The Long and Winding Road IV

The Long and Winding Road IV

It had been many years since I drove more than 150 miles or so in a single day; longer than that alone, and I had never driven more than 200+ miles in the truck with a fully loaded camper and pulling a closed trailer. The rig totaled over 6 tons, and my Dodge pre-dated the company's update to the product to the hemi-engine and four wheel disc brakes. It is underpowered and underbraked, and barely able to handle the load. 

Once out of California trucks are no longer limited to a 55mph speed, and on Interstate 80 both cars and big rigs were ripping along at 75...a speed virtually impossible for me to reach or maintain, particularly uphill. The tension was significant; the distances vast. My Day 1 journal entry was titled “Inches on the Map- hours on the road". After 325-350 I was exhausted, and the maniac inside my head with the hammer was having a ball.

But despite the headaches I was enchanted by the land. Here's a few clips from my writings:

In western Wyoming I wrote:

“Runnin on Empty...what a choice of music- Jackson Browne's poetic song of life on the road; here the perfect accompaniment to the unearthly landscapes of western Wyoming.

Not a tree in sight, and strange flat plateaus from which the far from flat plain seems to hve sunk away from.”

Not the greatest English, but a pretty effective picture.

In Nebraska I commented:

“And everywhere this huge vault of sky- a constant reminder that we really are beings of the stars.”

And in Iowa an attempt at haiku:

“Impossibly green field

White house

Sky full of

Dirty cotton ball clouds”

We visited an odd little museum in Minden, Nebraska which included some cars, including a Crosley sedan. But the real prize was a steam driven merry-go-round run by a soft spoken young guy adorned in a cowboy hat. ( http://pioneervillage.org/I. had commented:

“We al road it, me on a zebra, and it was a wonderful step into this very different world than the one we left so far back down the road.”

The Auburn, Cord, Duesenberg Museum in Indiana was so spectacular we spent the better part of two full days there: http://www.automobilemuseum.org/#home.html.

And about which I said it was:

“...an Art Deco vision of perfect proportion and balance from the magnificence of cars that are the height of American craft, ingenuity, and accomplishment to the glass of the light fixtures and the tapestry-like draperies and accents on the walls.”

Remember this guy?
The car Whittell gave John
and the model Ernie built is in my shop
More information can be found at: http://duesey186.com/Datasheets/Model_J_Index/data2354.htm
Though I suspect the owner listed was not who John sold it to
See the notes below this picture, from the book "The Survivor Series"
The photo was taken, along with others, after John Mozart bought
As far as I know he still ownes the car

An Amish village we visited, on the other hand, just confused me. Although impossible to achieve, I could somewhat understand an attempt to stave off the “evils of modern society.” But to simply draw the line sometime in the 1830s was baffling. I do “get” that this was a cutoff just at the invention of the full, instant communication between people, via the telegraph. Still, it seemed arbitrary and just strange, as Illustrated by horse-drawn carriages with electric tail lights.

On the 1^st of September we finally arrived at Lime Rock, Connecticut. It was already 16 days since I had left home. But...

“It is achingly green

and starkly manicured

as if not a blade of grass

dare be out of place

But it is charming

and steeped in 25 years or more

of history

at a depth

(at least for White America)

that exists nowhere else in the land.”

The Main straight at Lime Rock
Tower and building desgined by Sam Posey
A study in green beauty

The Long and Winding Road III

The Long and Winding Road III

Bonneville is the spookiest car venue in the world. Fortunately in our days there in August of 2004 it was cool and moist, though that made tuning for a run a nightmare. God had to have been laughing as you installed jets for 4800 feet and suddenly the sun came roaring out from behind a cloud, cooked your mind, and shot the effective density of the air up to about 8000 or so...in the middle of your run.

Funny, eh? Well, at least it was driving anyone with a carb intake system as crazy as it was us. But the spookiness is multi-dimensional. You are, after all, standing on a dried up lake bed that is over 20 miles long, on a crust of salt left over from the eons in which it was part of an inland sea. It is, or appears, totally flat, and I do mean totally. The nearest uprisings, which are deceptive looking mountains, appear both squashed down somehow and less lofty than they really are...and also seem to be close enough to touch.

It's all that sky...really unnerving. Makes everything seem tiny compared to that immense sweep of blue. The rain had left a small lake of its own near the start of both the short and long course (that one spans seven rather than three miles, and is for vehicles which exceed 175mph)...so the crew merely moved the starting lines...a mile! And yet the end of the courses were still nowhere near the boundaries of the lake.

As cool as the event is, the place truly gives me the willies.

But that might have been, in part, because our arrival at Bonneville was the culmination of a whirlwind of activities and feelings...which really started here: http://thunderbirdtahoe.org/. Cute, eh? And it, once again, involved John Lewis.

You do remember John, right? Sometimes, all these years later, the stories I weave about him seem so improbable I wonder if I have made up not only the stories, but John himself.

