The last De Soto rolled off the assembly line 30 years before David Frank was born, but he’s one of the marque’s biggest fans. The 31-year-old engineer currently moonlights as the National DeSoto Club’s volunteer editor of DeSoto Adventures, and he’s not the only millennial or Gen Z’er who finds De Sotos to be “de-lightful” and “de-lovely,” as the company once advertised. The National DeSoto Club counts at least three people in their twenties and thirties on its list of national officers, trustees and volunteers — an uncommonly youthful car club staff in 2023.
For David, adventuring into the world of De Sotos was basically a matter of genetics.
“I kind of grew up in a family of them, so there wasn’t really escaping it,” he jokes. David considers himself a fourth-generation De Soto owner, his great-great uncle having bought a new 1941 De Soto and his great-grandfather having owned a 1949 De Soto Custom sedan followed by several more De Sotos. David’s grandfather bought father’s cars. The De Soto gene then passed to David’s father, who, at age 14, bought a 1956 De Soto Fireflite Sportsman from his father, which he still owns to this day.
