IAISO

I ran into a few bumps and roadblocks getting this ride-along both started and then finished. Had to reschedule a couple-three times at the last minute and whenever that happens I always worry about inconveniencing others with my various twists and turns but I needn’t have fretted about any of that with @billyblyth, the subject of this installment of the Riding Shotgun project. He was more than patient throughout the entire show, reminding me kindly that delays were just part of life, which I suppose they are. But now, finally, and without any further ado…

sludgo: Hey Bill…let’s start the ride with the origin story. How’d you get the car bug?

@billyblyth: Well, I think it goes back to when I was a very young kid learning to read. As soon as I could put words together I’d read anything I could get my hands on. Didn’t matter what it was. Anyway, I was probably twelve at the time and stumbled upon a book—I don’t know the name of it—but it listed every car manufacturer on the face of the planet with pictures of their cars. It was about six inches long and four inches wide and two-and-a-half inches thick and had no cover and I bought it at a flea market for less than a dollar! That’s when I first stumbled upon Ferraris. I remember the date of the book was 1966 so they had pictures of the Lusso and I thought, boy, those were really nice! And there were Maseratis and all those sorts of things too. Then as time went on I subscribed to Road & Track magazine and just ate it alive. Car and Driver too. I really enjoyed reading the articles written by their cast of characters: Dan Gurney and Brock Yates and the whole Hee-Haw gang.

Image: imdb.com

I’d also say that my father was a big influence. At the time, The Untouchables was on TV with Robert Stack as Elliot Ness and I’d watch that with Dad and always loved seeing those old cars. He would tell me this one was fast or that one wasn’t. He also liked to tell the story of when he was a little boy—he must’ve been seven or eight back in ’31 or ’32—and was going to public school. There was a fellow there named Henry that Dad became friends with whose father was a very wealthy magnate but was sending his kids to public school rather than private school so they could meet regular people. The story goes that Henry’s mom would call up Dad’s mom and ask if “young Billy” could come over to play. She’d say yes of course and Henry’s mom would send a car for him if he could be ready on time, and right on time there’d be my old English grandfather sitting on the porch when a chauffeur-driven Cadillac V16 town car would pull up! My grandfather always said that car was longer than the house was wide and the chauffeur would come out just like in the movies with the jodhpur pants and the boots up to the knee and the cap and all that sort of thing then come to the front door asking if “Master Billy” was ready for his playtime with “Master Henry.” The thought of that huge car pulling up to get my dad is something I still picture in my mind often.

Fun story! Did your dad have any favored marques?

He was a big Oldsmobile fan too, just like your dad was. Buicks as well, to a certain extent, and he’d tell me all about those cars. I remember that the last of his Buicks was a ’54 or ’55 and that was two-tone car and massive. My mother would use it to go to the store and if she was just running in quick, you know, in those days she’d just tell me and my brother to behave and she’d be right back.

Of course we’d proceed to wrestle and mess around and do all this other stuff, and one day he knocked the car out of Park and we started rolling backwards. Thankfully the bumpers were pretty substantial back then and we stopped when we hit another car with similar bumpers! Of course my brother’s story was completely different than mine and I ended up not being able to sit down for a week!

Any other early automotive influences?

I remember being particularly interested in reading the stories of race car drivers—Grand Prix drivers in particular, like Tazio Nuvolari. He raced cars and motorcycles and was just tough as nails. He’d wear steel toes on his boots and steel knee-guards on his knees when he was motorcycle racing. He’d crack up and break bones and they’d still lower him into his Alfa-Romeo afterwards and he’d go around the track at amazing speeds. He was ugly as sin but could drive like a bat out of hell.

In our first conversation you mentioned you’d owned many cars over the course of your life. Name the coolest.

I would think the ’67 Alfa Spider.

Tell me the tale.

At the time I picked it up I had a Triumph Spitfire I loved that I was always driving around for work but one day I stopped by this guy’s shop. His name was Armand and he was from Italy and worked on Alfa Romeo cars. Occasionally he’d have something for sale and one day when I was there he’d had this Spider come in.

He told me somebody had built it to Velocé spec and that the 1,600cc engine gave it a lot more jump. I wound up buying it and loved it. It was just a beautifully balanced car. Wasn’t the fastest going down the road but when you put all the parts of driving a car together it was a wonderful car to own and drive.

Are Alfas the fave? I love Alfas. Absolutely. But it’s a toss-up between those and British cars. As a little background, my family is British so I’ve always enjoyed things British. I’ve had a bunch of MGs and Triumphs and lots of fun little British cars. I had a ’66 Sunbeam Alpine that I’ve written about before on Bring a Trailer that I found when I was living in a very rural part of Ohio.

Sounds like a story worth retelling.

