Oldsmar resident Elizabeth Lyons recently found part of an original Oldsmobile tractor on her property, but soon after uncovering the rare auto artifact, it was taken from her yard before eventually winding up at the city’s historical museum.
Near the start of the most recent Oldsmar City Council meeting, longtime council member and former mayor Jerry Beverland told one of his patented stories that typically involve two of his favorite topics—the city of Oldsmar, and its 100-year history.
Beverland related how a friend had phoned him days earlier shortly after helping a downtown resident unearth what appeared to be an antique auto part from a pothole in her driveway.
No one knew it at the time, but that call was destined to become a very interesting footnote during the city’s yearlong celebration of its centennial anniversary.
“This past weekend I got a phone call that ended up being one of the most incredible phone calls I’ve ever received,” Beverland said in the opening minutes of the August 16 meeting.
“They said, ‘Mr. Beverland, you need to come down here and see what we found.’”
Soon after, the four-time author of books on Oldsmar’s history arrived on the scene, and he quickly identified the piece as a flywheel off an Oldsmobile tractor that was more than likely cast at a foundry on Tampa Road around 1920 by automobile pioneer and city founder Ransom E. Olds.
Needless to say, the longtime lawmaker and avid city historian was amazed at the discovery.
“I went over there and I said, ‘you’ve got to be kidding me!’” he said.
“What was in (there) was three-feet in the ground, and I wasn’t about to leave it there!”
Beverland joked about how the piece ended up in his possession, but he clearly wasn’t joking about not wanting to leave the long-lost, 250-lb. flywheel where it was found.
“What they found, the mayor was accused of stealing,” he said, referring to current Oldsmar Mayor Doug Bevis. “(But) it was Beverland that—I didn’t steal it, I took it. There’s a difference between taking and stealing.”
The remark elicited laughter in the council chambers, leading Vice Mayor Eric Seidel to tell his colleague he might want to explain the difference to the sheriff’s deputies sitting at the back of the room.
But while Beverland and others laughed off the “theft,” the young woman who uncovered the hefty heirloom wasn’t smiling.
“I didn’t think it was a very funny joke,” 25-year-old Elizabeth Lyons, an employee at Jack Willie’s Bar & Grill, revealed in an interview with Oldsmar Connect last week.
“I was really upset about that, because I love Oldsmar and I like everybody who lives here, and I thought it was very strange for a former mayor to have done this. I was very upset that somebody came to my house and stole something from me.”
Lyons said the worst part of the situation was how it made her feel about her historic find.
“Now I don’t really even care about what it is anymore, because it really got taken from me as soon as I got it,” she said. “I didn’t get the chance to be like oh, this is cool, let me look up some facts about it and say, oh, this is what it is! This is awesome!”
“It took away my excitement and joy over finding this cool piece of history.”
The discovery
To get to the heart of this story, you have to start at the bottom. As in the bottom of the muddy pit where a piece of automotive history was found.
After being dropped off at her downtown home on the afternoon of August 8 by Eric Ramquist, whom Lyons considers a father figure, and his girlfriend, Mijan Ramsay, the front tire of Ramsay’s car got stuck in a rut near a garage on the side of Lyons’ lengthy driveway.
The trio worked to free the car, but recent rains combined with work on a nearby sewer line made the task seemingly impossible.
“We tried pushing, but we just could not push it out,” Lyons said. “So we tried shoveling the dirt then the shovel hit something really, really hard, and we noticed it was something huge. We were like, what in the world is this?!”
As it turned out, the little black BMW was entangled with the near century-old Oldsmobile flywheel, and the group quickly realized there was no way to get the car out without removing the old part first.
So Lyons and her small crew donned gardening gloves and used a borrowed shovel in an effort to extract the hunk of heavy metal from the hole, and soon what began as a minor vehicular nuisance turned into a challenging task and fun bonding adventure.
“My dad’s shoveling the dirt out and I have on a pair of gardening gloves trying to scrape the mud out from it,” Lyons said. “We knew if we didn’t get the piece out, the car wasn’t going anywhere.”
Ramquist eventually called a friend with a heavy-duty jack, and a few hours later, they finally removed the car-tifact from the ground.
“It was really heavy, and we thought it was a wheel of some sort, but we had no idea what it was at all,” Lyons said.
“I was like, maybe it’s buried treasure!” Ramquist joked.
By this time, Lyons was running late for work. But before she went up to the house to clean up and get ready, they covered the part with a black garbage bag, rested it against the garage, and agreed to let Ramquist take the piece home and clean it up before they started a fact-finding mission to learn what they had discovered actually was.
Unfortunately, those plans were quickly spoiled, because the part had suddenly disappeared.
“I came home from work that night at around 10:30, and I noticed the piece wasn’t where I left it,” Lyons said.
“I didn’t think anything of it, but a couple of days later I asked my dad if he took it to clean it and he said no, he definitely did not, somebody else must have. And I was like oh, that’s very upsetting. Who would do that? Nobody ever comes to my house. Nobody even knows where I live.”