Anyway, I know I introduced you to John in more than one blog entry, including a discussion about his relationship as a young man to George Whittell, and I'm positive that somewhere or another I talked about the Whittell “cottage” on Lake Tahoe and the time John and I, along with John Boyle, went there so John could provide some amusing anecdotes for the docents to use when leading tours through this “Cabin in the Sky.” Well...that was not the only time John and I were together at the Thunderbird. He had somehow managed to convince the foundation responsible for the site to open it up to him and his guests for a birthday party celebration. While now you can rent the place for such affairs, at about ten grand a night, John was granted access for this party, with a couple of hundred guests, in recognition of his relationship to Whittell. Sherri came along with Adin, and of course Don and Alice were there as well. In addition to all the other festivities, on that earlier jaunt Boyle, Lewis, and I meandered down to the Carson City airport to speak with the world's leading experts on Grumman seaplanes to see if we could track down the Albatross Whittell had owned, and supposedly “crashed” on the lake.

Excuse me? Why the hell would those folks, along with their restoration facilities, be located in the desert? Yeah, I get it that nothing rusts in such a dry climate, but it is still...unsettling to drive by a line of seaplanes, including Pappy Chalk's fleet which he used to fly charters off the McArthur Causeway in Miami to the Bahamas during my youth. Really...strange.

As a kid I would watch these lumbar into the water off the causeway
Near the equally weird Goodyear blimp base
But they were a lot more elegant once airborne

We did not learn much about the plane, but John contracted with one of the pilots to bring a Albatross to the lake so Lewis could take clients for seaplane rides. When Denny brought this dinosaur down it literally stopped traffic completely around, and on the lake. No one could believe their eyes. It was as if the world's largest California Condor had just swooped in over the mountains. Like a hallucination or an LSD flashback.

One of John's clients refused to get on the thing...probably a smarter man than me...but when John then asked Sherri and I, in passing, if we wanted to go, we were in the Zodiac and scrambling onto the plane before he finished the question.

“You know,” I said to her as we started to taxi, “trying to get a 60 year old seaplane off of and then back onto this lake with all this wild and rugged terrain around is not exactly the smartest or most responsible thing we've ever done.” Oh well, the kids are grown and on their own now I suppose.

After the party Sherri and I parted for what was to be the longest period we have ever been apart. In my journal I wrote:

“I just flashed on the sight of that mind chilling vertical land of the Desolation Wilderness- turned to wallpaper out the side hatch of a Grumman Albatross- with a freezing wind blown straight into my face at more than hurricane force by the prop wash- Jesus, it's been a hell of a 24 hours- and Lord am I glad I got to share at least a part of it with those I love so much- Especially Miss Bright Eyes.

And that was before I saw that salt mirage!

The Long and Winding Road II

The Long and Winding Road II

It started with a hailstorm, though over 1000 miles away. It was in the Spring of 2004 and I had just seen a piece in the evening news about baseball-sized ice falling from the sky someplace in Texas.

“Holy Crap!” I had an instant nightmare about what that would do to my hand built aluminum car body on the open trailer I used. I jumped on the phone to Don to tell him we needed to buy closed trailers.

“But Marty,” he said, “the hail will beat up the closed trailer as much as the open one.”

“Don, I don't give a damn about the $4000 trailer, but I do care about the all aluminum car inside it!”

So...about $5000 later....

There went the entire budget for the trip.

In February of 2000 we had bought a fairly large Lance camper for the truck. The truck itself was purchased two years before, but I had opted for the long bed, high capacity variant...laughingly called a “3/4 ton” though its actual load rating was more like a ton and three quarters. The camper had a bed area which sat up over the cab of the truck and living space which extended two feet beyond the rear bumper of the truck, with loads of storage space, a full bathroom, furnace, air conditioner, and a more than adequate refrigerator and freezer. We had purchased it after tiring of the outrageous motel rate increases during the Monterey Historic races and car week at Laguna Seca. When a motel asking $45 a night for the Wednesday before the rent went to $150 a night with a three night minimum for the weekend we'd had enough.

So with the new trailer as the final addition I was “good to go.” I had managed to find three races on or near the Eastern seaboard on consecutive weekends in early September. The weather would be ideal...not yet the cold and forbidding snowbound winter and yet past the sticky humidity of Estern summers. Perfect. And if we left early enough we could even take in Speed Week at Bonnevile, something Don wanted to do as he was the engine builder for a land speed record car.

Wait...a Crosely powered record car? It is to laugh, no?

No. Gerald Davenport was, of course, wacko....but the car and attempt was quite real. It came about this way:

I first met Gerald through the West Coast Crosley Club chapter started by Dave Brodsky. Gerald was from Kentucky, and had tragically lost his son some time before. The young man apparently really loved Crosleys, so in tribute to him Gerald built up what he claimed was the largest Crosley dealership in the world...which might not have been that much as a stretch cause I think it is also the only Crosley dealership in the world.

