Re: Packard in an unlikely place

Posted by su8overdrive On 2016/2/3 1:55:07

JW, respectively, i live a couple hours to the north of Rabble Beach in the greater Bay Area--where you lived before moving to the much more placid Austin-- and have known several exhibitors, met a couple of the selection committee over the years, including a late friend who took Best of Show, the latter telling me many....interesting stories about some of the Rabble nonsense.

Another friend who ran a shop making high point show cars run like the automobiles they once were told us how he was instructed by the owner of a Graber-bodied '34 Standard Eight convertible sedan to run a die grinder over the entire block and head. He won best in class at Rabble Beach.

Of course some of those trophy chasers do some of their own work. Katharine Hepburn claimed to clean her own windows.
I know of a lifelong Hispano specialist connected with Rabble who's one of those rare fellows who could allegedly do practically everything but plating himself.

As with the CCCA, which started two years after Rabble, for the most part, the days of owner/restorer are long gone. It's mainly pay to play, and i've been fooling with old cars on both coasts since i got out of college; earlier we oft visited Ed Jurist's wonderful Vintage Car Store in Nyack, a little further up the lazy river from where i went to high school.
There we'd admire big Loziers, Chadwicks, Simplex Speed Cars and chain-drive 80nph Locomobiles with two-wheel brakes-- these were the holy grail. Duesenbergs and Packard Twelves were still second-tier then.
In fact, the word "classic" didn't have cachet with the mainstream until a Model J first owned by Greta Garbo became the first car to bring $100,000 at public auction in 1972.
Sometime, read what lifelong, knowledgeable autoholics like Ralph Stein thought about all this concours malarkey.

The speed with which some of the proletariat comes to the rescue of shopping mall developers, coupon clipping products of nepotism showing at venues like Rabble reminds me of the people supporting the very _________ who are shafting them, but i understand we're not to veer toward politics here.

Ralph Lauren chromed the wheels of a Bugatti Type 57 originally painted body color. To the Rabble judges' credit, he didn't win his class, but still placed or showed. I think the Ralph Laurens of this world will get by just fine without your defense.

A fellow who's shown cars at Rabble several times over the years has one of those US-flag-waving businesses supplying interior trim to import cars. His product is made in Mexico.
Makes you wonder if w h e r e the entrant's lucre comes from should be part of the judging equation, if this be truly about "class" and elegance.

A gent no longer with us described how decades ago, unable to break a tie in one class at Rabble, each cars' dipstick was drawn. The one with the cleanest oil got the nod.
No enquiry whether one car's engine was remachined/rebuilt and filled with detergent oil, and the other's simply gussied up and top overhauled with non-detergent. I have heard other Rabble veterans tell me that to win at such shows, it was wiser to simply give a worn engine a ring and valve job so the original factory balance might be maintained for the sake of a smooth idle to impress the judges, even though such an engine would otherwise be fully rebuilt by a genuine hobbyist like most of those here on Packard Info.

We can dredge exceptions to any lot. But Rabble Beach ad nauseum? No thanks.

Phil Hill, whose Santa Monica shop restored many Rabble winners, said it best:
"I've seen more nice cars forever ruined for the sake of another few points."

And don't "yeah, but" over the recent "barn find" preservation class. It's a few decades late for that for too many survivors.

So, why make such a big deal out of this?
Because the Rabble trickle down miasma has poisoned this hobby. The original automotive concourses in France and Europe of the '20s, '30s, contestants might drive through the previous night's rain, reach the hotel, in the morning park their cars with wheels still showing a bit of mud on the lawn, where the cars were judged solely on line, form, an oft intangible aura, perhaps graced by a lovely woman.

Some of us come to PI for technical and moral support for our survivors--much of which we've gleaned from you-- arguably the world's consistently finest production cars during the first half of the last century, not to be PR flacks for silver spooners.

JW, your well-sorted 115-c drophead has as much heart as any nepot's parade float at Monterey.