Honk if you love classic cars
Enthusiasts, collectors gear up for shows
Susan Felt
The Arizona Republic
Sept. 9, 2005 01:00 PM <!--______START TEXT OF STORY________-->
[font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]Mark Kramer remembers the first time he fell in love.
Not surprisingly, it was in Rome. Summer 1962. He was 15, sitting at an outdoor café on the Via Veneto on vacation with his parents. He had never seen a Ferrari. But before he saw it, he heard it.
"I'd never heard this sound. It was a high pitch shriek. It was music to my ears," Kramer says.<!-- BOXAD TABLE --> [/font]
[font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]It was a Ferrari. A red, open-top roadster. A 250 California Spyder to be exact. The sports car in Ferris Bueller's Day Off.
"I fell in love. They built 104 of those. It's the Holy Grail for Ferraris," he says.
There have been other cars since. Porsches. Corvettes. A turquoise convertible GTO. A Mazaratti. And the 1959 Bonneville convertible Kramer bought his freshman year of college for $600 with money he had saved working for the Chicago Parks District.
But his favorite car remains a Ferrari. He has every one he's ever purchased (five), including the first: a 1981 308 GTSi he got when he was 35. "I ordered a two-tone combination. Red with a black bottom. It was stunning."
"Cars have my heart," says Kramer, 58.
It's one of the reasons that in April of 1990 he opened his McDonald's restaurant at the Scottsdale Pavilions to car clubs for their weekend gatherings.
He understood the passion, and it was good for business, he says.
In 1990 there was little built at Pima and Indian Bend roads. Loop 101 was still seven years away.
The first Friday night about 30 people showed up with their cars. Three months later, there were 300.
Now, 300 cars on Saturday nights (it was switched to Saturdays within the first few months) would be considered a slow night, says Kramer and his business partner, Jerry Wernau.
The Rock and Roll McDonald's Saturday Night Car Show attracts an estimated 600 cars and 150 motorcycles during the cooler months - fall through spring.
And during the venerable Barrett-Jackson Classic Car Auction, car enthusiasts bring as many as 1,100 to 1,200 cars to the car show.
There's no charge.
Similar, albeit smaller, versions of this outdoor carfest happen across the Valley from shopping-center parking lots at 35th and Northern avenues to the Safeway Shopping Center at 83rd Avenue and Lake Pleasant Road. and the Split Window Diner in Fountain Hills nearly every day of the week, weather permitting. There are weekly gatherings across the state. (Go to cruisinarizona.com for a list.)
Mark Neumann, 45, occasionally drives his '70 GTO to the Saturday night gathering.
"It's nostalgia and also it's generational," he says.
"Maybe in high school, you liked these cars. Then you moved on with life. You got married and had kids and now you have the money to go back and relive a little bit of that youth."
There's also a little bit of the pride thing, Neumann says.
"It's a unique thing to have."
Gary Ellsworth, 64, is restoring a '66 silver blue Mustang. It's an automatic. He's fixing it to drive, not to make it a pristine restoration like some Mustang enthusiasts.
Ellsworth has been buying classic '60s Ford Mustangs for nearly 25 years. He's one of the early members of the Copper State Mustang Club. His favorite car is a red Shelby Mustang he's had for 17 years. A retired machinist, Ellsworth keeps cars at his home in Scottsdale and at his mountain cabin. "I always liked taking things apart and putting them back together to make them better." He has seven cars now. Three are new, but it's the Shelby he likes driving the best. It was designed by Carroll Shelby, a racecar driver, auto designer and a man Ellsworth describes as the godfather of Mustangs.
Ellsworth's first car? A 1950 Ford convertible he customized.
Frank Gemmell, 65, owns three Model A's: a '31 coupe, '30 town sedan and a 1928 Model AA truck. He and his wife, Janice, shipped the '30 sedan to Europe and drove it through the Alps.
He has enough parts to build himself another Model A, he says. Besides building, the Gemmells like driving their Model A's. They took the town sedan to Colorado Springs for a meet and drove it up Pikes Peak. The Scottsdale couple don't hesitate to take it out on the open road, maintaining a brisk 50 to 55 mph.
Gemmell's first car? A 1946 Mercury his uncle picked out for him. "It was more reliable than cool."
Roger Miller, 66, drove his first Model A - a 1930 two-door - to elementary school in Lake Wilson, Minn. His father traded that car for a 1950 Ford two-door coupe that Miller drove during high school.
Miller's earliest memory is sitting in the front yard of his parent's farm in his grandfather's Model T truck pretending to drive while his father and other adults thrashed oats.
As a college student, Miller rebuilt that truck from its engine to its body. It took him nearly 40 years and retirement to return to restoring Model A's. He has a '29 Model A cabriolet he's restoring at his home in Peoria and two cars, a 1930 Model A Victoria he's also restoring and a 1923 Model T roadster he and his wife, Loida, drive at their cabin in Prescott.
"I just like old cars. They have a different feel and they're easier to work on. The newer cars, you need a computer."[/font]
