Dino 206SP

Dino 206SP

Enzo Ferrari had only one child within his marriage...Alfredino “Dino” Ferrari. Named after his grandfather, the founder of the first metal working shop which was also Enzo's boyhood home and which recently opened as a Ferrari museum in Modena.

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Though Ferrari built at least one motor of 2, 4, 6, 8, and 12 cylinders, by the early 1950s the iconic engine for cars bearing his name were Colombo designed V12s. The inline six was an experiment which, as far as I know, was only used in the 121LM, a rather awkward design said to be beastly to drive and impossible to tame.

121LM
Looks almost good in this shot
Despite odd hood lump
and tiny grill opening
Tail fin from headrest not obvious

 Dino was a proponent of the V6...in that he prognosticated the future, as this has become the standard for 21^stcentury performance road cars.

I think though, that while the old man was willing to try the configuration for formula racing, he was afraid that a road car with less than 12 cylinders badged as a Ferrari would not sell. Thus the fendered racers as well as the first street variants bearing V6 motors, up through the 246 series and ending with the 308GT4 and early 308GTB, also badged this way...these cars all bore badges with the son's signature of his nickname in script on a Modena yellow background.

In an era which ended in the early 70s, the three great auto races run on open roads were the Tour de France, the Mille Miglia, and the Targo Florio. By 1958 the only one left was the Targa, the oldest of the three. The course was brutal...mile mile of broken pavement on the poorly maintained roads of Sicily. It was no place for the faster and bigger cars, as the roughness of the pavement, the tightness of the turns, and the closeness of many of the buildings, all made it likely that the bigger, faster cars would wind up in the weeds...or worse. 

It was a natural for Porsche, but Ferrari could not ignore the challenge of such an event on what was, though world apart from the rest of Italy, still part of his “home turf.” Thus was born the series of Dino racers such as the 196 and 206 specials...the “S” and “SP” prototypes built with the Targa in mind. So Bill Schworer bought and restored one.

Maybe Bill was looking for another two liters?
Number as used in the 66 Targa Florio

 Like most of the rest of us in the Bay Area region of the Ferrari Owners Club, Bill was moving into the then new sport of vintage racing. Unlike most of the rest of us he was in one of the “up” iterations of his “boom or bust” financial life. He was an ambitious home builder, which even in California can be a roller coaster ride, not for the faint of heart. Oddly, I don't remember a single one of his street Ferraris, but I didn't need to dig out old photos to remember a lot of details about my romance with the 206.

I also, however, remember in detail his wife's car.

Deanna Schworer was a very special lady. More than a few years Bill's junior, I thought of her as a mysterious and mystical spirit. She always seemed to me to be sitting quietly in the background somewhere, and I always picture her at the spinning wheel which sat in her living room...I had never before nor since seen anyone spin their own yard...or knitting something with the thread she had created.

Among other projects, Bill had been the developer for Meriners Island, a community of townhouses off the San Mateo bridge stuffed into a bit of land between San Mateo and Foster City. Somehow he had found room to also build his own home there...one of the most intriguing places I can ever remember. 

First of all, it had a single bedroom, but included a two car garage, which Bill had made a showpiece, complete with terra cotta tiled floor...a touch I never saw anywhere else, and I have seen some pretty fancy garages.

I remember that the living room included high, clerestory type windows, complete with stained glass. In fact, the feel of the room was very much that of a small chapel, a place of quiet refuge.

Oh yeah, Deanna's car...it was a silver 330GTS convertible. From 1960 or so Ferrari had moved from the 3 liter 250 through the 275 and on to the 4 liter generation of Colombo-designed V12s. I have always felt the 330 comes across best in the more popular coupe version, and the market I guess agreed, as I believe the S was rare even by other convertible versions. I still prefer the 275 pictured in another post, and never thought John Lewis's yellow bird lacked “giddyup.” But the 330 was definitely fast, and Deanna was no lightweight in using everything it had.

Pretty in Yellow
From ultimatecarpage.com
But I still prefer John's 275

I remember in particular at least one occasion where she displayed that verve convincingly...twice on the same club outing. 

