Cool Cooler

Today I started to work on an old automobile swamp cooler. My sister gave it to me. Years ago she saved it from the farm where we grew up outside of Chowchilla. I don't know any story behind whose it had been back in the days before car air conditioning. I know I thought it was old when I was young and I haven't been young in a long time.
Eventually I got the thing apart and found it was full of some nasties. Something had used it for a nest. Whatever had built the nest was was long gone, but there were nesting materials that resembled cotton or maybe the stuffing out of an old chair or something. As I recall, either would have been plentiful in the old barn where the cooler lived for many years.

I found that it works muck like a modern swamp cooler for a house using a pad of aspen shavings that adds moisture to the air that is scooped in as you drive down the road and swirled through the vents into the cab. I haven't been to OSH to get a cooler pad yet but when I do I'll have to figure out how the cooler hangs on the window and door and exactly how the whole thing works. I used to think that the pad inside spun around like a squirrel cage as you drove, but now that I've seen inside I think I was wrong about the spinning.

I hope I can find an old timer or car or cooler buff that can fill me in on some of the details about this type of car cooler. In the meantime I'm off to the hardware store.