By David Hacker
Cars, like women (and some hunks too, to be gender fair), often are the objects of desire. One difference: As they age, women fear the loss of their physical appeal; cars, on the other hand, grow more magnificent as they reach antique or classic status.
This, of course, assumes regular maintenance or restoration.
As a male, I'm certainly not alone in my admiration and appreciation of both women and cars--no matter the wrinkles and rust or droops and dents.
Let it be said that some of the most fascinating people I've known in my travels in the world of old cars are females, most recently with Jacqueline Shinners, curator of the Dennos Museum (see page 8), whose publicity on the "Art and the Automobile" exhibition is insightful, entertaining, and understandably enthusiastic.
This contemporary Excalibur is based on the 1928 Mercedes-Benz SSK.
The only race car driver I've ever met was a woman, Donna Mae Mims, a Pittsburgh, Pa., sports car racer who roared around tracks in a cloud of pink--pink car, pink clothes, and, if I remember right, pink perfume. I did a story on Donna Mae, about the same time Denise McCluggage was burning up the tracks in Europe, winning the Monte Carlo rallye.
Then there was Shirley Muldowney, who gave drag racer Don "Big Daddy" Garlitz all the squeal and roar he could handle at over 200 miles an hour on a quarter-mile track. And who can forget the change brought to the Indy 500 with drivers Janet Guthrie and Lyn St. James?
Just before I encountered Shinners, I met Alice Preston, 50, curator of the Brooks Stevens Car Collection in the Milwaukee, Wisc. suburb of Mequon. She is a classic in herself.
Thirty-two years ago, when Alice was 18, she was a grease monkey in a garage, changing oil in cars, tinkering with engines, and developing a love for a career and hobby that was largely a man's world.
A fellow mechanic at the garage, who later became her husband, arranged for her to go to work for Brooks Stevens, already a well-known Milwaukee industrial and auto designer and racing-car enthusiast. The rest, as they say, is history.
"I like going fast," she says, simply. "Cars, motorcycles."
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Alice grew up on a Wisconsin farm, where she learned the art and skills of machinery repairs. "I was always taking things apart to see how they worked," she told me on a November visit to the Wisconsin museum. When she was a teen-ager, Alice said, she was living on a farm near Beaver Dam, Wisc. A neighbor farmer, who had a 1942 Ford sedan he had abandoned in a field, told Alice, "'If you can make it go, you can have it.'" |
I had been lusting after a close look at one. Good thing I'm patient. It took me nearly 30 years to get behind the wheel of one, and then only my mind was in motion; the car wasn't. |
So Alice chopped out a sapling that was growing through the engine compartment when the hood had been ripped off, fussed with the engine for three weeks, and got it running.
That was her first car, and she hasn't looked back since. Her eye is always on the road ahead, not the rearview mirror.
I videotaped a two-hour interview with Alice, who talked about Stevens and took me on a tour of the museum. (I plan to edit this into a one-hour show to be seen on TCTV2, the Traverse City public-access cable channel.)
Although known mainly for designing and manufacturing, the long-nosed, low-slung, sporty-looking Excalibur car, a contemporary classic based on the 1928 Mercedes-Benz SSK, Stevens spent most of his industrial-design career innovating such things as pastel-colored kitchen appliances, the glass-door clothes dryer, cookware in colors, Oscar Meyer's Weinermobile, the Willys Jeepster and influencing marine design (including the rakishness of the Evinrude outboard engine). He's also responsible for the wide-mouth peanut butter jar, the prototype for the nation's motorhome industry, which revolutionized recreational vehicles, the look of the modern Harley-Davidson motorcycle, and the "Soft Cross" label on the Miller Brewing Company's beer-bottle.
When Stevens died in 1995 at the age of 83, he had been a one-man industrial revolution. His factory turned out nearly 3,000 of the classic-look Excaliburs between the 1960s and 1980s. It was so well built, says Alice, that most of them are still running today.
"If this car were to run into a truck today," she said, knocking a knuckle against a part of the frame, "the truck would get the all the damage. This was so overbuilt."
Ever since the Excalibur came out, I had been lusting after a close look at one. Good thing I'm patient. It took me nearly 30 years to get behind the wheel of one, and then only my mind was in motion; the car wasn't.
"I'll sell it to you," grinned Alice, patting the fender of the white 1979 Series III Excalibur. It was only $24,900. It had only 8,000 miles on it. A bargain, perhaps, but not as much of one as the boyhood car that got me started on this fancy.
That was a 1932 Plymouth Roadster, which cost me $30. For years, I've had pinned above my desk a sketch of that model roadster. It took me from my home in Wyandotte to Camp Algonquin at Burt Lake near Indian River the summer of 1944, where I was a counselor. It was a convertible, with side curtains and a rumble seat. That summer, it was a well-known sight around Petoskey, Harbor Springs, and Charlevoix, when not many cars were running because of World War II and the gasoline shortage.
For years, I've read Hemmings Motor News, hoping to find a 1932 Plymouth Roadster for sale. No luck. I'd have to relive the past in memory only.
But wait.
Earlier this year, Chrysler announced it was bringing out the Plymouth Prowler. This was the first Plymouth production car that seemed to be built with the flavor of my little '32 Plymouth Roadster. Small. Sporty. Different.
I had felt a few twitches of longing when Chevrolet introduced the Corvette in 1953 and again when in 1955 Ford came out with the Thunderbird, but my pocketbook was much too thin for either of those cars. In 1984, I did indulge in a Pontiac Fiero. But I soon learned that it was a car--as my wife Barbara said of it--"You don't get into it; you put it on, like a glove."
Alas, the Prowler again may not be the answer. It won't be available until sometime in 1997; at this point there is no guarantee that I will be available then. And a Bill Marsh salesman tells me only 1,100 will be built, none of them destined for Traverse City.
The Prowler looks more like a street rod, a sleek and stylized version of those ungainly old cars refashioned with big powerful modern engines, blow torches, metal-cutting tools, and fancy paint jobs to look like a John Dillinger just-another-day-at-the-bank-robbery car.
No thanks. Besides, the Prowler's price tag will be in the mid-$30,000s.
Alice, if you'd come down a few grand on that Excalibur...
For more information on the Brooks Stevens auto museum and collection call (414) 241-4185. PTN&O