Cars

A friend called the other day to ask if I’d like to see a car collection.  He’s a member of the Alfa Romeo club and someone in the club had met the owner of the collection and asked if he would let the club members see it.  He’d agreed and the viewing had been set for Saturday morning.  My friend took me as a guest.



MGA



The cars were stored in a warehouse.  The first car I saw upon entering was an Austin-Healey 100M, worth about $100,000.  As I walked around with my mouth hanging open, I saw a roomful of sports cars: several more Healeys (including another 100M), a couple Jaguar XK120s, an early Porsche 911 targa with the soft rear window and a 911S, several Porsche 356s, including a Speedster and a Carrera coupe with a glassy silver paint job befitting a car worth about a quarter million dollars.  In one corner there was a Ford Model T Touring with full side curtains and, next to it, a ’36 Ford roadster, but otherwise the cars were all European sports cars of 50s and 60s vintage; just the cars I’ve always admired and desired.  I felt like I was in my garden of earthly delights.  There were several wonderfully restored MGA roadsters, and a coupe as well.  The MGA is a car whose lines I’m particularly partial to.  My first car was an Austin Healey Bugeye Sprite, and, in an ideal world, an MGA would’ve been my second.  The third would have been a big Healey and the fourth, an E-Type Jaguar (there were no E-Types in the collection).  But this ideal progression of mine was derailed by the intrusion of practical considerations.  There were also some Model T based race cars in the room, plus a Morgan, an Alfa Romeo Giulietta Sprint, an MG TD and a TF, and in the corner opposite the Model T, something I'd never seen before: a Turner.  There were maybe 25 classic cars in all, and none of them was even slightly shabby.



Pierce-Arrow



Then someone said, “There’s another room over here!”  I squeezed past a massive Lincoln from the 20s that was parked in a workshop area with a lift and work tables displaying a pair of running boards off the Lincoln that someone not present was inlaying with wood laths.  Doubtless the collector employed someone full time to maintain these cars.  That would be essential with a collection this large.  (Years ago I knew a guy—he painted 2 of my cars, a Lotus Elan +2 and a Jensen-Healey—who for a while worked for Neil Young.  Young at the time employed 3 full time workers on his car collection.)  Beyond I could see a room perhaps twice as large as the first full of ancient brass era cars (pre-1910), and cars of the teens and twenties.  I was told the collector was building on a collection that had been started by his grandfather and added to by his father.  There were a couple of Packards and half a dozen Pierce-Arrows, huge things bigger than an SUV, with tires (the early ones of white rubber) almost up to my armpit, the later Arrows sporting their trademark trumpet-shaped headlight fairings.  There was a Chandler, a Reo runabout from 1906 and a pair of Oldsmobiles with a couple Cadillacs from the same era; a Marmon, a pair of Stutzes, a Pope Hartford, a Maxwell, and more Model Ts.  It seemed a miracle that so many cars this old had been preserved.  After all, it’s not like they could be kept in a steamer trunk in someone’s attic.  They required constant space and attention.  Again, all of them were in excellent condition. 



1906 Reo



I hadn’t the vaguest notion what any of these cars were worth.  I’d never been much interested in cars this old.  Back in the days when I used to attend the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance every year, I would skip over this vintage with barely a cursory glance to head for the 50s and 60s era cars.  But this time I felt fascinated.  These were vehicles my parents would have known when they were children.  I wished I could climb into them.  The brass cars (aka horseless carriages), in particular, awed me.  They harkened to a steampunk aesthetic.  The brass fixtures were exquisite.  There was something on the running boards of a couple of them that looked like a brass thermos.  I asked someone if he knew what it was and he said, “Yes, that’s to make acetylene gas for the lights.  You put calcium carbide in the larger bottom section and water in the top.  The water drips down into the calcium carbide and makes the gas, which is piped to the lights through this tubing.  They’re often referred to as carbide lights.”  So if you wanted lights at night you not only had to load your gas generator and work up some pressure, you also had to light your headlights with a match.  There were strange pedal configurations, all sorts of levers sprouting from everywhere.  Back in these early days there were over a thousand independent manufacturers with no ruling paradigm for how to do anything, so everyone was going off in his own direction.  In some of these cars you had to advance the spark manually as you accelerated, sometimes using a hand throttle.  There was so much for the driver to attend to, in contrast to our era when all cars are pretty much the same and virtually drive themselves.  The oldest were incredibly raw and primitive, but the rapid evolution of the engineering was fascinating, you could see the brains of their designers ticking over, trying to solve problems.  You could smell the history in these cars; they were time machines.  If you could sit in them you would be in another time, and hence a different world.  I imagined driving one of them and finding the external environment transformed as well and myself chugging down a dirt lane through a slow, open, almost 19th century world.  I wished I could spend a few days there and fiddle around with them, get to know them better, but after an hour or so we were rounded up and told there was another building nearby where the “overflow” was stored.   



Bugeye Sprite



The 3^rd building had just a few, maybe a dozen, cars in it, the least valuable of the collection, it seemed: a Lancia sprint car, a couple of Porsche 912s and a 914, another MGA, a Ferrari 308 and then, over in one corner, I spotted it: a Bugeye Sprite like I had my senior year of high school and first year of college.  It had been a long time since I’d seen one in the round.  Better believe I lingered there a while, looking it over, letting the sweet memories bubble up.