We had a group of perhaps five or six couples and cars who went for a weekend to Hearst Castle at San Simeon on the California coast. As anyone who had driven the Coast Highway can attest, opportunities for enthusiastic driving on most of this road are few and far between, and it is entirely possible to get stuck behind Grandpa in a 40 foot motorhome and lump along for miles at about 25 MPH. But shortly before you come to the castle there is actually a short four lane stretch where there is no risk of going off a cliff if you happen to lose it, and the curves are more gentle than on the rest of the road.

I seem to recall at least the following cars there...Bill and Deanna in the 330, with her piloting, The Jones's in their yellow 246GTS Dino, The Thinnesen's in their red variant, Sherri and me in the 2+2, and the Morton's in their 330GTB. Deanna hit that four lane and just...disappeared. We all put our feet in the carbs, and I remember hitting well above 200kph on the speedo, and none of us got anywhere near her!

On the return trip we were better prepared for her...enthusiasm. The Schworer's had invited us to their place at the end of the weekend for wine and snacks. The lsat part of the route was up I280 on the hills above the main SF peninsula population areas. Once more Deanna “put her foot in it,” and once more, in those beautiful and, in those days, empty hills on one of America's most attractive freeways, we were all dancing along at triple digit speeds all the way to CA92 and down to her Mariners Island home...where Deanna quietly sort of somehow seemed to just...sit back in a zen-state and assume that mysterious subdued yet so attuned state of being.

Oh yes...the 206. When the restoration was finished Bill had what I can only describe as an unveiling. Pretty much the usual suspects were invited to see the car, displayed attractively on that startling tile floor. It was just gorgeous, and a very historically significant little beast. Also on display was a copy of the Road and Track cover photo of the car in flight at the 1966 Targa Florio, where it finished second. To top it off, while Bill Morton was pissed off that he could not fit his frame into the seat, nor his legs under the wheel, and had to sit with his head titled sideways even without a helmet, I slipped into the seat with plenty of room to spare.

Helping Bill get belted in
Gee Sher, I fit it better than him
Can't I have one?

Sherri immediately recognized a certain glint in my eye and shook her finger at me. She needn't have bothered. Neither then nor now could I have afforded as much as a down payment on the sales tax for the car, no less the full price.

As it developed, Bill was frustrated with the car and later sold it. While the car was perfect for the Sicilian event, the nature of vintage race grids was that it was always in with bigger and faster FIA championship variety cars, where it usually ran dead last. Even Laguna Seca is not “twisty” enough for the car's handling advantage to enable it to show well against a 250LM or Cobra Daytona.

I believe this is a 612 Can Am Car
At any rate, too big and fast for the 206

I could have cared less and would gladly have parted with dearly loved parts of my anatomy to own it. 

Deanna was not only a shockingly fast driver, she was an accomplished pilot. She and Bill had both been married previously, each having a child from that union...Deanna's son was a few years younger than Bill's daughter. 

The girl was a talented photographer as a teenager when we knew her. In fact, to this day a photo of hers of Adin, taken when he was perhaps five or six, sits on top of one of our floor speakers in the den-it is my favorite shot of him as a child.

At the age of 38 we lost Deanna...a staggering shock. We were all just a couple of years older than her. None of us had likely experienced death among our friends before. The sheer unexpectedness of it was disorienting.

Bill was at the races with his daughter. Deanna had rented a plane and flown up to Oregon with her son..I believe she was originally from that area of the country. She had offered to take some friends up in the plane to show them around from the air...it was a family of four and there was no room for her boy, for whom this type of sightseeing was, no doubt, “old hat” anyway. So he stayed behind on the field to wait for their return.

They never did. I can't imagine what it was like for him when he finally learned they were gone forever. Though at this point in my life I tend to think of almost all children as ten years old, I really do think that was about his age (his half-sister was about 16 at the time). What a horror for him, with no one around at the moment but strangers.

Deanna; wonderful, mystical, talented Deanna...had made a horrible amateur mistake. She had flown into a three sided canyon, a place where the only choice was to either climb out or turn around. And if neither was possible, there was only one outcome. What must it have been like for all of them to know what was coming. Or did the family know? Did she keep that from them and face the inevitable with the grace and quiet acceptance with which I think she was blessed? No way to know.