Step right up, folks
Truly one of a kind
Paducah, KY

Gerald was at this particular meet to pick up a car he had bought, a pretty little thing called the “Tholens Special,” built by Dale Tholens in the 1950s and quite well known among “small car afficianados.”

 The car had been owned and raced by another friend of mine, Terry Matheny, though I don't remember whether Gerald got it from Terry or it has passed to someone else by this point.

Beautiful workmanship
A tiny jewel I lusted after

Anyway...Gerald's route back home, on I80, took him past Bonneville during Speed Week, run by the Southern California Timing Association...and one of the world's truly best car events. Like Monterey the pits are open to wander around and talk with owners and, despite the usual race event tensions, everyone is open and easy to talk with. The participants range from scruffy Home-builders to full pro teams from the likes of Honda and Nissan.

Great People
Spooky Place
Great Event

The “short course” is three miles marked by a black line on the salt...one mile to get up to speed, one for timing, and one to slow down. Gerald decided to stop and watch, and the SCTA guys good naturally enticed him to unload the car and run the course...whereupon he turned 86mph with no prep work at all.

Ah...another fish on the hook. Gerald returned home and promptly built up a real racer to go after the 750J/Pro class...which he won in 2002 at just under 100mph with this pretty beast (the 1010 number refers to some biblical phrase or another, with which I am totally out of my depth about).

It started as a stock 47 sedan
On the salt at Bonneville

In 2003 some smart asses with what started life as a Honda 600 took the trophy from Gerald. The rules are such that this bomb ran in the same class even though it had a totally flat bottom and fuel injection. The former results in less undercarriage turbulence while FI automatically, unlike carbs, adjusts for changes in altitude and air density. Hmm...unfair advantage.

I should note, at this point, that I had decided to keep a journal of the trip, so I have very detailed documented memories...and this part of the trip was, even absent the migraines, frustrating. Gerald refused to take advice from Don and had his own “expert” with him...who I think was way out of his pay grade. Between the use of the original intake manifold of the Tholens...pretty but too restrictive of airflow, and advice from the expert to continue to richen a motor which was already hoking on fuel as the “density altitude” readings the Honda guys readily shared with us went from 4800 to over 8000 feet almost instantly...things were going brown and ugly.

And of course Don had forgotten to bring jets for the Weber carbs. Fortunately Speed Week guys are real princes, and a group running an Alfa roadster in two different classes, one with carbs and one with FI, willingly shared their stash with us. But we never did manage to get the car above 86.

Still, it was a fun event and I would urge any car buff to put it in their “bucket list.” But..gotta fly. We had a schedule to make and a race to do in Connecticut. The main problem was going to be how to keep from going nuts, alone all that time with no one to talk to but the stupid little voice inside my head.

The Long and Winding Road

The Long and Winding Road, I

By far most of my racing with the Siata was done on the tracks of California...the vast majority at either Laguna Seca or Sears Point. I'm not complaining...these are stellar places and Laguna in particular has worldwide fame and mystique. Even though Sears was a shorter drive from our home in San Carlos Laguna always said “home” to me. I think it was the more rural setting, the golden hills filled with hawks and eagles, the fog across the paddock at night, and the stillness when the track was not in use. I as much enjoyed camping there for the Skip Barber racing school or the week between the Monterey “Pre-historics” and the main event the following weekend as the races themselves.

The only other purpose-built track I had driven in California was the old Riverside Raceway, but that was in the Ferrari in the late 1970s.

Besides those tracks I also ran events at temporary road courses set up for special events at Buchanan Field, a former military training airport which then became a general aviation strip for the city of Concord and was the scene of the first post-WWII sports car race in the West in 1947, as well as on the runways and taxiways of the US Navy's North Island Naval Aviation base on Coronado Island.

Out of state excursions were rare, and only as far as Nevada. The first of these was multiple runs on closed public roads with the Ferrari Club...the Virginia City Hillclimb. I also did a couple of events on a temporary track created in the parking lot of the Reno Hilton; once with the Siata and once with the Quantum Formula Junior. Neither of these were happy events as I blew a Bob Graham motor in the Siata (this is the one in which he “saved me money” by using Crosley rods), and blew out the center section of the clutch disk in the Quantum.

The only other Nevada events I ran were on a purpose-built course at Fernley, some distance outside of Reno. A compensation was a street recreation where at least there was the opportunity to drive on that original street course. Unfortunately, the other tracks where the car ran are no longer there-Bridgehampton having succumbed to the bulldozer relatively recently, while Allentown disappeared decades ago.

