Brant car show showcases automotive history
The Canadian Military Heritage Museum of Brant hosted its fourth annual Combat and Classics Car Show on Monday, May 19, 2025.
Local and out-of-town visitors alike came out to tour the museum and to admire and discuss the different makes and models on display for Victoria Day.
'We've had a wonderful turnout today,' said Bob Ion, Chair of the Canadian Military Heritage Museum. 'We've got people who've come out from all over Ontario to bring their classic cars and their vintage military vehicles, and we're actually just about to give out our Director's Choice awards; there's a plaque for one military vehicle and another for a classic car.'
During the event, guests exchanged stories about the various paint jobs, upholstery work, engines, wheels and the clever details that made each of their vehicles unique. From a 1951 MG TD Midget to a 1973 AMC Gremlin, a 1951 Dodge Kingsway and much more, there were plenty of cars for enthusiasts to check out.
Paris residents Norman and Jean Mulloy, who brought along their 1934 DeSoto Airflow, were the winners of this year's Director's Choice Classic Car Award.
'This was the first aerodynamically designed vehicle,' shared Norman. 'They had discovered that square designed cars like the Model A, were more aerodynamic going backwards than going forwards. Walter Chrysler hired the Wright Brothers to build a miniature wind tunnel to help with testing, and the result of that in the end, was the DeSoto Airflow and its older sister the Chrysler Airflow. When these cars first came out in 1934, it was $995 and they had close to 45 brand new features that the public had never seen before.'
As far as the military side of the car show, members of the Ontario Military Vehicles Association brought around a dozen or so vehicles to the event.
'These are guys that collect, maintain and preserve these military vehicles, which are such an important part of our military heritage,' said Ion.
David Downing and his father, Don, traveled from Innerkip with a 1954 Dodge M37 3/4 ton truck, a 1953 Ford M38A1 1/4 ton truck and a 1959 Daimler Ferret Mark 2 scout car.
It was the Downing's Ferret, which is even licensed for the road, that ultimately took home the Director's Choice Military Vehicle Award.
'This vehicle was actually used by the British army. It's a Mark 2 and it's got the turret on top. Canadians used the Mark 1 which is like this one, but without the turret so it was open at the top,' said David. 'They used these for peacekeeping, mostly in places like Cyprus and such and they were used right into the 1980s, then as they got antiquated, they got sold off.'
David said that as a member of the Ontario Military Vehicles Association, he often takes his vehicles to different military based events and advocates for veterans.
For those who are interested in learning about Brantford-Brant's military history, the Military Heritage Museum of Brant is located at 347 Greenwich St. in Brantford, and it's open on Saturdays and Sundays from 12:00 to 4:00 p.m.
'We preserve and educate people about the military heritage of Brantford, Brant County and Six Nations,' said Ion. 'We honour the men who went to fight overseas, as well as the men and women who worked on the home front while the guys were all away; the women weren't allowed to fight back then, so they stayed back at home making parts for weapons. Everything you see here has been donated by veterans and families, and it's our place to tell the stories of the artifacts that we house.'
Ion said that he and the other volunteers who run the museum have been having a great year so far.
'Since March, the response from the community, the schools, and the people who have come from out of town to visit, has just been fantastic,' he said. 'You know, our volunteers have completely made this building what it is today; it just wouldn't be possible without them, and I think it shows. We're really looking forward to another great year here.'