But what I do know was what happened when we gathered at the funeral home for the first “celebration of life” I had ever attended, a concept which was uncommon and “new” back then. We were all standing around on the corner in front of the building, still in shock and trying to work up our nerve to go in, when here came Bill. 

I don't remember his exact words, but the impact of what in general he said changed me forever.

“Why the long faces?” he began.

“Am I hurt? Of course. Am I angry at her for leaving me alone? Sure. Am I also angry that she made a stupid mistake? You bet. But we are not here to mourn Deanna. We are here to celebrate her life. She died doing...exactly...what...she...wanted to be doing. How many of us are going to get to say that?”

And in we went.

Somehow my memories of her and that 206 are wrapped up around each other. I smiled the other day when I ran across old photos of the car at Laguna, and that made me see her smile as clearly as if she were standing in front of me.

Sheer magic. She makes the one on that painting in the Louvre pale by comparison. Julia Roberts made a movie called “Mona Lisa Smile.” Julia is a beautiful woman and that big wonderful mouth and smile are charming, but there is little about it which is mysterious or mystical.

Deanna, on the other hand, truly had

The  Mona Lisa Smile

1989 Monterey Historic

1989 Monterey Historics

Sherri has long expressed the desire to reduce clutter around the house. Like most people our age, we have accumulated quite a bit of “stuff,” adding to it year-by-year. People who move about regularly are forced to cull this “stash” at least somewhat each time they relocate, but we have been in this house for two decades and spent even more than that in our home in San Carlos, so the piles are quite extensive.

She has done a bit of work in other areas (and I have been totally AWOL in the activity so far), and a few days ago started to tackle our numerous boxes of photographic prints. It might be hard for millenials to understand in this digital age, but well into the early years of the new century, you took pictures with cameras on film, and had the negatives processed by companies which then gave them back to you along with prints of the frames on special photographic paper. In some cases they provided duplicates of each shot so you could “share” the photo by giving a print to someone else. Of course you could also provide the negative back to the processor to produce additional prints later.

At any rate, like many couples we had accumulated both albums we had made and boxes of prints...most of which then got relegated to a shelf in a closet and were never looked at again. So Sherri started “culling the herd” and gave me a stack of car related photos to go through and do the same.

We actually had reduced the stash of prints we reviewed by about 2/3...which was easy since many were simply poorly shot and others were just duplicates. But a couple of days later, as she continued the process, she gave me two regular envelopes to go through, on which I had written “1989 Monterey,” and which contained color photos I had done at that event.

Like much of my car photos, these were of cars which are unlikely to ever be seen again at a single location and in such great numbers. Many of the cars are now worth tens of millions of dollars each, and even for the “new” “Monterey Reunion” which succeeded the Steve Earle “Monterey Historic” races he created, this is heady stuff and a lot of these cars simply disappeared into collections dispersed all over the world. At least a couple, shown here, were special to me, as they were owned and raced by friends, many of them buddies I met through the old Ferrari Owners Club.

Looks like a "normal" 250 California, Right?
It's Decidedly Not
A very rare, all aluminum competition version
Mike Cotsworth aboard

The Cotsworth 250SWB Cabriolet (“California”) needs a bit of coverage. It's quite a story. Mike and his wife Vicki were at an early Montery event and were looking at a similar car parked in the paddock...a steel bodied road car. A gentleman wearing a hat like the one in the photo of Shelby below stopped and asked them if they liked the car. Who would say “no?”

“Well,” the stranger explained in a soft drawl, “I own one I would like to sell and you can come look at. It's parked under a tree on my property in Texas and needs to be rebuilt.”

Mike and Vicki actually took him up on the offer. The car looked pretty sad, and had been under that tree for years. It did not run, the interior was a mess, and the tree was a plum tree...the fruit had put purple stains all over the car.

Mike wanted nothing to do with it. It was Vicki who had the guts and imagination to see what it could become. They bought the car and, as they started into the restoration of it, found out exactly what they had and how rare and special it was. Even as early as this photo was taken it was worth over a million dollars, an almost unheard of figure in those days.

