The Aspen Preservation Society

I was going through my inbox when I found these photos a reader named Steve Seiwald of Molalla, Oregon, sent in of his 1977 Dodge Aspen. Steve was responding to something that I’d written about my Rover, where I tried to explain why I felt it was my duty and honor to give a home to this car, which had been driven just 71,000 miles by its original, loving owner and parked since 1978. Steve wrote, You mirrored my sentiments when it comes to rescuing cars. I have a ‘59 Buick convert...

18/11/2008

The price of glory

The number that counts here is 1,500. That, roughly, is the number of American racing drivers who have lost their lives in open-cockpit cars since the earliest days of the sport. Most serious followers of the sport can already look at a photo of the green flag at an Indianapolis 500 from the early 1950s with the knowledge that a lot of those drivers didn’t live to see John F. Kennedy elected to the White House. The book we’re announcing here forces the reader to realize that while...

17/11/2008

Teague designs AMX. But not that Teague, and not that AMX

When Lee Iacocca, helming Chrysler, bought AMC in 1987, he not only dismantled the country’s last major independent car manufacturer, he shredded every AMC fan’s hope that the brand would someday be revived. Sure, somebody raises a faint hope here and there, mostly based on trademark renewals (or lack thereof) as evidence, but most speculation about a return of AMC now rests on the sketchpads and in the Photoshop wizardry of dedicated AMC fans. But the sketches and renderings...

13/11/2008

thank you Chet Kelley - Dream Cars of tomorrow from 1953

In responding to an item in HCC Lost and Found, Chet Kelley sent me a copy of an old Fred Horsley book from 1953 titled, simply, “Dream Cars.” It’s a bit tattered, but it was still worth flipping through for more than just the content that he directed me to. Inside, it’s chock full of the most cracked-out, pie-in-the-sky, don’t-tell-me-this-can’t-be-done automotive ideas up to that time, and not just from Detroit, where we typically think so-called dream...

06/11/2008

Toronado serendipity - the long and the short of it (hah!)

Just recently, Hugo90 posted the above photo of a shortened Toronado to the Hemmings Nation Flickr pool, with the caption that he’d seen it at the 75th anniversary celebration for Oldsmobile in 1972. “Probably built by Oldsmobile, but I don’t know what for,” he wrote. Nifty. I bookmarked it, intending to get back to it and dig deeper. But while selecting SIA Flashbacks for the next few weeks, the digging deeper part just fell into my lap. In a larger story about the...

31/10/2008

the Cheetah Transporter, an unlikely El Camino

Cheetah Transporter from the November 1961 issue of Sports Car Graphic Geoff Hacker’s recently been collecting articles on his Cheetah Transporter, which a) had absolutely nothing to do with Bill Thomas’s Cheetah, and b) seems rather timely for our celebration of the El Camino’s 50th anniversary today. Can’t see why? We’ll clue you in shortly. In the mid-1950s, Norman Holtkamp, who later became well-known as a Porsche-VW dealer and tuner, noticed how effectively...

16/10/2008

the El Camino turns 50 - now enough with the mullet jokes

One reason we don’t do too many articles on anniversaries on certain cars in the pages of our magazines is because every year marks the 25th, 35th, 50th, 75th anniversary of some car or another, and we simply can’t get to them all. Thus, we really only hit the big ones, like the 100th anniversary of the Model T, covered in the current issue of Hemmings Classic Car. But today marks a rather important anniversary in automotive history: 50 years ago today, Chevrolet introduced the...

16/10/2008

Test your knowledge of automotive history Part 3

I guess those last few questions were too easy, because they were all answered quickly. So we will move on to the next round of questions from Jim Hill’s pop quiz. PS. We did not have the advantage of the Hemmings research library, or google search or wikipedia on the cruise ship so these questions were pretty tough for the staff as well as the cruisers. 13. What company made wagons before they made sedans? 14. Whose company slogan was “Boss of the Road” and when was it first...