Kimberly De Jong's reporting is funded by the Canadian government through its Local Journalism Initiative. The funding allows her to report rural and agricultural stories from Blandford-Blenheim and Brant County. Reach her at
kimberly.dejong@brantbeacon.ca
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Brant car show showcases automotive history
The Canadian Military Heritage Museum of Brant hosted its fourth annual Combat and Classics Car Show on Monday, May 19, 2025. Local and out-of-town visitors alike came out to tour the museum and to admire and discuss the different makes and models on display for Victoria Day. 'We've had a wonderful turnout today,' said Bob Ion, Chair of the Canadian Military Heritage Museum. 'We've got people who've come out from all over Ontario to bring their classic cars and their vintage military vehicles, and we're actually just about to give out our Director's Choice awards; there's a plaque for one military vehicle and another for a classic car.' During the event, guests exchanged stories about the various paint jobs, upholstery work, engines, wheels and the clever details that made each of their vehicles unique. From a 1951 MG TD Midget to a 1973 AMC Gremlin, a 1951 Dodge Kingsway and much more, there were plenty of cars for enthusiasts to check out. Paris residents Norman and Jean Mulloy, who brought along their 1934 DeSoto Airflow, were the winners of this year's Director's Choice Classic Car Award. 'This was the first aerodynamically designed vehicle,' shared Norman. 'They had discovered that square designed cars like the Model A, were more aerodynamic going backwards than going forwards. Walter Chrysler hired the Wright Brothers to build a miniature wind tunnel to help with testing, and the result of that in the end, was the DeSoto Airflow and its older sister the Chrysler Airflow. When these cars first came out in 1934, it was $995 and they had close to 45 brand new features that the public had never seen before.' As far as the military side of the car show, members of the Ontario Military Vehicles Association brought around a dozen or so vehicles to the event. 'These are guys that collect, maintain and preserve these military vehicles, which are such an important part of our military heritage,' said Ion. David Downing and his father, Don, traveled from Innerkip with a 1954 Dodge M37 3/4 ton truck, a 1953 Ford M38A1 1/4 ton truck and a 1959 Daimler Ferret Mark 2 scout car. It was the Downing's Ferret, which is even licensed for the road, that ultimately took home the Director's Choice Military Vehicle Award. 'This vehicle was actually used by the British army. It's a Mark 2 and it's got the turret on top. Canadians used the Mark 1 which is like this one, but without the turret so it was open at the top,' said David. 'They used these for peacekeeping, mostly in places like Cyprus and such and they were used right into the 1980s, then as they got antiquated, they got sold off.' David said that as a member of the Ontario Military Vehicles Association, he often takes his vehicles to different military based events and advocates for veterans. For those who are interested in learning about Brantford-Brant's military history, the Military Heritage Museum of Brant is located at 347 Greenwich St. in Brantford, and it's open on Saturdays and Sundays from 12:00 to 4:00 p.m. 'We preserve and educate people about the military heritage of Brantford, Brant County and Six Nations,' said Ion. 'We honour the men who went to fight overseas, as well as the men and women who worked on the home front while the guys were all away; the women weren't allowed to fight back then, so they stayed back at home making parts for weapons. Everything you see here has been donated by veterans and families, and it's our place to tell the stories of the artifacts that we house.' Ion said that he and the other volunteers who run the museum have been having a great year so far. 'Since March, the response from the community, the schools, and the people who have come from out of town to visit, has just been fantastic,' he said. 'You know, our volunteers have completely made this building what it is today; it just wouldn't be possible without them, and I think it shows. We're really looking forward to another great year here.' Kimberly De Jong's reporting is funded by the Canadian government through its Local Journalism Initiative. The funding allows her to report rural and agricultural stories from Blandford-Blenheim and Brant County. Reach her at .