A Really Brutal Beast....
Despite the classy white walls

The “Carsten” Allard was owned, at the time of the photo, by my friend Dave Brodsky. Dave was not a racer...not even by vintage standards. I could regularly and easily pass him in his Edwards/Blume Crosley special. The Allard is a handful for anyone. This car is quite famous, winning race after race with Bill Pollack behind the wheel. It scared the bejesus out of Dave, and he later invited Pollack to drive it when Allard was the featured marque for the event. And yes, it did race with those white wall tires.

David Love and Mary Ho
One of the most well known Vintage Cars in the World
1958 250TR "Testa Rossa"
Now Owned by Tom Price

But it is the pictures of David Love's 250TR which need the most explaining. You see,

Price's "Other Car"
1963 250GTO

David was my first driving instructor when I decided to join other members of the FOC and go vintage racing. In fact, I spent the first few laps sitting where Mary Ho is in the full shot of the car. I was in awe. I was in heaven. I had no idea where the track went or what David was trying to tell me. I kept staring at the little brass plaque shown in the shot of the car's dashboard. It was from an old pinball machine and said simply...”Insert coin to begin game.”

Coin Slot at Far Right
David did have a sense of whimsy

I said nothing about it and stumbled into my own 2+2 to follow him around. I focused on the “stinger” ends of his tailpipes. They, like the windshield bracket (you did notice the windshield bracket, right?), were works of art, not car parts. Pure jewelery.
When we came in and he asked if I had learned anything I sighed “yeah, that car is just f*ing gorgeous.”

A couple of shots were of famous racers from the 50s and 60s...Sir Stirling Moss and Carroll Shelby in particular...it is shocking to me how young they looked in 1989.

Sir Stirling Moss
I think the lady is his wife
But I'm not sure

World's Shrewdest "Chicken Farmer"
Carroll Shelby
I wonder what he's holding?

But it was the series of photos at the end of this entry which not only brought back memories of that event, but gave me the same “hair on the arm rising” thrill it did when I first saw the display. Somewhere I have a photo as I first saw the display after just arriving for the race, and well before the track was opened to the public. In that shot it is wreathed in and surrounded by fog, and looks as ethereal and surreal as the real scene must have been back in 1959.

In the first 20 or so years of the Monterey Historics, no single sponsor owned the paddock displays. Thus there was not the commercial and unified approach implemented when Rolex became the owner of this area. At the same time, there was actually more creativity and diversity shown in these earlier showings, including, for example, such wonders as a reproduction of a section of a 1920s board track, on a significant slope, complete with a Miller race car strapped invisibly to the track and looking for all the world like it was in full flight.

The Aston Martin display was so authentic it included mannequin gendarmes and mechanics standing behind the cars, and faces of spectators in the stands, including famous figures like Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, and Elvis Presley. The cars were the ones which actually ran that race, which gave the company the world championship for sports cars. I believe the actual car was number 59, and the winner was driven by Salvadori and Shelby.

But even that was not the thing which impressed me the most about the set. At the time Ford was fairly active in the event, mainly through the efforts of a Ford official named Tom Senter. There was a breakfast they hosted in the old and intimate amphitheater area (since gone to build the new, and rather cold, media center), There was also an award for the best Ford powered car, as judged by Tom and later, after he lost a battle with cancer, by his wife and daughters.

At the time Ford owned Aston Martin. You would have expected that to be played up and plastered all over the place in a year when the brand was the featured marque for the race, and where the company had gone to some non-trivial expense to build that wonderful display. But you'd be wrong. There was nothing, and I do mean nothing,mentioning Ford or the link to A-M in that display, or anywhere else at the event. If you did not know that Ford owned Aston Martin, after you looked as closely as you wanted for as long as you wanted, nothing in that display would reveal that fact to you.

It was the classiest thing I had ever seen. It remains that to this day.

The Winning Car
Salvadori and Shelby
History in Motion

Drake

Drake

I've put off writing about him since I began this blog...he is just too daunting a subject, and I've dreaded getting started. I've mentioned him in a number of posts, and I don't think I can put off at least starting to peel into the many layers of which he was made, any longer.

Ernie and Marylou
For Ernie this was "Dressing Up"
Must have been at some 50s party

Ernie Mendicki was born in 1938...his middle name was Drake. Obviously, kids being almost universally cruel at certain ages, they called him “Duck, duck, waddles.” You see, he had a serious heart condition, and was also, even as a child, large. He was unable to run and play the usual macho male child games, thus the cruelty.