09/10/2008

Test your knowledge of automotive history Part 2

We have had a few correct answers to the first posting but we are still waiting for others. In the meantime, here are a few more: 7. What automobile company was started by JW and WD Packard (Hint: Not the most obvious answer). 8. What car ran so well when it was on “All in the Family”? 9. What were called the “3 Ps” considered as the finest cars of their time? 10. Who was Mercedes from the name Mercedes-Benz? Mercedes SLR McLaren model 722, zero to sixty in 3.6 seconds,...

08/10/2008

thank you Matt Litwin - car ads from 1972

When researching articles, we often dig back through the buff books for road test information on the cars we’re writing about today, and Associate Editor Matt Litwin’s substantial collection of old car magazines has saved our bacon numerous times. And, of course, we end up losing an hour with each mag he brings in as we flip through the old car ads in each issue. So I thought I’d share some of the fun with all of the full-page car ads (and one bike ad) from the June 1972...

03/10/2008

Test your knowledge of automotive history.

Richard Lentinello explaining why the wife’s good bedsheets make a perfect restoration tool for laying out all your parts before reassembly. During the recent Hemmings Cruise, the staff gave a few seminars on the days when the ship was out to sea. One of the cruisers was Jim Hill from the Packard Source List who has been on several Hemmings cruises in the past. On our first day of seminars, Jim passed out a quiz on automotive history for everyone to take a crack at. The test had 41...

02/10/2008

The 1910 Shrensbury Minton

When the Beaulieu Encyclopedia doesn’t mention it, you know it’s an obscure car. A photo from the PEMCO Webster & Stevens Collection at the Museum of History & Industry, Seattle, says that this c. 1910 automobile is the Shrensbury Minton. It’s a huge, expensive-looking car, and it’s not mentioned anywhere else in the world that we know of. We tried variations on Shrensbury and Minton…nothing. It’s identified as being in Seattle. Is it just a major error, or...

10/09/2008

Tongans got Humbers

I’m not a huge fan of the Boston Globe’s overhyped Big Picture blog, but I’ll cop to checking in every few weeks to see if I can learn something as a photographer. They’ve never done anything with cars that I’ve seen, but a series on the inauguration of King Siaosi (George) Tupou V, the new king of Toga, included a shot of him inspecting the troops from an open Land Rover Defender 110 at the Coronation Military Parade in Nuku’alofa; and this...

08/09/2008

toy cars, not teddy bears

John Morrison sent along this picture of himself in 1955 clutching two of his favorite toy cars, and I could’ve sworn he somehow rifled through my parents’ family album and found a similar picture of me doing the same. Or of my father doing the same. Or of my brother doing the same. Y’know, I’d bet just about everybody reading this blog has a similar picture tucked away in their family album. But John swears that’s him, clutching a Porsche Speedster. His question,...

04/09/2008

This was racing

Maybe a year ago, I wrote a column for Hemmings Classic Car admitting that for me, watching cars like the one in the photo race on dirt tracks has been a longtime guilty pleasure. Yes, a lot of pre-war coupes, including this one, got diced, in more ways than one, to become dirt-track Modifieds in the Northeast. This car was built by Lee Taylor and driven by the late Dick Havens at East Windsor, Flemington and Harmony speedways in New Jersey, winning track titles at both Flemington and Harmony....

01/09/2008

Terry, meet Gary; Gary, meet Terry

Gary Faules, inspired by an earlier photo opp with one of our Hemmings field representatives, wrote in: It was just another typical California weekend here with perfect racing/car show temps in the 90’s to 100’s. Now some might say that’s too hot but car guys know this weather causes the grease monkeyettes to take the top off so to speak. We spent the weekend visiting our son Will, who besides his racing he is now helping run Thunderhill Raceway in Willows California and I...

26/08/2008

The orphans of ‘17

Motor Record was a trade publication of the Teens, primarily aimed at dealers, suppliers, et c., not unlike Motor today. I was reading through the March 1917 edition, never mind why, and I found a listing of dealers holding stock for orphaned makes. Working backwards, I came up with an interesting (to nerds like me) list of makes that were already orphaned by then. Some made a comeback later on, and are listed as (Old). Some, like Maxwell, were hugely famous and not uncommon today. But when...

