In response to the 'Gary Wales & the Ferrari Breadvan' post comes this anecdote from Ed Niles:

"Along with Matthew, Gary is one of the great characters of our world. Although I’ve heard this tale before (several times?) it still brings a chuckle.

Speaking of oft-repeated tales, I was responsible for the B-V coming here. My friend and Lusso owner Gordon Culp saw that I was having fun and making money, so he said, “Let me have the next Ferrari that your friend Roberto (Goldoni, in Rome) comes up with.” OK, so the next one was the B-V. I told Roberto to put a substantial deposit on it, which he did, although somewhat impecunious at the time. Then Gordon got to look at the pix, and said, “Gee, I’m going to have to spend some money re-shaping the body; I want the back to look like a GTO.” After I talked him out of that idea, he went to his banker, whose first question was, “The car is here in LA so we can inspect it, right?” Followed by, “you do have a California pink slip, right?” Somehow I thought that Gordon had the money.

Well, the upshot of it all was that my friend Gordon was not as hip as I had thought, and in the meantime Roberto was mailing me every day about his deposit. So much for trying to be a nice guy/middleman. That was when I started calling around, and when I got to Dick Merritt I hit the jackpot. Dick had just teamed up with Gary, a former stock-broker, and they were buying.

Dick has his own version of bringing the car back, which very roughly approximates Gary’s.

You can’t imagine two more disparate characters than Dick and Gary, but that’s another story."

 

I received this note from Lyle Tanner, a fellow Ferrari Owners Club member back in the day and proprietor of Lyle Tanner Ferrari Parts:

"Stephen:

I would like to mention that with Ed's help, I got #1465 Interim Short Wheelbase. Raced at Le Mans in 1959. They made six. Roberto Goldoni got the car for me. I couldn't get it started when it came off the ship.

I finally looked under the dashboard and there was another key that turned the battery on and off. Once turned, it ran great. The first time I pulled up to fill the tank with gas, the attendant and I thought there was a leak under the car after 25 gallons went into the car. We opened the trunk and discovered there was no trunk, just a 37 gallon gas tank.

Also interesting is when you got the car over about 140mph, the wiper blades would lift off the windshield.

I weighed the car one day with about 1/2 a tank and me standing on the scale. I couldn't believe the whole package weighed 2,300lbs.

Ed sold me a 500 Mondial. RHD and no LHS door. My wife at the time hated it. I was an engineer for the City of LA at the time and would often part it in the LA City Hall garage.

Can you imagine doing that today? After about one year, Ed bought it back.

Lyle "

[Photo of 1465 by Daniel Vaughan]

 

My life seemed to be on a course that was pretty well set. I would regularly travel to England and or Italy to buy cars and sell them in Los Angeles. In between trips, I bought and sold Corvettes. I lived in one of those stilt homes on the side of the hill above Coldwater Canyon with a stupendous view of the entire San Fernando Valley. My girlfriend worked at William Morris and, inexplicably, I'd already been paid to write two screenplays though I hadn't sought the assignments. My carport covered a couple of Maserati Mistrals and the driveway hosted a Corvette and a Maserati Quattroporte. A friend made the observation that I had it all. How interesting it is to hear how another views one's circumstances. Paris was still a few years away and that would handle what I felt was lacking in my life but at that moment, I was living the life of cars.

I really liked the Quattroporte and it was usually my first choice when selecting a car to drive for the day. I bought it in Milano from Robbie Crepaldi and I loved the sound of the four cam V8 engine. It was an unusual car for the time with its sports car handling and four door body. As a sports car, it should have been faster but for a sedan it was quick enough. I drove it for two weeks after it landed on the docks in Los Angeles before I discovered where they'd put reverse in that five speed gear box--a spring-loaded dog-leg up and to the left of first gear. The Frua design was familiar and unusual at the same time. The car seemed smaller in life than in photos. It had a rich leather interior that belonged in a Rolls-Royce. I would go for long rides in the car, usually at night. Sometimes my father would tag along.

I found it interesting that my father came to like the Quattroporte because he tried to talk me out of buying it. He was with me in Italy where we'd gone to the Italian Grand Prix with Stuart and Beverly Baumgard, visited the Ferrari factory and sampled pretty much everything Milano had to offer. One night when I was under the weather, my father went out alone and ended up joining a parade that turned out to be a mass demonstration by the Italian communist party. They all ended up in a park eating spaghetti, drinking wine and listening to jazz until the sun came up. On another occasion, I told a taxi driver we wanted to go to a jazz club and we ended up in a nightclub with some spectacular looking women who all seemed to want our company. It didn't take us too long to realize the taxi driver had delivered us to an upscale maison close instead of the jazz club I had requested. We enjoyed a memorable three hour lunch with Tom Meade while waiting to see some Maseratis in Parma where we were joined by the proprietor of the restaurant. We witnessed an operatic scene in Milano's Stazione Centrale at two-thirty in the morning when a man followed his suitcase-bearing wife into the train station pleading with her not to leave him. Half-way up the monumental stairway, they drew a crowd--Lord knows from whence all those people had come at that hour--cheering and encouraging her to return home with him (after much coaxing, she did). We danced with fashion models (it was catalog week) every night at the Nepenthe. We chatted amiably with the elegantly dressed Christian, an impoverished Italian nobleman-turned-car smuggler (he looked like Curt Jürgens), at the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele over our afternoon coffee. We enjoyed ourselves for an entire month in Italy and maybe that is why my father came to like the Quattroporte as much as I did.