This is the only tconfiguration of the track I ran
Thy later added other sections
But on this one the only fun for a little car
Is how fast you can get through the esses at the end of the front straight...
At least until some idiot ran into me at the 10/11 chicane

But I always had dreams of going further afield. Of course I thought about the Mille Miglia in Italy, and had actually been invited to do a series in New Zealand, but both of these realistically were financially far beyond my capacity. A more realistic, though still ambitious goal, was to try and run tracks where the car had appeared during its “real” racing career. Sebring would have been the first among these, as that event in 1953 was the high water mark of the car's success, with a startlingly good finish...but Watkins Glen and Thompson would also have made the list, as these are still around, though it would not be possible to actually race on the course the Siata did at the Glen in 52.

I don't recall what provoked me trying to turn that dream into reality, but late in 2003 I began to do so, concurrent with the publication of the race calendar for 2004 in enthusiast magazines. I was hoping to do the Glen and Sebring and perhaps one other event, but it was quickly apparent that this was impossible in a single trip. The Sebring 12 hour is always in March, while the Glen event mirrors the dates of the original street races, sometime in early September. As I viewed the calendar, there seemed to be better opportunities for other events in the Fall, so started to put something together around the Watkins Glen SVRA weekend festival, which included races at the track outside the town as well as a street concours and an escorted “recreation” on the 1952 street course.

The Original 1952 Street Course

The other events bracketing that weekend was a vintage race weekend at Lime Rock organized by HMSA, which was one of my “home” groups and thus very comfortable for me, and one at Mosport in Canada put on by CASC, the Canadian Association of Sports Cars, an FIA affiliate. While the configuration of Mosport did not look all that suitable for a small, low powered car like the Siata, the fact that it was international and sanctioned by the FIA made that event attractive.

The thought of a 7000 mile roundtrip by myself, however, was decidedly less so. Perhaps, I thought, I could talk my racing buddy and engine builder Don Baldocchi bring his motorhome and Nardi/Crosley along. 

Don and his wife accepted...Sherri bowed out. Don requires a bit of patience. He had some serious illnesses and difficulties as a child which left him with a deep stutter, deficient hearing, and some problems in cognition and decision making. These did not keep him from becoming an accompished racer and machinist...but it did mean his engines were always a bit of a mistery.

Don on the Corkscrew
Kip Fjeld's Miller bhind
Me Bringing up the Rear
But in front of a Porsche...for the moment

Don was neither the neatest mechanic, not the sloppiest, I ever knew. Ernie would definitely be the former (Bill Morton thought Ernie must never have used his shop because it was so clean you could eat off the floor); while Bob Graham was the latter...Don was somewhere between, though working with him could be frustrating as we both wasted a lot of time looking for tools he had put down somewhere and then forgotten.

He also never kept notes about what he did, hence the mystery of his motors. When something went wrong he could not remember what specific changes he had made to that particular version which might explain the problem, nor did he discipline himself enough to make a single change and then test the impact before doing anything else, so when things went well...or badly...it was unclear what change or combination was responsible.

Being with Don and Alice together also was somewhat like handling a couple of young children...they always deferred to your own decisions and rarely offered any of their own. They were great people, but Sherri was not willing to take on the full management logistics of things like meals for the trip, and I rather naively stepped in for that as well as all the rest of the planning including routes, stopping places, and timing.

It gave me the longest stretch of continuous migraines I ever had...eight straight days and nearly 3000 miles trying to ignore the hammering in my skull while ferrying over six tons of tuck, camper, and trailer along with keeping Don's huge Class A motorhome and trailer with me. What was I thinking?

Evil Elf

Evil Elf

I guess you always meet some of the most memorable characters in your college days. But Dick Saltzman was a cut above even by those standards.

Where is he going with that?
Note Evil look on his face

My family was still living in South Florida when my Filipino roommate Donnie had to drop out of school. Donnie's love Annette was a fiery Roman nosed little Italian hand grenade with a sweet disposition and the temper of a Tasmanian devil. I can only imagine that if she was as hot in bed as she was when angry the fireworks must have been amazing. While Donnie was pretty laid back and he and Annette probably complimented each other well, apparently college did not provide enough education to keep her fertility in check...or maybe it was that they both had been raised as Catholics. At any rate she became...with child...and there was no question that Donnie was not an honorable man and did love her...so he dropped out to marry her and, unfortunately, I quickly lost track of both them.

But Donnie's strong sense of honor also resulted in his commitment to get a new roommate for me. My memory on the timing is a bit fuzzy, but at first I think it might have been Gene Blackwood, who also was from the same area around Cape Canaveral as Donnie, but then through an ad a graduate student from New York appeared...or were Dick and Gene there at the same time? God...you would think I'd recall all of this, right? It was, in the words of the protagonist in one of Tom Robbins novels...altogether too vivid, but alas the fog of time has dulled things a bit in my synapses.

