Joe Bruman Interview- May 13, 1995

by John Spencer with research by Candy Stanman

CCC: When did your interest begin with cars?

Joe Bruman: I fooled around with cars a long time before I bought a Citroën. In Junior College I modified a Ford Model A Coupe by extending the front of the car to accept a Cadillac V16 engine. I used to join Hot Rod clubs and tinker a lot. Later on in the mid-fifties before I moved to my present home I built another car using a 1941 Ford frame with one of the first Chrysler V8 engines and built a roadster.

CCC: So do you still own a Citroën?

JB: No. I bought my first and only Citroën from Bill Campbell's agency in South Pasadena. Campbell was a minor automotive dealer struggling to make a living. He sold Nash Ramblers in the mid-fifties and wasn't making a go at that, so he took on the Citroën line. And I bought a Traction Avant 11 BL (Légère) which the English called a Light 15. Four cylinder four door sedan. Some people saw a faint resemblance to the early Ford V8's because of the curved fenders, but it was much smaller than that. My 11 BL was a 1953 model. Since I had been a car mechanic over the years I did a lot of my own work. We took a summer vacation trip up to the state of Washington in that car and blew a head gasket. I had to take it apart in the motel parking lot to fix it before we could finish our trip. It was a good little car except it had only a three-speed non-synchronized transmission. It didn't really have a high-speed engine. Top speed was about 60 miles an hour [97 km/h]. In the early fifties it was a fun car to drive. Citroën had been building front wheel drive cars since the middle '30's, but they were almost unheard of in this country. There was all sorts wacko theories from people in New York claiming that front-wheel drive wouldn't work. The main thing about it was it made the steering rather heavy, so this light car had an 18-inch steering wheel and a really powerful rack and pinion steering. I fixed it up for camping with wood cabinets to carry all our camping supplies in the trunk a one-wheel trailer made into a tent so two people could sleep in this trailer attached to the car. Our two children were small enough to sleep inside the car. So we took a lot of camping trips. Well about 1956 I got the idea of starting a club because the car was pretty much an orphan, it wasn't selling very well. You could get parts from two main agencies in town. Campbell's agency in South Pasadena and Charlie Dirscherl's Challenger Motors in Hollywood. But there wasn't much factory support; you were pretty much on your own.

CCC: How old is Challenger Motors? [Challenger Motors closed in September 1997]

JB: I don't know, it was there when I bought my Citroën. I don't know if Dirscherl was an official dealer of Citroën's or if he just imported the cars and sold them personally, but he did sell them and stock the parts and was an expert repairman.

CCC: So how did you start this club?

JB: Well, I decided to start a club for mutual support so I put in an ad in Road & Track magazine sometime in the summer of 1956, I had my car for three years then. The idea was to start a little correspondence club with a newsletter and track down sources of parts and service.

CCC: Was it just you who started the club, or did you have a partner?

JB: No, there was no partner, but there was another man who joined the club immediately and claimed he started it. His name was Bob Smith and whether he put an ad in another publication or whether he really had a claim to priority I don't know. He was a really nice guy. He told me about a campground in Jalama. I don't know what happened to him.

CCC: Was this club the first of its kind in America?

JB: I don't know, it quite possibly could have been. We didn't have any way to find out. After we had been going for a few months, we started having meetings, and we all agreed to call the club the "Citroën Car Club." There was a lot of debate on whether or not to incorporate. There were some pluses and minuses to it, but we decided to incorporate. I agreed from the onset to be the Editor of the newsletter, acting President as long as was necessary until we could elect somebody, so I wasn't in that office for very long. I was President for only a year.

CCC: Here is the first newsletter you sent out (showing Joe a copy of the first newsletter)

JB: Is this the first one? That's good because I was trying to remember the names of some of the people who first joined the club. I printed theses letters on a hectograph machine which made copies in purple ink that pre-dated the Xerox copier. You'd put a cover sheet on, type on the cover sheet, which stencils through to a gelatin pad coated with glycerin. Then you run a roll of paper through it and your copies come out of what was on the cover sheet. I still have one. (Pause) Let's see some of these names of the original club. Robert Smith we talked about earlier, Keith McKinder over in Glendale had a neat roadster. [Don] Runnalls had a roadster and he eventually went to work for a Chrysler agency and learned how to do auto mechanics. Saved enough money to buy his own garage to repair Citroëns, and eventually got a dealership for the Citroën SM. He made a lot of money in the selling SM's in the 1970's. And he's still around, although I haven't seen him lately. He had one of his cars in a Classic Cars publication [Automobile Quarterly, Volume 13 Number 2]. During the beginning of the club I found out about another Citroën Car Club that was started in England and joined by mail and corresponded. In 1960, my wife and I took a European vacation with our two children and went skiing and sightseeing and we stopped and visited the Citroën Car Club. We had a good time with them. The President at the time if I can recall was Mr. Poxun and the Secretary of the club was Mr. Staite. They must have had a lot more members than us; they had a high-class magazine thirty to forty pages [The Citroënian.]

CCC: So what happened to you beloved Light 15?

JB: I continued to have to work on it throughout owning it. It was a real disappointment because I installed a DS 19 engine and built it up like a racing engine, very carefully every part mic'd and balanced very carefully, had special pistons made. We went to a rally in Santa Barbara for an annual get together for the club, and on the way back this engine that never went above 5,000 rpm just blew. One of those old cast iron rods just broke and tore the whole engine up. So, I fixed it up, had to buy a new engine, replacing the old one, but it never was the same after that. Because I was always worried about theses things that go wrong. So the car was running in fairly good shape when I traded it in at a Chevy agency for a brand-new Corvair in 1963. So I had the car for ten years. I put about 100,000 miles [161,290 km] on it. And they were pretty good miles.

CCC: Did you ever think this club would last as long as it has?

JB: No, I thought when they quit importing Citroëns in this country that it would be it. But apparently not! The purpose of the club is for the members to help each other. On its 20th anniversary the club named me an honorary member and presented me with this plaque with this Traction Avant door handle on it. Another thing I did when I ran the car club was I took my daughter's hobby jewelry enamel kit and made a master for a bronze car club octagon badge to sell to put on members' cars. Citroëns are still good cars and but parts and repairs are an ongoing problem. Probably the only reason why the club has lasted so long is because misery loves company!