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.
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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.
