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Spinning My Tires   is one man's view of the world of cars. Random thoughts, ideas and comments pop up here, all of them related to owning, driving and restoring cars. I've been doing this car thing as long as I can remember, and have enjoyed a great many car-related experiences, some of which I hope to share with you here. And I always have an opinion one way or another. Enjoy.

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Where Are All the Great Cars?

10/2/02

I’ve been going to car shows for nearly 30 years now. I think my father got into the old car hobby during its glory days back in the early Seventies when he bought a 1934 Ford four-door sedan at an auction. He knew nothing of old cars, but liked the shape of that old Ford. I was four years old at the time, and I still have the photograph from the local newspaper that showed me standing in front of my father’s new acquisition, holding a toy car of my own. From that moment, I was completely and irrevocably hooked.

We went to car shows every weekend when I was a kid. We took the old cars (my father’s collection eventually bloomed to nearly a dozen old cars) to friends’ houses on weekends, on long drives in the country, out to dinner, and sometimes on vacation. And everywhere we went, there were frequently other old cars there with us.

In the 80s, we toured. The VMCCA’s so-called Michigan Tour was a popular one, and my parents once tried the Glidden in their 1925 Buick touring. I distinctly recall attending Michigan Tours in Indiana, Ohio and New York where at any time I could have a ride in the back of a 1937 Packard V12 dual-cowl phaeton, an all-aluminum 1929 Rolls-Royce Phantom II touring, a ’34 Packard V12 club sedan (my personal favorite), a 1939 LaSalle rumble-seat convertible coupe, a 1913 Lozier touring car as big as a garage, a V16 Cadillac roadster and more than a dozen others. Today I go to car shows, especially those sponsored by the car clubs themselves, and I’m completely underwhelmed by the presence of ordinary cars from the Fifties, Sixties and early Seventies.

Not that there’s anything wrong with these cars, and I’m sure their owners are very passionate about them. But park a 1932 KB Lincoln town car next to a 1968 Pontiac Catalina 4-door with bench seats and see where the crowd goes. People are only looking at these “ordinary” cars because there aren’t any extraordinary cars at shows any more. I probably won’t make any friends by saying this, but I’m really, really, REALLY tired of all these garden-variety cars at every show I go to.

Where have the great classic cars gone?

Ask my father, and he’ll tell you that all the guys who own them are old. Yep, no doubt about that. These guys were old when I knew them twenty years ago. They got into the hobby when they were about my age, and the cars were incredibly cheap. One fellow I know picked up a supercharged Duesenberg SJ Dual Cowl Phaeton for less than $2500 in the early 1960s. My step-grandfather claimed to have scrapped several Doozies in the Fifties (oh, God, I dearly hope not). One fellow still has his first new car: a 1940 Cadillac convertible. So the old guys definitely had a jump start on the rest of us and pretty much cornered the market.

Some of the other great cars have been sucked up by museums and investors. These investors are probably leftovers from the hey-days of the late 1980s where any old car would gain 30% in value every year. Most of these guys took a bath when it was all over, but I bet a few held on, hoping that those days would return. They probably won’t, and now you have a bunch of guys not really passionate about these cars but holding on to them just the same because they don’t want to lose their “investment.” The museums have inherited a lot of cars from these same investors as a “tax” benefit. Nothing wrong with that, but the cars are immediately taken out of circulation and placed in static displays. Not much fun, that.

A lot of these cars went overseas during those same wild years. We probably won’t ever see them again because it costs too much to ship a car overseas and the government makes it very difficult to import an older car.

All these cars sit in garages, hidden from daylight, hidden from our eyes, possibly never to be seen again. Their elderly owners die, and their children are stuck with cars that 1) are too valuable to drive, 2) too closely linked to sentimental memories to sell, 3) too expensive to restore, 4) forgotten or 5) all of the above. And that’s a damned shame.

But I guess that’s where the hobby’s headed these days. The great classic cars are too valuable to drive and their owners are too old to drive them. It’s too much of a hassle to get the cars up and running and motor them down the road to a show or tour. Today, if a ‘30s Packard shows up at a show, it’s an orphan, and I seem to be the only one making a big deal over it. We get the Fifties and Sixties cars coming out like an army because they’re reliable and comfortable, and the younger people who have the time and energy to spend on a collector car recall them fondly and can easily afford them. So I go and look at the perfectly restored Chevy Biscaynes and Ford Torinos at the shows, and I talk to their proud owners. But I long every moment for those glory days of the early Eighties when you could fill a parking lot with the big classics.

