Why I Collect
#TeamFOP #collectingcars #ILoveCars #VehicleVault
People who know me have known about my love of cars for a while, but not everyone understands why I chose to start collecting. As I mentioned in my introductory post for this blog, my family wasn’t all that well off, financially speaking. Don’t get me wrong, we were fortunate – never missed meals, always had a home, had nice birthdays and Christmases, and, at least in my case as the eldest of three boys, never had to wear hand-me-down’s. But I realized as I became an adult and dealing with life’s challenges just how hard my parents worked to keep things balanced and provide for us. There certainly wasn’t the kind of money one would spend to indulge a hobby.
As I’ve also mentioned, I am totally lacking any sort of mechanical gene or talent. Don’t misunderstand me, I intellectually understand what happens with the various components on a car, how an internal combustion engine and transmission works. And, in the olden days, I was able to check and change fluids, etc. Hell, I could even change a tire!
But my love of cars was firmly based on being a driver (at least in my opinion). Speed and handling were what pushed my automotive buttons. Canyon runs with lots of twisty, turning mountain roads still give me a rush when I push myself and my ride. And, I have always loved long road trips – driving for twelve to eighteen hours in a day or 3000 miles in a week never bothered me in the least. Never mind that now that I am a FOP I can’t seem to handle the long hauls as well.
If you pair that love of driving along with appreciation for a car’s styling and aesthetics and then layer on my geek-love of technology and even worse my penchant for history, one can begin to get a glimpse of why I was drawn to automotive collecting. Not just performance/sports/race cars but truly anything on wheels.
I was finally able to begin collecting as I was fortunate enough to have some success in business. After taking care of my family’s security, I began to consider just buying some older cars, mainly muscle, for fun. My first three purchases were actually for my wife, my daughter and my then son-in-law. I was still trying to figure out what this hobby was going to look like.
After the initial trio of cars, the family discussed our approach. My position was that if we wanted to just collect ‘toys’ (I know, how elitist!) that was fine, but we didn’t need a fleet of cars to do that. We could buy, enjoy and then sell our ‘toys’. But if we wanted to truly collect, I wanted to make sure that we would share these cars with the public. I was aware of several private collections, from the very small to what I consider to be gigantic, in our metropolitan area. But they were all truly private and the only way to experience them was to be a friend of the owner or to perhaps be invited to attend a charity event that the owner would host. I proposed that, if we elected to pursue collecting, that we would determine a way to be able to share with the public. Building on that, we decided on our ‘portfolio thesis’: we wanted the collection to show the evolution of the car and its impact on society. My daughter, thankfully, was fully engaged and grabbed the reins in the founding, creation and operation of what is a successful auto museum in our town featuring our family’s collection. You can learn more about the museum, Vehicle Vault, at it’s website (www.vehiclevaultco.com) or on it’s Facebook page (Vehicle Vault Museum & Events).
I share all the above to set the stage – my background, my quirks and how we came to be able to have a family collection. I promise it will lead to why I collect.
The museum is important to me because I wanted to share my love of automobiles with people. I help out there periodically and sometimes give tours to patrons. I am famous (or more likely, infamous) for my S.S. Minnow tours. For those of you who are too young to remember Gilligan’s Island, it means that I give a three-hour tour. I can’t help it; I just love sharing about our cars.
I usually include in my long-winded soliloquy why I believe that the automobile was the most culturally impactful invention to the world, but especially here in the U.S. I believe that while cars have a lot of competition in terms of technological advances (aircraft, spacecraft, electronics, and computing, converting sight and sound to broadcast signals, etc., etc.) the automobile is, in my opinion, the only item that appeals to all five of our human senses in either a direct or related fashion. I usually get some very skeptical looks and even some verbal challenges. But I defend my position with the following:
Sight – I know too many people who risk whiplash turning their heads when some cars go by. Car manufacturers have known and leveraged style and color to help sell their cars, sometimes at the expense of reliability or performance. ‘Classics’ in so many cases, have some visual component that contributes to that designation. Folks turn nostalgic when they see a particular model’s lines or curves – and most frequently, the colors.
Hearing - In addition to the visual aesthetics, many manufacturers have designed their exhaust systems to be uniquely identifiable and enjoyable to enthusiasts and owners. Indeed, the exhaust system after market has offered options for turning a staid or ‘boring’ exhaust into something attention getting, if not desirable (glass packs, anyone?). The whine of a supercharger or turbo spooling up, the smooth rhythmic cadence of a finely tuned engine, and yes, the inclusion of radios and other music sources are all ‘baked’ into our perception of cars.
Touch – Leather seats, silky-smooth paint, the feel of a well-designed and ergonomically styled steering wheel or door handles all contribute to our memories and enjoyment of our cars. Even things not so ‘comfort-motivated’ can impact us. I still remember an old family Chevy-II (the less popular Nova’s brethren) with a painted metal dash rather than a padded dash
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Smell – I believe that most of you will think about that ‘new car’ smell, exhaust odor (probably not a plus for most folks) or the smoking tires aroma of a burn-out. But when I make my point about automobile’s impact on our sense of smell, I point to gasoline. I actually love the smell of (old school) high-octane gasoline and know from my conversations that I’m not alone
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Taste – Other than a rather strange, fetish-feeling Volkswagen commercial in 2001 involving licking of car door handles, most people might not understand how taste is involved in our cultural appreciation of cars. But I maintain that eating in cars – picnics, popcorn at drive-in movies, road trip snacks and, with the creation of an entire new niche industry: drive-thru/car hop/fast food, cars and taste are entangled at a visceral level. First a treat for families, it has become a way of life and expanded to more than just hamburgers.
Further underscoring my point about the impact that cars, trucks, motorcycles, and buses have had on American culture, I draw on my history geekism to talk about how these vehicles helped bring this geographically immense country closer together. We can debate that trains preceded automobiles and aircraft shortened the amount of time long distances took. But I counter that neither of these other forms of transportation were either available to the masses due to cost or the passenger limitations of each train/plane used for a particular journey. Think of it this way – cars provided a ‘crowd-sourcing’ means of allowing the U.S. population to move about and travel while trains and planes were ‘structured’ employee-focused approaches
Vacations, shipping of goods and food, business (think traveling salesmen and all of the support infrastructure) expanded their reach due to combustion engine ground vehicles.
As I lead guests through the museum, which is organized categorically by decade, I also love to explain that, philosophically, we believe every car has a story. As I explain, their stories may be about the manufacturer, the model, that specific physical car or perhaps is something historically or culturally significant relating to the car (example, Suzanne Somers peeking out of the driver’s window of a ’57 Thunderbird coupe in American Graffiti). What I love is that this inspires patrons to share their own stories as well.
I love to drive cars. I love to listen to them. I love to touch and smell them (yes, especially the gas smell when I’m filling up). And, while I don’t do it in any of the cars in our collection, I must plead guilty to still eating the occasional drive-in hamburger in the car. I love the variety, the ingenuity and the engineering that has exemplified cars, motorcycles, trucks, and the plethora of other vehicles we enjoy in our everyday life. And I find cars (well most of them) incredibly beautiful. With so many things to love about cars, is it any wonder that I love to collect?
Great article Lou! Thanks for sharing.