A bit of research turned up that his car had spent a fair amount of time up in Canada, where the frame filled up with road salt and rotted out from the inside. One side was so far gone, we could have peeled it apart like a sardine can.
The amount of repair required would have been prohibitively expensive. We located a good frame on Vancouver Island and had it sent down as cargo on the Victoria Clipper to Seattle, where I picked it up at the Customs office. After salvaging the original stamped numbers off of the front horn, the frame went into the scrap pile.