Award-winning car builder Jerry Woodward is reopening his museum of custom autos.

By Donald W. Meyers

| The Salt Lake Tribune

Provo • You stroll into Jerry Woodward’s museum and see a 50-year-old car with hi-fi speakers in the headrests, a TV in the dashboard and a full-width taillight and think, cool car, revolutionary really.

But Woodward looks at his 1962 Vortex X-2000 and sees a gift from God, a celebration of mankind’s creativity.

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At a glance

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Utah Museum of National Award Vehicles

The museum is at 407 W. 100 South, across the street from Provo’s Covey Center for the Arts. Admission is $3 for ages 12 and up, $2 for ages 5 to 11 and children younger than 5 are free. Hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays, with hours occasionally extending to 8 p.m. on Fridays, and 3 to 5 p.m. on Saturdays. For more information, call 801-373-3040.

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The three-wheeled Vortex is among the treasures visitors can view when Woodward’s Museum of National Award Vehicles reopens Jan. 23, showcasing both his skills as a car builder and what he sees as God’s ability to inspire people to mold great things.

"I was asking for ideas [for cars]," Woodward says, "and they came into my mind."

Throughout the museum, in the spare bays of Ace and Jerry’s Auto Glass, the custom cars are on display, along with signs declaring man’s ability, with God’s help, to create.

"Man can take desert areas and draw water out where it once was thought dry. He can soar to the heights unknown where once it was thought impossible," one sign reads. "The true challenge is to make happiness out of places where he once thought there was none. Man thrives on challenges."

Another sign, near a roadster, tells how parts from broken cars were assembled to make a beautiful vehicle — and that God can do the same with broken lives.

But Woodward says the most important sign is the one above the exit: "The most awesome vehicle ever created is the human body. Take care of it."

"The human body," he says, "can climb mountains and go places that no car can go."

Woodward’s passion for car building dates to his youth on the wind-swept plains of Kansas. Growing up in Emporia, he worked in his father’s car shop, where he learned welding, body work and glass installation.

With those skills, Woodward started tinkering, crafting cars from spare parts with the ideas that came to his head.

His first car was a roadster that he sold, a youthful transaction he regrets to this day.

"I wish I still had that car," he says, wistfully looking at a yellowed picture of it on his museum wall.

But — between working in his father’s business, which relocated to Provo, and rearing a family — Woodward kept coming up with ideas for custom cars that would bring him national recognition.

One of the first designs to win an award was his Thunder Rod II, a roadster constructed from the chassis and body of a 1929 Ford Model A. With a turbocharged engine, it held the record for the quarter-mile in street drag racing for five years and earned the 1957 Most Beautiful Roadster Award at the Grand National Roadster Show in Sacramento, Calif.

Woodward went on to snag six other Grand National Awards for his cars.

One of those was the Vortex, dubbed the "car of the next century." Its sleek, triangular shape, recessed headlights — and two high beams concealed under a retractable license plate — made the car look like it had just driven off a James Bond movie set.