by Bethaney Phillips
On the west side of Clay Center sits a shop filled with various cars, parts, and memorabilia. Mostly themed with Ford, decades of items are stored within the shop walls. Multiple days a week its owners can be found tinkering. Fixing up cars, locating parts, cleaning up original pieces so they can be reused. It’s a labor of love for Max Hanson and Lonnie Paquette. And it’s one they’ve been at since the early 1960s when the pair were classmates in high school.
Paquette moved to the area in 1959, while Hanson grew up on the farm.
“Of course we worked on everything,” Hanson said. “I watched and helped a little, I always had a wrench somewhere.”
Before graduating in the class of 1963, the pair became friends and started fixing up cars together. First, it was “The Heap of the Week” when Hanson’s ’55 Chevy was featured in the high school newspaper column. Then he moved onto Fords, trading for a Mustang, while Paquette was already a Ford guy.
With the first Mustangs to be released in 1964, Paquette said they hold sentimental value as well as practical experience for the pair.
“We just know them,” he said. “We’ve lived with them all these years.”
While for Hanson, he said the car was the beginning of his excitement for cars.
“I bought one of the very first Mustangs to ever come out, on April 17, 1964,” he said. “It was Primrose Motors then.”
For him significantly, it would foreshadow his career of owning a Ford dealership. He worked at the location selling cars before deciding to buy the dealership with his brother, Bruce, in 1986. He had worked there since 1973.
Meanwhile, Paquette went into the construction business, owning Riley Construction for 24 years. Occasionally they would work on vehicles together, though they remained busy with their families and full-time jobs.
“When we both went into our businesses we didn’t do a whole lot together,” Hanson said. “We were still raiding junkyards and stripping parts, some that we didn’t even need at that point. We kind of restarted in the early 2000s.”
In 1980 the purchased five Mustangs out of a Junction City junkyard, with no particular goal in mind. The takeaway meant parts as well as ongoing projects. They finished one in July of 2024 and sold it to a buyer in Colorado.
“We owned it for 40 years before we got it done,” Hanson said. They also embarked on separate car projects over the years. But nearing retirement, the pair purchased their Clay Center shop and began restoring on weekends.
They’ve completed a 1969 Mach 1, a 1966 Mustang Coupe, a 1970 Boss 302, and more.
“We don’t really count, we’ve done several,” Paquette said. “It takes a couple years. But we don’t play golf, this is our golf game.”
They’ve sold cars as low as $2,400 when purchasing for just $200, then up to the mid $30,000s for pricier models. Though all take much time and labor, they said.
“We probably get paid $1 an hour,” Hanson said.
The mechanics have plenty of tools on hand, but they’re not short on ingenuity, either. They’ve found new uses for old toolboxes and storage shelves, displaying antique equipment that’s been inherited or gifted to the pair. An old ambulance stretcher works as a rolling storage option. A bumper holds old photos, including one of an old racing strip that was north of Morganville. While an old set of donated tools is being restored to give as a scholarship to a new mechanic.
Meanwhile, the shop gives them the space and the time to work and reminisce.
Now fully retired, the pair work three to four afternoons a week. They also offer spaces for rent, leaving the shop filled with vehicles in various states, old machinery, and more. Meanwhile, there’s a wide variety of memorabilia, much of which came from Max’s former dealership. Others have been gifted to the Mustang lovers over the years.
Top: Max Hanson (left) and Lonnie Paquette (right) stand in front of a Ford that both have owned at various times. Middle: An old toy Ford with a matching blue model of itself above their bumper shelf. Left: A Mustang sits under an old sign for Hanson’s former car dealership.