At any rate, I showed up after a summer break to find a 64 Corvette convertible, a ratty single axle trailer, and what I viewed as a weird and uninteresting two wheeled conveyance in the yard,

Yeah, You've seen this before
But this time look at the Vette...
and that ugly trailer
But where's the bike?

and a 27 year old grad school student ensconced in the front bedroom. Somehow I think this was the Fall of 1967, but at any rate just before I met Marcia. Again, things are a bit fuzzy (no, not because of illicit substances...yet), and I do recall also another grad student who at some point occupied the back bedroom with the queen sized bed (and was there an en suite bath?)...who was there only during the week. This became important later.

So I guess maybe Dick and I were supposed to share that front bedroom with its twin beds. I gotta say I doubt I was happy about this as this guy looked like some perverted derelict..the cover of the Jethro Tull album “Aqualung” comes to mind. Actually...he was more of a degenerate than that.

Dick was actually employed as an engineer, though his job sounded totally deadening to me...designing landing gear for Grumman Aircraft in Bethpage, Long Island, New York...oddly and coincidentally a town very near to where Sherri grew up in Elmont. It sounded utterly dull.

Grumman had sent Dick to Gainesville to get his Masters in Engineering, though what possessed them to choose UF is still, 50 years later, beyond my comprehension. While the Engineering school at the University is better than decent, it's not like there are not equal schools in New York...ones where the company might not have to pay a living allowance, and where they certainly would not be absorbing out-of-state tuition fees.

On the other hand these were the heady days of the Space Program as well as Vietnam, and Grumman was heavily involved in both. Among other things they were the designers and builders of the Lunar Module...and though I never asked him exactly what landing gear he worked on, for all I know it might have been for this spindly, wonderful craft.

Dick and I hit it off quickly and rather well. He had a sharp wit...but I could, in those days, stay right with him...and our discussions were technical and wide ranging. He paid me a real compliment in the middle of a chat about nuclear physics, of all things. He broke off in the middle of the chat and allowed as how he was amazed that, lacking a deep technical background, I was able to quickly grasp very technical subjects, no matter how complex. I have thought about that comment many times over the decades, and realize how deeply that skill contributed to my business success. I think my first real boss, Frank Nichols at the First National Bank of Miami, was Dick's successor in grasping this, which led to his interest in giving me a start in the computer industry.

Dick acquired a kitten...a purebred Siamese he tongue-in-cheek named Deja Vu...though I never did figure out the joke. Maybe just that it was French? Or was it another of his notorious double entendres?

The most glaring example of the latter was aimed at a sweet young lady who was visiting the girls who lived in the next door unit of our fourplex. Though I never did meet the occupants of the other two units...maybe the far side of the building was just too distant to be of interest?...the girls next door were really cute. I guess I was too much of a self-conscious nerd to ever have the idea of asking one of them out cross my stupid little brain.

But I do recall that one owned the first BMW car I'd ever seen...a 1600 which was pretty rare in America.

Wikipedia Photo of 1600
Note what looks like 60s Stingray behind it

The three girls and a friend were visiting with us...I seem to recall alcohol being involved, when their guest asked Dick for a ride home. As I recall, none of these young things were over the age of 20...which made Richard qualify as a “dirty old man” by comparison.

What the young thing said was “Would you drive me home?” I have no idea if she had the hots for the elf, though I somehow can't picture that, or if she was just too inebriated to give things much thought.

“Sure,” Dick replied, looking at me with his cockeyed grin, “Bend over.”

He wasn't the neatest of roommates, and was too cheap to buy kitty litter for Deja Vu. Instead he tore up strips of newspaper to line the litter box which, as you can imagine, absorbed little of the odor and was totally useless unless changed daily. And, of course, the box lived in the bedroom we shared. It came to a head one day when I threatened to dump the box on his bed if he didn't clean it. Obviously I wasn't thinking straight as my bed was less than three feet away in the same room.

Once Marcia and I started dating, after sensitively easing this young freshman virgin into a very willing start at exploring a deeper physicality (I was, after all, a big man on campus senior by then), we were like two rabbits in heat...which once included stupidly and insensitively romping in the back bedroom on the other grad student's bed while he was away for the weekend. Of course he found out and penalized me, appropriately so, by refusing to pay his share of the rent that month.

I guess I was “blinded by the light.”

But Dick found our intensity amusing. He once insisted that, one day, rather than having sex, I would instead express a preference for being alone and doing something like taking a pistol and going with a friend down to the dump to slug rats.

Yeah, right? Certainly not at 27. “What is WRONG with you?” I asked. Oh...did I mention he had been married and was divorced? No, huh?

I had my second, civilized Austin Healey Sprite by the time I met Dick. In fact you have already seen this picture of my toy and his beast alongside the apartment. (pic) I didn't really know a lot about Corvettes, but did think they were pretty sexy looking. When Dick said I would likely drive it more than him as he preferred “the bike” I figured he was nuts, but was not about to complain. He was not exactly “into” the sports car idea.

“What makes it a 'sports car,'” he asked. “You can hardly fit a set of golf clubs in it.” God, what a tool. He was 25 years ahead of the first SUV, which is what he really would have wanted.