“That was the worst part,” Ramquist added.
“It was awesome, and then it wasn’t so awesome anymore.”
The flywheel that flew away
Like any good mystery, the key to solving it lies with sorting out the clues surrounding the disappearance.
In the Case of the Missing Antique Oldsmobile Flywheel, very little deduction was necessary, since the person who pilfered the piece not only admitted to taking it in a televised public forum, he also gave it to the local historical society to place on permanent display.
Mystery solved, we contacted Jerry Beverland to get his side of the story.
And while the 85-year-old local lawmaker didn’t make any excuses for his actions, he acknowledged his enthusiasm for Oldsmar’s history got the best of him and he apologized for allowing the situation get out of hand.
“The night it happened, Pat called me, he was there when they found it, and I went over there and I told him I hate to leave it here because actually I didn’t know any of the other people,” Beverland said, referring to Pat Knapp, the friend of Eric Ramquist who supplied the jack.
“I was just excited, and I didn’t know anybody there, and I was afraid it was gonna disappear and be gone forever. So we put it in the back of my pickup and I took it home.”
“It was never my intent to make anyone upset,” he added. “If my excitement upset her, I’m sorry that it did. But right from the beginning I told people that if the girl wanted it back, it’s right here in my truck, she’s welcome to come get it. And after a few days without hearing anything, I took it to the museum.”
Realizing that asking a young bartender to contact a veteran lawmaker about returning a century-old auto part that he took from her property, by way of a third party, was a highly improbable scenario, Beverland acknowledged he wished he handled the situation differently.
“I’m sorry that it happened that way and I wish it hadn’t happened that way, but it did,” he said.
“All I can say is if she wants it back, she can have it back. I’m just happy it was found, because it might be the biggest discovery in Oldsmar history.”
“But I didn’t steal it!” he added. “I told the whole story at the meeting. If I was going to steal it, nobody would’ve known about it!”
Coming full circle
Upon being contacted for their comments about this story, Oldsmar officials acknowledged the entire situation was handled poorly from the start.
Mayor Doug Bevis, who learned about what happened after Lyons asked at him at Jack Willie’s if he stole the wheel, said he hoped things could be smoothed over.
“She’s young and she lives and works here and she found something related to the centennial,” Bevis “But Jerry’s just so obsessed with Oldsmar that it transpired kind of weird, and unfortunately it put a wet blanket on her cool discovery of Oldsmar’s history.”
“I think it’s exciting that she found it, and I wish it had transpired in a different manner,” he added. “I think everything was well-intentioned. I don’t think there was any malice on anybody’s part, and hopefully the end result will be better.”
Bevis reiterated Beverland’s claim that Lyons was free to come and pick up the part from the museum, saying he wanted to “let her dictate what happens to it.”
Oldsmar Historical Society director Jeri Antozzi agreed, and as soon as she learned what had happened, she contacted Lyons to help make amends.
“I told Liz she’s welcome to come with her father and friends and pick it up, take it, and if she wants to donate it to back to the museum, that’s great,” Antozzi said. “I said Liz, it’s yours. Do what you like with it. But anything sitting in the museum has to be there in good faith.”
“In the thirteen year history of this historical society, we’ve been here for the good of the city,” she added. “We don’t want any negativity, and we don’t want this to tarnish what’s been a terrific centennial. I understand the enthusiasm was taken out from under her, and we want to do anything we can to bring that enthusiasm back.”
On Tuesday afternoon, following three weeks of confusion, excitement and disillusionment, the discoverer of the now-famous flywheel was reunited with her discovery.
“Jeri told me she would open the museum today if I wanted to come by and get it, and I said yes, most definitely, I will be there!” Lyons said as she and Ramquist picked up (literally) the hefty, rusted part.
“So we’re going to take it home, take photos with it, take it on trips around town to share it with all our Oldsmarians,” she added. “And then we’re going to bring it back to the museum!”
In another neat footnote to the story, Lyons said she was contacted by City Council member Dan Saracki, who is also the head of the Oldsmar100 centennial committee, and he asked if she would like to ride with her historic find in the city’s rescheduled centennial parade this Saturday.
“I never even get to see the parade because I’m usually working, and now I’m going to be in the parade!” she said, noting her boss is letting her come in late in order to participate in the event. “So I’m really excited.”
Now that the tale of the missing antique Oldsmobile flywheel has come full circle, so to speak, Lyons said she has a much better feeling about the whole affair.
“Most definitely,” she said. “I’m happy with the way things turned out.”
And although she has yet to speak with the man who started this saga, when asked what she would say to Jerry Beverland should their paths ever cross, Lyons didn’t hold back.
“I would ask him if that’s how his mom raised him!” she said. “Why did you think it was acceptable to steal this from me?! All I wanted to do was take it and clean it and learn the history of it and explore it a little more.”
“And after that, I probably would’ve donated it to the historical society anyway. If they wanted it that badly, all they had to do was ask.”
And with that, she and Ramquist took the wheel from the Beverland Family Room at the museum, loaded it into their truck, and drove off.
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