UPDATES:

1) I decided to buy new wheels & freewheel. I'd love to keep the Mallard hubs and the original freewheel but they are a mated pair and if anything happened the tools to fix or remove them are hard to come by and to buy a new set of very similar period-looking wheels, was about the same price and having a shop build new ones with the old hubs. I'm going to keep the hubs for now - who knows maybe down the road I'll have a little more $$ and can have them rebuilt to use. It's not a huge deal.

2) Some pics of the cleaning so far

-hoods:
This is how they came to me on the bike:


Here's how they look now:


And here's after polishing one of the levers, for comparison's sake:


-Crank:
Before


After:






-Stem
Before:


After:


More + a question in the next post