So Ernie spent a lot of time alone as a child, and being both bright and gifted with superb eyesight and small motor coordination, started building models. The kits available in that era were small scale and lacked many of the amenities those of us building a decade later had, not the least being more than the most sketchy “instructions.” Yet Ernie produced beautifully executed finished cars, including finely painted interiors and engines. I inherited a few of these, and I take a lot of pleasure in examining them and marveling over how well they were done. I also got a few that, even with the volume he did over the years, he had not managed to assemble. I have not tried to do so...they simply intimidate me and I know I cannot achieve a quality with which I would be content to display on a shelf next to his work.

As a young adult and continuing through his life, Ernie began to modify kits or to build “from scratch,” particularly when he became a model railroader. Again, I have and treasure some of that work of his...a model J Dusenberg modified to be a duplicate of one owned by our mutual friend John Lewis, complete to the correct and perfectly painted and lettered license plates, and replicas of all the stations on the old Yosemite Valley Railroad, which was nearby to where he grew up, containing such details as perfectly level open tread outside stairways executed in 1:160 scale...where one foot equals a tiny .075 inches.

When I say Ernie was “large,” I should qualify that. As an adult he was over six feet tall, and likely weighed 275 or more. His hands were huge...one big paw could cover both of my admittedly small ones. And yet his dexterity and vision were nothing short of startling.

Ernie could read the license plate of a car coming down his street before I could determine the make. And despite his size, he could sidle through a store selling glasses stacked on shelves along very narrow aisles without the slightest disturbance of them. Me? I could create a snowstorm of shattered glass with twice as much space.

I'm dancing around him here, as it is intimidating for me to try to come to grips with the huge influence he was on my life. But it's time to start into that.

After that first burger flipping introduction to Ernie at the FOC picnic I've mentioned in another post...sometime in the mid to late 1970s...I don't recall seeing him much. While Ernie had been granted lifetime membership in the Ferrari club due to his knowledge, contacts, and the cars he had owned, he really was not a joiner, and though a founder of the SF chapter, he did not like the trend away from shade tree mechanics and towards ever fancier and more expensive events, so he stayed away.

I'm not a joiner either, but there was so much new to be learned and, as detailed elsewhere, the people were so warm, friendly, and welcoming that I spent a lot of weekends participating in various club outings. So, if not for Gary Winiger, I might not have connected further with Ernie, and my life with cars would have been much the poorer for it.

I need to devote much time to Gary, but though I really did not know him all that well at the time, he somehow discovered that Ernie and I were both railroad modelers and enthusiasts, and that we modeled in the same scale. Over the years I have more than once mused that Gary would have liked to build models but thought he did not have the requisite skills. He certainly always exhibited an interest. At some point he told me about Ernie's layout, which took up the second bedroom in his home (he was between marriages at that point I think, or maybe had just married Ann, his second wife).

I was working for Burroughs Computers in San Francisco, and it was someone who reported to me who was the catalyst for my own return to railroad modeling. John Hinkle and I were browsing through a bookstore on our lunch hour when I picked up one of those bargain table books every such store seems to have, particularly near Christmas. I mentioned to John that I had built several layouts and that I had equipment “in storage” and he urged me to buy the book. I did and was once again hooked, beginning one of what became several evolving schemes leading ultimately to the three level complex occupying its own special room in my workshop.

Ernie had let his layout languish for some time, but once Gary “put us together” it rekindled his interest and before either of us knew it, he was helping me hone and refine my rather rudimentary building skills. I have neither his amazing eyesight nor his manual dexterity. While I thought his layout somewhat toy-like, his buildings, many built from sheet and stick scratch-building materials rather than kits, were simply amazing. He also applied lettering and other modifications to rolling stock, and even structures built from kits were done in a manner worthy of submission to any of the modeling magazines. When I inherited his equipment, I re-purposed his tracks and trains, and showcased his buildings on my new system...and I still have the intent to submit some of his work to those magazines in his name. See “Planes, Trains, and Automobiles” (March, 2017) for a deeper look into my model railroading world as well as Ernie's work.