The photos show me with the Baumgards (who at that time owned GTO 3987) and my father with Tom Meade in the distance.

I have been back to Milano-- shooting part of a movie on one occasion--and so much of the city is exactly as it was when I was buying cars but the circumstances have changed. It is funny how the thought of a car can conjure up so many memories.

 

Ed Niles will be joining Larry Crane and the EW gang at Elysée Wednesday tomorrow night. If You haven't met Ed, don't miss this opportunity! Bring your friends.

 

It is always a joy to read your stories. Thanks again

 

Stephen, you are a true gem! Thanks!!

 

In the mid-seventies, I probably looked like the last person one would imagine riding in the front seat of a black and white Los Angeles Police Department squad car. Looking more like a musician than anything else, I saw a lot of double-takes from people wondering why I was in the front seat and not handcuffed in the back seat on my way to jail. On these occasions, I got a cop's perspective on the city in which I was born and grew up. The view through the windshield of a black & white was very different than that through the windshield of a Ferrari to which I was accustomed, needless to say.

I rode with a sergeant in downtown Los angeles out of Parker Center--the Glass House, as it was called. Later, I rode in Van Nuys and, later still, in Venice. Leaving Parker Center for the first time, the sergeant gave me his call sign telling me that if he were to be shot I was to use the radio to tell the dispatcher that there was an officer down and give his call sign. It put the job description into sharp focus.

We had just left the Parker Center garage on that first ride when the dispatcher called a 211 in progress. Someone was robbing a bank only a few blocks away. We went to Code 3 which meant lights and siren. In those days--maybe today as well--only one unit responding to a call was allowed to use lights and siren. Everyone else went lights-only. The reason for this was that when two or more units used sirens, too many accidents occurred because one could not hear the other as their own siren blocked out the sound of the other.

We pulled to the curb and left the black & white parked in a traffic lane. I followed the sergeant along the sidewalk until we got close to the bank at which point he flattened himself against the wall--gun drawn--and continued toward the bank. I followed suit. As we got close to the entrance, someone called Code 4. The bank robber had surrendered or been subdued. The event was over.

On another occasion, we responded to a disturbance at a transient hotel. Two fellows who had scraped together enough money to pay for a cheap room for the night were having a dispute. We arrived after the first unit had responded. The two vagrants were venting their anger to the officers already on the scene about what one had done to the other. As the sergeant and I approached, the senior of the two officers interrupted them and pointed to me. "Tell it to the lieutenant." Suddenly, I was a lieutenant on the LAPD! Without losing a beat, both men aired their grievances to me. I listened to them both and kept my silence for a moment or two after they had finished. Then I told them, "Either you both behave, go back to your rooms and stay there or the officers will take you down to the Glass House where you will spend the rest of the night until a judge can see you in the morning." They barely said thank you before disappearing back into the hotel happy to remain free for the night to enjoy the relative comfort of their rooms.

That same evening, we responded to a call about a man trapped beneath a car in a parking lot. He had been hiding and when the lady backed out of the parking space, she ran over him. Hearing him scream, she jumped out of her car and ran away leaving him pinned by one of the wheels. He was suspicious and wouldn't say why he was hiding but there was no reason to arrest him and away he went lucky not to have been crushed. Much later that night, we responded to a call at an emergency room in a downtown hospital. They had a dead body. It was the same man. It just wasn't his night.

Van Nuys was a different environment. Robberies and drugs seemed to define the action. It was as if some people got off on the violence regardless of the minimal return. Venice was unlike either downtown or Van Nuys. Gang activity was the primary concern and a black & white unit was not the safest ride in that area. It felt like a battleground in an undeclared war. Driving the same streets in my own cars never gave me the same feeling though I may have had a false sense of security.

I think, more than anything else, those experiences gave me an understanding of just how thin is the social veneer.

 

Rolls-Royce speedsters: A matched set - YouTube

Excerpts from a special day spent with Gary Wales and the pair of boat-tail Rolls-Royce speedsters he designed and built on two 1937 Rolls-Royce chassis.

 

Rolls-Royce speedsters: A matched set - YouTube

 

On a rainy day in Connecticut, our good friend Don Klein made arrangements for John Fitch to sign sixty of our full-size, numbered Carrera Panamericana posters that artist Chad Glass executed for our documentary. This photo was shot by Don with his phone after they unwrapped the shipping parcel and John signs poster 1/60.