So here's this lovely shape, with 300hp, that he has no clue how to use. Lemmee at it. His Vette was bought with fuel economy in mind, so it had a 3.08 rear end ratio, the highest available that year, and best I recall it was an automatic. Thus the slowest accelerating 64 Vette....

The thing was a frickin' rocket ship compared to my Sprite, which you timed from 0-60 with a calendar.

Dick “conned” me into a deal where he would give me the car for a day if I would wash it for him. This became virtually an every weekend ritual. Wash Friday morning/play for hours after.

In fact, my first date with Marcia involved the Vette.

It came about like this.

I had known a really pretty black haired angel in high school named Betty Goldstein. She and her older brother Jack were by far the top of the status and beauty heap of north Dade County in 1963. So when I learned Betty was in school in Gainesville I somehow overcame my nerdy self-consciousness and decided to ask her out.

But when I reached Jennings Hall, the girl's dorm where I learned she lived, something got screwed up, and the voice which answered the pay phone on the floor quickly and obviously did not belong to Betty. Instead I was talking to Bettte Goldenstein, who also knew something was wrong as she always went by her middle name, Marcia, and not Bette.

“What the hell,” I thought, and asked her to lunch. Dick advised me to “go Dutch” if she turned out to be a dog, or pay for her lunch if she was OK. He also loaned me the Vette for the date. What a guy.

I was really impressed with myself, and decided to equally impress everyone else by doing a handbrake turn to park the car in front of the dorm. This is an old trick where you grab the handle 9which only a few cars have anymore, by the way) as you floor the throttle and spin the wheel, enabling the car to do a 180 degree turn in about its own length.

The Dorm mother was less impressed with this than either me or Marcia, who turned out to be tall, not anorexic by any means, and with legs that seemed to be perhaps nine feet long. As she slid those miin-skirted gambe into the seat of the Vette I had already decided that lunch at Jerry's (a sort of local version of Frisch's Big Boy) was on me.

One Saturday night I borrowed the Vette to take it out on the newly completed I75 and “see what it would do.” What it did was about buck 30...but even at my rudimentary level of driving knowledge I noted that that pretty front end wanted to make it an airplane at that speed. I could virtually spin the steering wheel from lock to lock and the car would continue in a straight line. As I also realized that even its metallic brakes (drums) would not slow the car down substantially without a parachute and an anchor I lost my nerve and backed off.

When I relayed this to Dick he got a funny look on his face.

“You do realize it has bald tires,” he asked rhetorically.

Oh. Therein began my discipline about walking around an unfamiliar car before driving it.

Then there was that two wheeled toy...which turned out to be a Suzuki X6 “Hustler” motorcyle. 250Cc, two stroke with a built in oil pump (no manual mixing of gas and oil), drum brakes (twin leading shoe front), electric start, and a six speed transmission...I believe the first on any street bike.

“So what,” I thought, unimpressed. I went out a couple of times as a passenger with Dick. I had not been on two wheels since high school, and it took some time before I stopped really screwing things up by leaning opposite to Dick in turns. While it was...ok...any 250 with two people up is not exactly Corvette quick.

Then one day Dick renegotiated our deal. There's that cockeyed grin again.

“Clean the Corvette,” he offered, “and you can take the bike out for a ride by yourself.”

I was not exactly thrilled, but decided to humor him. I should note that, in those simpler days, Florida did not have a separate cycle license, and you needed nothing but bravado and cajones to ride. So I tooled the thing sedately out past the edge of town, onto an empty county road in the middle of empty Alachua County. Whereupon I thought I'd see what the fuss was about.

I stopped the bike, put it in first, cranked the throttle, and popped the clutch.

Holyyyyyy Shiiiiiit! The beast shot out from under me, leaving my ass hanging off the rear end of the seat. I hit red line in the first three gears so fast that I was shifting as fast as I could move my hands and feet. 60 came quicker than the Corvette, and the “toy” did not show any signs of anemia until I was doing 100...whereupon I thought about its flexible flyer frame and those drum brakes.

Took awhile to get things moderated. Took a lot longer after stopping to get my right leg from shaking so hard I was afraid I was going to drop it.

After returning home I looked up the specs on it: 0-30 in 1.3 seconds, 0-60 in 6 flat, and a top just over that 100 I had hit...out of a two stroke with all of five or so moving parts!

If I were single and still willing to ride, and wanted to have only one bike, one of these would still be in my garage. I have never ridden or driven anything which equalled that rush for the first few seconds. 

Not the fastest
Not the quikest by today's standards
But an amazing machine

Maybe that evil elf Saltzman wasn't crazy after all. 