I guess I’m pretty unique in the car hobby today. I’m 32 and I’m restoring an old car. Not a hot-rod, not a muscle car (been there, done that, bored with it), but a genuine old car. And I’m going to drive the doors off it. I can always restore it again, right? That Century of mine is going to get driven. A lot.

As far as I can tell, I’m alone. I went to a local Buick show a few weeks ago, and I was less than half the age of nearly every other attendee. Most were shocked when I told them I owned a 1941 Century instead of a ’70 GS Stage I or Grand National. They were even more incredulous when I told them it was a 2-door sedanette, and that I wasn’t cutting it up to make a hot-rod. They were actually excited by my car, because it’s so rare.

There were only three other cars older than my ’41, including a ’32 90 series limousine that had been “modernized” to include a small-block Chevy and automatic transmission. And even that car was owned by a guy closing in on 60 years old.

Car clubs are puzzling over how to get more young people into the fold these days. To be honest, I don’t have any answers for them. For me, it’s part of who I am, and old cars have been a part of my life—the hot-rods and racing cars are a relatively new thing, and I got burned out on it quickly. I grew up around the classics, and shared my father’s passion for them, and inherited his values quite early. I tinkered with the idea of hot-rodding a Model A Ford when I was about 14, but I always heard my father’s voice saying, “Anyone can cut up a car—it takes a man to restore it.” Cliché, yes, true nonetheless.

When I was old enough to drive, I learned to drive standard shift on a 1930 Model A Ford, not a new car. When I got into racing, I bought a fast car, raced it, then decided it was more valuable to me as a show piece. Today it sits in the garage, unused for more than 12 months. Then I built FrankenRanger, just to see if I could do it.

By the way, I sold FrankenRanger last spring to finance the Century. And I’ve never been more excited about a project than I am about this one.

I don’t know where young people in this hobby will come from. People my age grew up with really crappy cars in the 1970s, so I don’t think many of them will return there to find their hobby car. A lot of kids are building fast cars, especially the imports, which are red-hot right now. They don’t have any interest in a 35 MPH cruise on a country road in a car with 4-inch wide tires. They want speed, flash, and loud stereos. An old car would be an anachronism to them, about as easy to relate to as their grandparents’ stories of the Great Depression.

The cycle seems to be feeding on itself—the great cars are owned by the older hobbyists, and they’re not getting any younger and keep the cars locked away. Their children, and their children’s children aren’t exposed to them, and don’t develop an appreciation for the old cars and their amazing engineering and craftsmanship. They don’t pick up the hobby where their elders leave off, and an entire generation goes in a different direction. The cars gradually vanish into museums or into the collections of not-quite-as-old-but-still-old guys.

So I’m calling on you young people out there. Yes, YOU! Go out and find these old cars—the great ones, the unmolested ones, the original ones, and get them on the road. Drive an old car and you’ll quickly find that going fast and playing loud music aren’t the only ways to have fun in a car. You’ll be transported back to an older era, and you’ll find that people are friendlier, kinder and more excited about seeing you than they’ll ever be when you drive by with a loud stereo and your cap on backwards. Everyone waves and smiles. When you’re in an old car, everyone is your friend. And don’t get me started on how helpful they are if and when you break down in an old car. Don’t believe me? E-mail me and I’ll take you for a ride.

I don’t want to be the only young guy at these functions. In a few years, I’ll be all alone because all the older people are getting out, or, gulp, dying. And the great cars will disappear forever unless you tell your fathers/uncles/grandfathers/friends that yes, you love the great classics and will preserve their history. Get involved and make the investment in effort and time that it takes to keep these old cars on the road. Save this critical part of our history that is slowly fading away unnoticed.

I look in Hemmings every month, and some really great cars are in there. They’re always in there. Perhaps they’re finding new owners who are using them and who I’ll run into some day. Perhaps they’re being driven in Florida and California and other places where you can use such cars all year ’round. Perhaps I’m the one who is out of touch with them, not the other way around.

Yeah, I hope that’s it.

See you next month.

E-mail me at toolman8@sbcglobal.net

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Last modified on 02/06/2005

Thanks, Fidget!