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Logan Staib was a natural-born mechanic, which his father, David, realized when Logan was 12. That was when David bought yet another classic muscle car — a 1964 Ford Falcon this time, with a 302 V-8 engine — with plans to rebuild it, before a ruptured disc in his back got in his way. 'Logan was like, 'why can't I help?'' David Staib remembers. 'And I'm like, 'you're 12, you probably could.' And so that next day, we were out in the garage. He's pulling the cylinder heads off of the 302. From there, it just kind of started.' Early this spring, David climbed behind the wheel of another muscle car that Logan had rebuilt, this one a vintage Ford 1986 Mustang GT convertible, a version known among Mustang-heads as the final 'Fox-body' model that came with the iconic 'four-eyes' headlights. He made the day-long drive from his home outside Charlotte, North Carolina, to Moody Air Force Base in Georgia. 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On May 30, 2023, Logan was riding his motorcycle near the Okinawa city of Nago, Japan, when he fell and was killed. In March, nearly two years after Logan's death, David drove Logan's Mustang to Moody, parking beside the retired HH-60 with Logan's name painted on the door as part of the aircraft's maintenance team. David slid open the big cabin door and climbed in. On the metal was the signatures of the last crew to fly 26356, and, written in Sharpie, Logan's name as the last crew chief to put the aircraft in the sky. Sitting in the same helicopter his son had worked on was overwhelming, David said. 'It was retired and put in the air park before he was killed, so this is not something that they did because he was killed. It's just this weird chain of events,' said David. 'You just think about the odds of that helicopter being there with his name on it.' Logan was, according to his mother, Christina Maciejewski, a boy who loved being a boy. 'As a mom, he was my baby,' Maciejewski told Task & Purpose. 'He loved fishing, working on cars, he just loved people. He was always the kind of kid who made friends with the underdogs.' Joining the military, Christina said, was always in Logan's mind. 'Very early on, he said he wanted to go into the military,' Christine said. On Sept. 11, 2001, she said, 'we were actually on vacation, kind of watching the World Trade Towers. And I remember, I mean, he was so little because we were vacationing in September, because they weren't in school yet, and he was just like, 'they tried to blow America up.'' From that vacation on, said Christine, when Logan made crafts or projects, they had patriotic themes. 'One that stands out was a stool that he made for brushing his teeth. And it was like all red, white and blue, with flag stickers and stuff like that on it,' she said. With a move to South Carolina, David and Christina split, but Logan soon took up his dad's habit: rebuilding cars. Logan, David said, could figure out almost anything with gears or pumps or an engine, but unlike him, when Logan got stuck, he knew how to look stuff up on YouTube. 'He was one of those kids,' said David. 'There's like a mechanical aptitude test, and it's just a bunch of gears all mixed together. [It asks] if gear number one is spinning clockwise, what rotation is gear number 10 spinning? I mean, he would know, and not many people get that.' After David and Christina separated, Logan lived with David. When he was 12, they got the Falcon up and running together, which led to Logan starting his own projects. 'I think the next year we got a broken down four-wheeler, and he fixed it, and then a little dirt bike, and he fixed it. And then he gets to be 14 or 15, and he buys an old Jeep, and we start working on that,' David recalled. 'Like a Daisy Duke Jeep, like one from the 70s.' In high school, fixing fun rides wasn't enough. Logan wanted to race. 'He buys a Corvette,' David said. 'He's tearing the motor down in our garage and refusing to ask me for help.' High school came and went, said Christina, and college didn't take, which led Logan to the Air Force in 2019. Though eager to ship out to basic training, he waited for a maintenance job to open up. 'It was his passion,' said Christina. 'I had always told my kids that old saying, like, 'if you do something you love, you'll never work a day in your life.' And that was definitely something that he wanted to do.' After boot camp and tech school, Logan ended up at Moody in the 41st Rescue Generation Squadron, wrenching on the unit's rescue-focused HH-60s. One of his first supervisors, Miles Gravange, said Logan quickly showed the two traits his parent knew him best for: easy to make friends, and a passion for machines. 'Staib was one of the funniest guys around, but also one of the most skilled technicians,' said Gravange, now a section chief with a fighter squadron at Moody, in an Air Force release. 'When he got to the helicopter maintenance world, he was like a fish in water — he just got it. According to everyone I talked to, you didn't have to worry about the maintenance he was doing, which says a lot about the family, how they brought him up.' On weekends, Staib would be at South Georgia Motorsports Park, just north of Moody. 