I don't really recall, but suspect it was during those long hours together that I began to become almost an apprentice to him, and not just for railroad modeling. We worked on our own projects but chatted about the world in general and cars in particular as he helped me to be more precise in cutting pieces or applying the nasty but vital ACC “super glue” which is the only cement fast-drying enough to connect the tiny N scale pieces before my shakiness made a mess of things.

Ernie, I would quickly learn, was opinionated...about everything, and was a power who forced the world into what he wanted it to be rather than accommodating himself to the way things were. The day he died he still had what was likely the last dial phone in Cupertino. He simply saw no reason to change it, and in fact it was only when the phone company said they were dropping pulse dialing for good that his widow was forced to finally install a pushbutton device.

In some ways he was like a Mennonite...only instead of freezing technology in the 1830s, for Ernie it was the 1950s. For example, and I just thought of this with some startled amusement, prior to the 330GTC which was his last Ferrari, I don't recall any of his other collector cars having disc brakes.

I'm still dancing, aren't I? I guess I'm trying to provide a frame...a context if you will...around Ernie within which I can delve further into the complexities of his uniqueness...and this first level will have to be a mere general overview of a person whose breadth of talents was rare enough in a single person, and whose skills are rapidly disappearing across the entire population, though the needs for those skills are not.

Ernie was an educated man...but mainly self-educated. While he did graduate high school and had some community college course work, he came from a poor family, and the realities of economic harshness and need ended his formal academic training. That barely slowed him down.

He had become a voracious reader in those years of sickness, and he had a lust for learning not dissimilar to my own. It went in whatever direction his curiosity took, from literature to engineering.

It had to have been difficult to be a teenager with a heart condition so serious as to keep him so quiet and isolated from peers...though in many ways perhaps they were indeed not peers except in age. He became the youngest, and one of the first, patients to get an artificial aorta, a pretty high risk operation in 1952 when he was 14. Though the procedure was successful it was a number of years before he could lead a more active life than was possible both pre and post operation.

I think his love of cars might have developed during those years. Among his reading material from an early age were found subscriptions to car magazines...he had every issue of “Road and Track” from the publication's inception, along with “Car and Driver” and a number of other lesser known enthusiasts “bibles” of the day. These created the foundation of what became a formidable research library tucked into the corner of his shop. In fact, some of this material became the start, in copy form, of the research on my own Siata.

But, based both on the cars he owned and my conversations with him, his interest was broad rather than narrow, from sports cars and European racing to American historic and classic makes and racing as diverse as Bonneville speed trials and NASCAR.

So, by the time he was “of legal age,” he was an accomplished modeler, a well-rounded reader, a knowledgeable car enthusiast, and, as refined by his schooling, a competent draftsman.

Yeah but...there is an accomplishment through those years that transcends all those areas even as it draws on the knowledge gained in each. Ernie had also done the first of many of his “frame off” total restorations of a car.

The story Ernie told me was so imaginative and clever I implemented a much less complete version of it with my own sons, and thereby lost much of the value of the exercise by watering it down.

Like virtually all young men of a certain age, Ernie's interest in cars was a yearning for fulfillment in actually drivingone. To add ownership might be tempting fate too much. Ernie's father, of course, anticipated this developing desire well in advance of the point it could be executed...he probably concocted the idea before Ernie really had any though of driving.

In the early 50s cars which were then 20 years old or more were much less objects of desire than today and more just old junk. For autos built in large numbers, parts could be had by “pulling your own” at any junk yard, and prices were low. So, for a car like a Model A Ford, the price of a complete vehicle, maybe even in running condition, was something like $50.

Actually, that was the exact price of the one acquired by Mendicki senior for the use of Mendicki junior. But the deal Dad cut was brilliant! He agreed to pay only half the price, and then required that Ernie completely disassemble the car and totally restore it. When it was done, Dad would agree to grant approval for the lad to get his driver's license.

By the time he was done Ernie could do everything from making his own upholstery to rebuilding a differential. It was the first of the 103 mostly rare ad exotic cars we would own over his lifetime (His widow Marylou and I counted them so that is not a made-up number). And the annoying thing was...he was good at all of it.

