiasm and spark. Leno obviously can’t.

“Suppose you’re a married guy with three kids and you want to do a little hot rodding on a budget,” Leno tells the camera. “This is the best way to do it. It’s a classic case of ingenuity and hard work.”

One video commenter posted about this episode: “Jay should consider this young man (for) his role in the garage when he is ready to retire. Very talented and intelligent. He actually held Jay’s attention. No offense, Jay.”

Just listen to the pair discuss the inherent hazards of vintage fuel-tank placement — in the compartment over the driver’s lap. Paddison decided that was one place where innovation was OK, and moved the explosive tank to the back of the car, away from his body.

“It’s a little terrifying when you’ve got 12 gallons of fuel hanging over your lap … in a car like this,” he said, chuckling along with Leno.

Every bump

Paddison said his father was “a child of the ’60s” — which means something a little different in this family than it might mean in others.

“Cruise-ins, the Beach Boys, cars with no doors and the back full of kids,” he said. “We would watch street drags at night until the police showed up.”

A dozen cars usually lived in his grandfather’s driveway in Portland, he said. “He’d bring used cars all the time. He bought them for nothing,” Paddison said.

When Paddison grew up — if he grew up — he purchased the Model T “as a pile of parts for $800,” he said. That was after it spent 47 years mouldering in somebody’s shop, he said. Over the years, he said, he’s invested no more than $6,000 of his own money on the project. (He also started his own sideline business, Paddison PreWar, out of his garage.)

He built it, tried it, took it apart and built it again, he said. “You learn as you go. You figure things out,” he said. For example, the original, vintage suspension was not up to freeway speeds, he discovered the hard way: “Every chuck hole, every bump, every rock — we felt it,” he said. He upgraded it for greater creature comfort, he said; the car is not meant to be a museum piece, it’s meant for the road.

The great thing about Model Ts, he added, is that they’re actually pretty simple machines, and parts remain plentiful. “Joe Blow could blow it apart in his barn and keep it running,” he said. “They’re ridiculously reliable.”

Discussion about his Model T project on the online “Jalopy Journal” eventually grew so long and enthusiastic that one far-flung friend who deals cars in the Los Angeles area posted to Paddison: “You know who you need to be in the same room with? Jay Leno.”

Paddison sent a letter to the “Jay Leno’s Garage” show and forgot all about it. Months later, his phone rang with a number he didn’t recognize. He let it go to voicemail and listened later. “This is Jay Leno,” the voice said.

So Paddison and his family hauled the car down to Hollywood in July 2016, fingers crossed that all would go well. He was still tinkering the morning they left; the family paused in Sacramento to scour the town for various auto parts.

All the tension and worry disappeared when they pulled into the Burbank complex where Leno has “176 cars and 300 bikes,” Paddison said. “I was surrounded by all these rare vehicles, all these names, I was like a kid in a candy store.”

Leno and Paddison spent about two hours filming inside Leno’s garage studio. Then Leno cranked the car — it started in one — and the pair zoomed off down the highway.

“If only my dad was here to see this!” Leno hollers into the wind. “A mile a minute!”

Back at home, Paddison chuckled: “Most of the time they hope the car won’t break down.” There’s a tow truck that always follows off-camera, he said; fortunately in his case it wasn’t necessary.

What’s Jay like?

Leno’s very much how he appears on screen, Paddison said: “He’s just a personable, down-to-earth guy. He’s an average guy who just happens to be Jay Leno.”

“Watching their minds work together, it was just magical,” said Julia Paddison, Clayton’s wife. “Clayton really enjoyed it and he really held his own.”