'He'd go on Friday night for 'Test and Tune,' which was also what they call grudge night,' said David. 'People that you street race, that you've talked shit with, you can go there and shut them up at the track. So Friday night at the track was what Logan did.' Other times, said Christina, Logan would bring a car to her house in Charleston to race on local tracks — and occasionally blow the motors. 'There were a couple of times we had to tow him and his car back, because he would come here, you know, blow it up, and have to get back for work,' said Christina. For Christmas in 2020, David bought Logan a motor for the '86 Mustang the two had found in Tallahassee for $2,800, a steal by anyone's measure — in May, Autotrader listed two restored 1986 Mustang GTs for over $20,000. He dropped the motor in, added a turbo and was soon racing it. In 2022, Logan got orders to Japan. He had plans to swap the transmission from an automatic to a stick, and maybe add a blower, but that would have to wait until he got back. In Japan, Logan bought a motorcycle and sent his parents pictures he took as he zoomed around the Pacific coastline. On a ride on May 30, 2023, he was driving through a tunnel that was slick with the island's near-constant rain. 'He laid the motorcycle down, and a vehicle traveling towards him that swerved to miss the motorcycle hit him and killed him,' David said. 'The motorcycle slid away and was undamaged. Literally undamaged. It completely survived. I had all of his Air Force buddies strip it down and sell it for parts, because I didn't want it to take another life.' On May 31 — just after Memorial Day weekend — Christina was at work. Her phone lit up with an alert from the Ring doorbell camera at her house. On the screen, she saw three Air Force officers in uniform. She asked them through the app what they wanted. 'They said, 'can you come home?'' Christina recounted. As she drove, her mind clung to desperate ideas. 'I thought, 'I hope he's in trouble, I hope he raced something, or did something he wasn't supposed to do,'' she remembers. 'But I knew it probably was not good.' A month after Logan died, his sister, Peyton, living in Charleston with Christina, had a baby. She chose the middle name Riley, same as Logan's. They keep a garden out back to remember Logan by. On David's side of the family, they got tattoos. 'Logan's big claim to fame was a TDY in Arizona, where he had gotten coined by a general,' David said. 'They all got drunk and went out hiking and they got this picture of a 40-foot cowboy cactus. I didn't even know that was such a thing. And then they all got those [cactus] tattoos on their legs. So number one, all 15 male members of my family went out and got the same tattoo.' But the real memorial, David said, is Logan's Mustang. 'When Logan was killed, I immediately sold my drag car because I knew that his Mustang would be the last drag car I would ever own,' David said. 'I've got a lot of work ahead of me to get it where I want it.' He would make it untouchable, aiming for 6 seconds or even 5.5 in the quarter mile, a screaming fast number if he gets it there. 'Currently, it has a full mechanical restoration, like there's literally from the radiator to the rear end. There is nothing that is used. It's a new rear end, all new suspension, all new frame, all new axles, rims, tires, block, transmission, clutch and all the safety equipment that has to go with it. And then it'll go into a body shop and get a full, you know, three, four or five coats of clear black paint job with, you know, with pin striping. And then I'll get the interior all redone, and I think I'm going to convert the interior to just all black, instead of black and gray. And then it'll sit in my garage.' In March, David drove the Mustang to Moody to see the helicopter, tail number 26356, retired and mounted as a static display on base. The helicopter was fairly famous at Moody for a 2012 mission in which its crew had responded to a call for help from an Army Special Forces team near Mazar-e-Sharif, Afghanistan. Maneuvering into a dusty, narrow wadi, its crew recovered an injured Afghan soldier, a rescue that earned the crew the 2012 Mackay Trophy for the 'most meritorious' mission of the year across the Air Force. 'They un-riveted the doors so that we could see in there and see the Sharpie, that my son was the last person to sign off as the last airman in charge of that helicopter,' David said. Even getting 26356 as a permanent display at Moody had a hint of fate to it. 'Apparently, there was a general that wanted a different helicopter put out there,' David said. But others insisted, said David. ''No, this one belongs there, because it won this award and rescued these people.' And I don't know if it was because of us, but they had repainted it, redone the graphics, so his name was fresh. And so me, my wife, my mom, and all of my son's buddies that were traveling with us for this, we all got to just sign under his name to say our goodbyes.' 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