At the time I met him I can recall a number of the cars but am not sure I remember all of them. I know he had the 1952 Mille Miglia winning Ferrari 250 Sport, the first three liter V12 Ferrari. He had the 250 LWB Tour de France, though how many louvers there were in the sail panel, the way these things are distinguished, I couldn't say. I think that his big Edwardian at the time was the REO, I believe the EMF came a bit later. There was the Siata of course, the car which pretty much convinced me to buy the one Dick Peterson had and which Ernie had brought to California for Mike Cotsworth. I'm sure there will be a lot more about that before this entry ends. I can't imagine him not having the Auburn roadster, as that was a car he had lovingly restored early in his youth. Finally, there was the Model T Speedster he shared with Charlie Forge, and the Doc Young Crosley racer he inherited when Young died. Some of these were partnerships with others but I didn't learn that until much later.

Oh...and there was the burgundy colored AC Bristol. Though the only one of his cars I actually drove was the Siata, and there was to be another AC of Ernie's far in my own future with him, though that one was silver...but with a similar burgundy colored nose and racing stripe.

Ernie mentored me both in modeling and in cars. I think his own lack of formal education caused him to gravitate towards loving a role as a teacher. While opinionated as hell it was easy to forgive that as he was also so knowledgable and skilled. He was also an annoying micro-manager.

I don't do well with that in the best of times, and it came to a real head while I was working on cars with him after I got canned at Wells Fargo. That in itself is a story which actually may relate more to cars than it might at first appear. But it did not relate to Ernie so will have to wait for another time.

We were rebuilding Gary Winiger's Lotus 22...a cigar shaped open-wheeled Formula Junior. Ernie and I shared much of the work, and split the proceeds from a friend who was happy to pay a comparatively ridiculously low hourly rate for his talent and my more modest contributions.

Ernie was a frugal man...he never made more than about $25,000 in any single year from his “day job” as a business forms salesman, and could stretch a dollar further than anyone I knew. He would solicit end cuts off full salamis and other meats from Safeway, for example, and being a talented cook could produce some really tasty and amazing dishes from these leavings. But sometimes it just got ludicrous. He actually chargedme a couple of bucks an hour for the use of his shop and tools while we worked. I didn't really care that much, but it just had me shaking my head at him. 

Anyway, Ernie hated electrical work. While I'm no EE and alternating current still baffles me (really, how can electrons go bothways to produce energy?), after wiring both my Siata and the Crosley station wagon for Jason a Formula Junior was not capable of intimidating me. So Ernie asked me to wire the car...and then kept looking over my shoulder to tell me how to do it. 

I took it for a bit, but then finally walked over to the bench and slammed the wire cutters down and called him over. I told him “If you tell me something to do and I don't know how, I'll ask you. Otherwise stay the hell out of my way and leave me alone!”

To my surprise he immediately apologized and did just that...left me alone to complete the work. But that was Ernie. You could be out with him for dinner, have him totally dominate the conversation to the point you were nothing more than an audience, then call you as soon as you got home to tell you how much he enjoyed your company! But there was always something to learn from him.

One thing I did, which became a habit I have kept to this day, was how to lay out a toolbox so neatly I can tell in an instant if something is misplaced. In fact, it was Ernie who had the rule which went:

“If it takes more than 30 seconds or so to find the tool you need while under the hood or under the car, get out...clean everything up and put it back where it belongs until you find the missing item.”

Well, actually there was more to hisritual. His toolbox was much more packed than mine, and Ernie would not let me put tools away. Instead he had me put them on the workbench so that he could clean them and put them back to be sure they went in the way he wanted.

I only wish I had imposed the same rule on Adin. Sometimes the lad drives me crazy.

Once Gary Winiger told each of us that the other was an N scale modeler, Ernie was challenged, after a long hiatus, to return to the railroad room which occupied his guest bedroom. I was astounded by the quality of his work on structures, whether scratch built from balsa and castings or from kits, as well as his custom paint and lettering jobs on locomotives and cabooses. To be looking at perfectly straight open treads on the stairs of the models of the stations on the old Yosemite Valley line he did, which are now the stations on my layout, still amazes me. I just don't understand how someone with hands that big could also be steady enough to glue these in place with such accuracy.

