With a minor in history from the University of North Dakota, there’s no doubt I’m biased about history and how important newspapers are as historical documents. They’re valuable for births, obituaries, kids setting records in high school sports and the list goes on to include advertising.
That said, I’m going to put a completely different twist on history through some information I became privy to last Saturday.

As some of you know, I’ve been restoring my old car and am now near the completion of a renovation that started nearly eight years ago.

As I’ve researched information about this car that I’ve had for 34 years, I can tell you with confidence that I’ve learned more about it in the past four months than I had in the previous 33 1/2 years. And I thought I knew just about everything about that car.

It’s a 1985 Pontiac Trans Am that I purchased in September 1990 in Grand Forks. I drove it as my primary vehicle for 12 years. After the Hazelton Centennial in 2003, it was parked until I decided to start working on it in 2018.
As I dove into this with research and money, I came to find out that a collector car is worth more if its history can be traced and if it’s original. Ironically, I had the original part, but was lacking in history.

Enter Pontiac Research Service: This is an organization in Michigan that is dedicated to maintaining the history of anything Pontiac. There’s another organization called GM Heritage Archive that is everything GM except Pontiac and can trace information as far back as the 1902 Cadillac.

For my curiosity, it was Pontiac Research Service. If you pay a fee and provide the vehicle identification number (VIN), they can trace a lot of information about your car in general, and specifics about your individual vehicle.
For instance, my car is black. It was black when I bought it and after hitting a deer in 1991, it was repainted black. But I didn’t know if that was the original color. Indeed, a code shows that it was what Pontiac called “all black.” That’s significant for two reasons. First, it’s the original color, and second, of the 44,000 Trans Ams built in 1985, only 4,475 of them were “all black.” Others were two-toned.

It also contradicted what I thought every Trans Am had. On the glove box, there’s a badge that states, “Performance Suspension.” As it turns out from this report, Trans Am had special performance packages called WS3 and WS6. About a third of those built in 1985, including my own, had one of those options.

Here’s the real kicker. Pontiac Research Service sent me a copy of the original window sticker. Now I know what the original price was, what the options were, and most importantly in my opinion, who sold the car initially.
It turns out the car that I bought from Edie Pontiac in Grand Forks, was originally sold in Topeka, Kan. That kind of surprised me, but when I started connecting the dots, it perhaps makes sense that someone from Kansas who was stationed at Grand Forks Air Force Base, traded the car in at Eide Pontiac since there was only one owner previous to myself.

I also now know that my car was sold for $15,260 in June 1985. In today’s dollars adjusted for inflation, it is the equivalent of $44,000. All the options are also listed and the value of each. It’s important information because it now traces the car to Topeka and erases a previous five-year gap.

That said, if you are restoring an old car, truck, even motorcycle, and if you can provide the VIN number, you will be able to learn a lot more about your project than you could possibly imagine. That alphabet soup called the VIN, reveals at lot more than a serial number.

In my new experience, the only thing I won’t be able to find is the original owner. That is considered confidential and the only way I would find out is if someone came forward, told me and could prove their identity link to the car.

This is not something I could have even imagined three years ago when I was fixing only what I could afford. I just wanted my car to look nice and be reliable. Now, I’ve got all this additional information that’s made it more valuable and has allowed me to put a journal together that has now eclipsed 70 pages.