Planes, Trains, and Automobiles

Planes, Trains, and Automobiles

I've known for ages there was something missing from this film title (I never saw the movie)...boats! Over the decades of my fascination with machinery I had observed that many of the “car people” (makes a weird mental picture of some sort of Transformer beastie, doesn't it?) are often also interested in at least one other of these...sometimes more than one. The only link is that they are all means of transportation... but so is a horse, and the only car guy I knew who was also into, as Ernie used to say, a means of transportation you had to put gas into even if it wasn't going anywhere, was Mike Cotsworth. But then Mike had two daughters, and we all know what that means in regards to horses.

I have always been interested in all four (not that I don't like horses..but they are BIG animals that intimidate me...and they know that), and though my direct history and contact with cars is long, my involvement with trains is even longer. In fairness, I have never driven nor wrenched on a real train, though I have ridden on many, including a number of steam powered rides...Railtown 1890 while it was still the Sierra Railroad, Roaring Camp and Big Trees, The California Western “skunk” line, The Sacramento Northern, etc. The actual CW “skunk” was a gasoline powered railcar, so named because you could smell it coming long before you could see it...but we rode behind a restored steamer...a 2-8-0 or 2-8-2 best I recall. If you don't know what those numbers mean, rather than taking up space here I'll just suggest looking them up on Wikipedia.

CWRR 2-8-2
This type was first built for Japan
and thus is nicknamed a "Mikado"

What I have done is modeling in miniature trains and train lines...and I started when I was about ten, though my first “train set” came when I was four.

We were Jewish, and I was born in an era in which Jews did not at all recognize or celebrate some min-version of Christmas...no “Hanukah Bushes” or eight days of gifts giving. Yet for some strange reason, this one year we did have a tree, under which Mom and Dad had placed a Marx steam loco with a couple of cars, a caboose, and enough track to make a loop. My sister got a “Howdie Doody” marionette. Yuch.

Not very realistic...but a start

Marx trains were a cheap alternative for people who could not afford Lionel. They were stamped tin with minimal attention to detail and non-working couplers. I don't remember doing much with the set, but on the other hand I still had it after we moved from NY to Florida.

Maybe it was Greer Ganong's HO “layout” which inspired me? This kid was older than me and as strange as his name...but then I was a pretty precocious and odd duck myself so we were attracted to each other. His “layout” was a loop of track, perhaps with a couple of sidings, on a green painted plywood table. But at least the engine and cars looked like the real things.

HO layouts can look quite real

I grabbed my bike, somehow got Dad to buy a piece of plywood, and toddled off to Orange Blossom Hobbies to trade in some of my stuff and get some more correctly scaled Lionel gear. I then nailed down a loop of track and two sidings and had my first rail “empire.”

But O scale, though “only” 1/48 actual size, takes up a lot of room, and it is impossible to build what I had in mind on 32 square feet. Hell, I'd have needed our entire apartment. So railroading got mothballed...for almost a decade.

I really don't know why I picked it up again, but just after I started dating Marcia I built a shelf switching layout in HO in my apartment in Gainesville. This was on three modules which could be “knocked down” for easy movement. This pre-dated what is now a standardized and documented way to build a modular layout, but it served its purpose. I “scratch built” my own structures for it as I had no funds for buying commercial kits, and used parakeet cage pet store gravel to ballast the rails. I was attracted by model building at a young age, and also was interested in the movements required to switch railcars from one area to another. I have little patience for puzzles in general, but for some reason this type appealed to me.

But the world was complex and, with Vietnam and grad school looming, the hobby went dormant again until after I was married, whereupon the new smaller N scale came on the scene. HO stood for “Half O”...and was 1/87 actual size. This made building a very basic layout in a space as small as a sheet of plywood possible, and allowed for some decent modeling and diorama-like techniques to be applied as well as some semi-realistic operation, but it was pretty minimal. But cut that size in half yet again (N is 1/160 actual size) and you could build a real empire in the same footprint.

A "huge" 2-6-6-2 Articulated C&O steamer
The real one is over 140 feet long...scaled in the length of a pencil!

The problem was that miniaturization manufacturing in 1970 was not up to the task in terms of reliability and durability of the mechanisms and motors. Though I built a pretty extensive little world I could not make it run well or reliably, so when we moved from Florida I sold the entire setup to a colleague at work, and once again was out of the hobby, though I did bring my HO stuff with me when we left for Las Vegas, where I cobbled together a basic layout, which could swing up out of the way into a case on the wall when not in use...or was that layout after we came to California? At any rate, I was in and out a number of times but until sometime around 1975 could not be considered a “serious” modeler.

One of the people who worked for me got me “back on the rails.” We were browsing around a bookstore on a lunch break when I stumbled on a nice picture book about modeling he convinced me to buy. From there it was off to the races, first with an overly ambitious N scale layout around the walls of our garage in San Carlos, and then a much more modest “liftup” operated from a central pit which lived inside a spare bedroom for much better temperature and dust control.

By the 1980s N scale was vastly improved mechanically and ran very well. I kept this layout and moved it into a dedicated room here in our retirement place, never expecting anything more ambitious.