14/08/2008

the soggiest cruise-in yet, but they still came in droves

So we knew the rain was coming. It was about as inevitable as the morning, but somehow, the cars kept coming, and kept coming from further and further away. New Hampshire, Maine, Boston, downstate, upstate. We even had a Canuckian show up. We figured they came for a show, so we kept the show going, and even after the rain started - and lasted for an hour and a half - nobody left. If we had a Hardcore Cruiser award, we’d have given it to each and every person last night. And once the...

08/08/2008

three (among many) reasons to admire Brooks Stevens

Had I not made it apparent here earlier, I’m a pretty big fan of Brooks Stevens’s automotive designs. I can’t say I thoroughly dig all of them, but I appreciate his willingness to incorporate outlandishness into practicality and his willingness to tackle less-than-mainstream subjects. Myron Vernis knows this and recently sent me a collection of postcards featuring Stevens’s designs that apparently came from the Milwaukee Art Museum. Three of the postcards in particular...

30/07/2008

the son of Corvette: Uncle Eddie’s Crosley

So after posting the photos and info on my post-Crosley engine haul, Myron Vernis starts telling me about this Almquist-Crosley he knows about. As it turns out, it’s his, so I tell him I need photos, stat, and he comes through, along with some history. As you know, Ed Almquist founded Almquist Engineering which was a pioneer in catalog sales of speed parts. Around 1955, he bought Clearfield Plastics, an early manufacturer of fiberglass kit cars. In the ensuing years, he produced a series...

07/07/2008

These are a few of my favorite things

Aah, May and June. On the eve of July, it’s fun to look back at some of the more enjoyable events that have helped me shake off the damp chill that still refuses to be evicted from inside my cinder block walled-garage. I had the enjoyable opportunity to attend a Boston-based driving event in the end of May that was designed to introduce the local press to Saab’s stellar new 9-3 Turbo X flagship, a wicked looking, seriously fun-to-drive sports sedan and SportCombi wagon whose 280hp,...

30/06/2008

the Taylor one-wheeler lives and may rise again

Good news, fans of the Taylor one-wheeler! Since our earlier post on Charles Taylor’s vision and prototyping of a one-wheeled vehicle, we’ve gotten in touch with Taylor’s son, Charlie, who still lives in Golden, Colorado, and still has some of the components of his father’s prototypes. Charlie filled us in with some details of exactly how his father built the prototypes and sent along some pictures to help illustrate. The vehicle was driven by a chain saw engine. The...

25/06/2008

thank you Paul Bellefeuille - Amesbury, Massachusetts, 1968

I have yet to get down to Amesbury to visit Phillip Michaud at Michaud’s Garage (where the AMC signs still hang), but Paul Bellefeuille, who provided the photos of Michaud’s in the present day, uncovered another little treat, a photo of Michaud’s from 1968. Specifically, the photo appears in an ad in the program book for the 300th anniversary of Amesbury 40 years ago. The ad quite simply states that Michaud’s sells Rambler and Land Rover. So Paul sent along the book for...

16/06/2008

traditional hot rods and Easter Eggs at York

So last weekend I had a chance to check out the 35th annual NSRA Nationals East in York, Pennsylvania, a real treat because a) I’d never been to an NSRA show before, believe it or not, and b) on Friday, they corralled all the traditional hot rods for a special show within a show. Sure, “traditional” is up for interpretation nowadays - everybody has their own idea of just how they really did it back in the ’50s - but that just led to a wider variety of styles and...

14/06/2008

trump the minivan, bring me a Boonie Bug

I shouldn’t have mentioned the Brubaker Box yesterday. I had to go searching for a link, and in the process, I discovered several equally awesome box-type VW-based proto-mini-vans. For example, the Boonie Bug, pictured above, for which one can apparently still buy plans for $65. A modified version also allegedly had some screen time in Total Recall, though the Internet Movie Car Database doesn’t have a listing for that wonderful piece of early 1990s cinema. Also still available in...

11/06/2008

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