Ernie's house was, and remains, on a street which is still partly industrial. A block away is a row of two story condominiums put up some years after I met him. What graced the area before that was a small, privately held cannery, a relic, no doubt, from the days when what is now Silicon Valley was still an agricultural area of fruit trees. Before they tore the cannery down Ernie scratch-built a model of it. While he omitted some of its size, a modeling technique called “selective compression,” it is a pretty astounding rendition, and occupies a prominent place on my railroad.

Ernie was not only my entree into vintage racing, he was also the force behind me doing so in a Siata 300BC.

After a couple of years in the Ferrari Club and a number of track events at Sears Point and Laguna Seca in my 250 PF Coupe 2+2 (and yes, that is its official moniker), I had noted that my friends in the club were getting involved in the relatively new pastime of renting time on race tracks and driving old race cars there. The emphasis then was on restoring and using these historic relics as they were meant to be experienced...on track. The thought of really racing to win in them was pretty far from any of our thoughts.

I had looked at a couple of cars...a lengthened Elva Formula Junior that looked like a narrow refrigerator with wheels, some sort of Climax powered special needing a lot of work I feared might be beyond me, and, finally, a lovely silver Zagato-bodied Alfa 1900 with a “double bubble” roof line being sold by fellow Tifoso Jim Cesare, which Ernie talked me out of as too powerful and expensive to fix.

And then he mentioned the Siata. He already owned ST428, a Crosley powered roadster supposedly once raced by Carroll Shelby, but with no documentation of that nor any other period history. But Ernie claimed that, small as the car was, it had all the sights, sounds, and feel of the much more financially out-of-reach Ferrari Barchetta. In fact, Ernie told me, the model was nicknamed “The Baby Barchetta.”

And Ernie knew where one was which was for sale.

Actually, he knew where two were, but kept that from me...a tidbit which was to forever alienate me from a pretty well known and respected but curmudgeonly Jim Proffit. Jim had a car known as “Poor Man's Ferrari,” a Fiat powered car, literally sitting on a shelf in his shop in Long Beach, and apparently there was some discussion between he and Ernie about the car and me, but I was blissfully unaware of this when I later visited Jim and tried to buy a part for my car from him.

His negative reaction far exceeded the issue of the part, and when I questioned Ernie as to why this was so he alluded to Jim being unhappy that I did not buy that car. Hard to evaluate either the story or the car as, except for a magazine article I saw much later, I had no idea about it or where it was.

Anyway, Ernie badly wanted me to drive his car in a brief sprint down his street..to tempt me into buying ST402, a car he had bought for Mike Cotsworth (odd how the same names keep circling through all my blog entries). When Mike lost interest and wanted a more powerful racer, the car went to Dick Peterson, and hence to me, a story related in more detail in “everybody Needs a Mentor in Something” (January 2017).

The battery was flat, and Ernie was no athlete, yet with me behind the wheel he pushed and shoved while I poppped the clutch with the car in first until it finally fired...and jumped off, snapping my neck back with surprising speed and force.

I was hooked, and ST402 soon became mine, with all that came to imply in that January blog entry. But this is a story about Ernie and not about that car in particular.

Though there is another yarn about it which relates to Ernie's amazing talents.

In 1987 I had a major unnerving wreck with the Siata. That incident, and the long road back for both me and the car, is detailed in the “This is Not Going to End Well” series of blog entries from February 2017. This includes the interior door panels Kent White lost. By doing so I was equally lost, but Ernie was not.

He told me to buy a few yards of tan colored vinyl material, and told me where to get it. He also had me pick up some good quality dimensioned wood, and proceeded to simply “scratch-build” two new door panels. With a bit of cord he made the surrounding piping. He sawed the wood into the rough shape needed to match the curve of the door, and also sized the wood required to create the “pockets” for each door. Finally, he literally carved and filed the wood until it fit perfectly, still allowing the additional space required when the material was glued onto the wood frame.

When it did not exactly fit, he simply temporarily peeled back the material until he could get to the wood beneath, and filed and whittled, testing and whittling, using an Xacto knife, until the panel fit perfectly.

I was stunned. But he merely said it was just like working on the model railroad, except in 1:1 scale rather than 1:160.