And then Ernie died. As I said, there is an affinity among car guys for other hobbies which seem common to the group...modeling, boats, planes, radio controlled craft of one type or another, and trains of all sizes. For example, Sherri and I were standing in line at one Railfair celebration at the Railroad Museum in Old Sacramento when I noticed a few vintage racers in line ahead of me, staring in wonder at a display of large scale custom built steam locomotives. I joined them, also staggered by hand built locomotives and the hundreds to thousands of hours of work it took to machine things like wheels and gears for them. One of the guys muttered under his breath...”and they think we're crazy.”

It was Gary Winiger who put Ernie and me together in terms of N scale modeling. Gary had learned that Ernie and I both had layouts, though Ernie's took up an entire bedroom and he had vastly more running equipment and locomotives than me, including a number of expensive and rare solid brass units. He was also, as I am not, a master craftsman.

Ernie was a big guy...one of his hands could cover both of mine, but he had eyesight that was well beyond 20/20, and those big hands were very steady. He had a heart condition as a child and since he could not play with other kids, had kept busy building plastic model kits, many of which are now on display in my shop, and then moving into scratch built and high quality kits when he started into model railroading. In fact, learning I was “into trains” got him back to working on his own neglected layout, where he constructed a beautiful, scaled down version of a cannery, now gone, which graced the street he lived on in Cupertino.

He quickly decided that it was a great idea to will his stuff to me. I was flattered, but I never expected to have to deal with it as soon as I did. Ernie got sick over one New Years and within a week succumbed to pancreatitis. He was not yet 65.Though the loss was over a decade ago it is something I never will quite get over. He was that much of a force in my life.

I did not care for Ernie's track setup, but decided to tear his layout and my own apart and build a new, vastly expanded line, which would showcase his building skills. Among other things, he had scratch built all the stations on the old Yosemite Valley Railroad, and these became passenger and freight terminals on my newly designed “Sierra Northern, “ the third layout I built using that name.

The lSNRR resides in a dedicated room, occupying eight by 12 feet, with tracks around the walls and a central peninsula...on three different levels. Ernie had so much track, switches, and running gear that, could I figure out how, I could at last build something which looked and ran like a real railroad, moving cars from point to point among towns loosely patterned after the real Sierra Railroad. In order to do access the levels there is an elevator which lifts trains from one to the other.

I have been working on this system for almost 15 years. No layout is ever “finished” but all the tracks except for one yard are in, all towns on the main level are landscaped to some level, and the main interchange yard is also done.

Part of the main interchange yard at Riverbank
SP SD9 switcher waiting for work
Santa Fe Observation car at station
"Cut" of boxcars in foreground
Power poles mark boundary between "upper" arrival/departure tracks and "lower" classification ans storage yard
Note Ernie's scratch built replica of the YVRR Merced Station

 This is where the Sierra Northern terminates and joins the world via the Santa Fe and Southern Pacific, which then continue to the lower level through the “farm town” of Manteca, and on to the unfinished yard at “San Francisco.”

Going the other way, the Sierra Northern starts from the interchange at Riverbank, climbs to Jamestown, which is a main industrial hub, with a branch to the third level terminal at Angels Camp. This top level also contains a logging spur at Camp 16 and a mining spur at New Melones. The main line continues from Jamestown through Sonora to its terminal with its lumber processing facilities at Tuolomne, which represents the real railroad's link to the facilities at Standard, outside Sonora.

This is a complex and large layout crammed into very little space. Over 100 freight cars are active on it and a purchased piece of software is used to generate and route cars between industries which I built or installed to justify those movements. There are also over 100 manual and electrically controlled track switches, and Ernie's excess rolling stock and engines, many no longer operable, are in a custom display case he built that overlooks the layout...it is six feet long with multiple display tracks on five or six shelves.

There is more than enough to do and build to keep me happily occupied for the rest of my life. Now about that boat...but that's another story.

"Girasole"
The Italian word for "sunflower"
It litreally means "follow the sun"

Scenes along the Sierra Northern "Empire": 

Part of the "lower" yard at Riverbank

Below is the engine facility at Riverbank:

Six stall roundhouse is seen beyond the turntable

Jamestown is a major interchange with the Angels mining and logging branch as well as having significant industry of its own:

Another of Ernies scratch built YVRR stations...this one in use at Jamestown

A view of the central part of Jamestown. The buildings are kits done by Ernie:

The west end of Jamestown.

And the east end of town:

Main line between Jamestown at top, and Sonora at bottom

This is Sonora, east of Jamestown on the SNRR main line. Not shown are the oil transfer companies on the east side of town which are the main industries:

Below are views of the end of line at Tuolomne with its facility for processing logs into lumber:

Log dump and Pond

Ernie's Scratch Bulit Sawmill
Note the incredible detail
The roof is removable to show the saws and tables