Well, the village we lived in had less than four thousand people—one pharmacy and one grocery store that were in the same building over by the train station—so it was easy to get out and find some nice curvy twisty roads and I was out for a drive one day and passed a house I’d passed many times before when I noticed that there was something red sitting out in a field near the house. So I went to the house and, never one to be bashful if there’s a car in the picture, I knocked on the door. This old guy answered and I excused myself and told him I was interested in the little car he had out there and he just looked at me with kind of a sad look then invited me in. This was in ’72 or ’73, and he told me that it had been his son’s car who’d gone to Vietnam and sadly he had been lost. He said he felt bad the car was languishing there in the field but he just didn’t have the heart to deal with it. His wife had passed away and he was all alone and was just kind of a sad guy, but said we could go and take a look at it. So we walked out across the field and there it was, stuck up to its rocker panels in mud, but it looked very nice. He said he could go and get the tractor and we could pull it out and that’s what he did, and beyond some rust on the rocker panels it was a very clean car. He asked if I was interested in buying it and I asked him what he’d like for it and he said that wasn’t that important then asked if six hundred dollars would be okay with me!

We put a couple gallons of clean gas in it and I had to buy a battery, but danged if it didn’t start right up and run fine. I told him I’d go to the bank and get some money and he said he’d just follow me and we did the deal. I took it home and got it all cleaned up and was lucky enough to find a wrecked one in a salvage yard nearby so that solved my parts problem. The wreck had only been rear-ended so it had everything important I needed for mine. There was a guy my family knew who ran a body shop so I had the rocker panels done and painted then went back and showed the farmer his son’s old car and asked him if he’d like to go for a ride. He said that he would, and while we were out and I looked over at him and he had this big smile on his face and tears in his eyes and seeing that set me off, so there we were, both crying as we drove along!

What happened to the car?

Funny you should ask! I’ve had short experiences with all my cars because there was always something else coming along, so I ended up selling it to one of my best friends who kept it until he got married then gave it to his father-in-law, and when the father-in-law passed away it passed down to his son. So it’s still in the family and rolling along.

Everyone likes to hear about The First Car. Me too.

Mine was a hand-me-down from my Dad—a ’64.5 Mustang coupe. Six-banger. Wimbledon White with a red interior. When he got it, he was running a steel mill and the cars hehad been driving were all abysmal and unsightly, their finishes rotted from everything the massive blast furnace would blow onto them. I remember specifically, he had a ’51 Plymouth coupe I thought was really neat because in the center of the dash was the windshield wiper thing but on the outside it was awful. My mother wouldn’t even let him park it in the driveway, thinking the neighbors might think it wasn’t ours if it was just out in the street. That was the summer of ’64, and she’d seen commercials for this new Mustang she thought was nifty so she told my dad to go and look at one. Said that if he liked it we could get one of those. So he went and checked one out and bought it and the ugly cars suddenly went away.

Nice first car! What happened to it?

Well, after my dad got married and had kids he became a Ford guy. One time we were at the Ford dealership buying his new LTD and he was talking with the dealer about the Mustang. He told the dealer that I was trying to expand my horizons by getting into British cars, and the dealer said he had a lady who’d been in looking for a Mustang. He couldn’t make a deal with her, but she had a Triumph she was wanting to get rid of. Somehow they all constructed a deal where the lady picked up the Mustang and we ended up with the Triumph and the new LTD.

Nice second car too!

It was a ’69 Mark III Spit. A really sweet, sweet car. By the time they got to the Mark III they’d figured out the rear suspension, and they were really good handling cars. I thought it was so cool how you opened up the hood! My dad borrowed it a lot because my British grandfather liked to go for rides in it. He lived across the border from us in Pennsylvania and once my dad went to pick him up to bring him back to stay for a week or so and while he was there my twin girl cousins asked him if they could drive the car. He asked them if they knew how to drive a stick and they said that they did and climbed into the car and promptly backed it into a tree! Didn’t harm anything mechanically but it was red at the time and I’d always wondered what it would look like in British Racing Green, so that was the punishment my Dad got for loaning it to them—having it repainted. And then, after all that, I painted it Aston Martin Silver Birch, just on a whim. It looked really cool in that color.

Any ride you wish you had back?

Definitely the Alfa, but then there was also a ’60 MGA—one of my favorite cars. British Racing Green with tan interior and side curtains. I had a 1980 Pontiac Grand Prix for my work car at the time, but that MGA was my play car. Still, every once in a while I’d take it the twenty miles to work and back. Those cars are much better if you drive them than if you just let them sit.

I’m personally glad to see some love for The Octagon.

Oh sure! I’ve had two ‘Bs too. One was a ’67—white over red. It came with the name “Sebastian,” and the story on that one is that when I owned it I was approached by a fellow through an intermediary who was looking for that same car. He’d searched for it and found the VIN number and somehow found me and told me he was married to its first owner and was interested in acquiring the car. Well, I’m a sucker for a love story, otherwise I’d’ve never sold it but Sebastian went home where he belonged and I moved on.

Great story.

I just look at it this way: I’ve never had hugely expensive cars but I like to be a good custodian and then see them go to good places.

They’re special machines to be sure. Worth caring for.

They’re the closest thing I can get to a time machine, honestly. I mean, if you get into a really old car it’s like entering a different place in time. There are reasons why the car was built the way it was. What was influencing automobiles in general at that time? What were the trends? People look at Packards and Cords and cars of that era and they think about why would they paint those wheels bright orange?

What about near misses? Cars you had a shot at but got away from you?

There was a ’67 Maserati Mistral convertible that had been owned by a local businessman. It had been lovingly cared for but he had passed away and it had sat in a garage since. Had some rust on the front brake rotors and a little ding under the front fascia and was going to need some reconditioning but it was an aluminum-bodied car and I didn’t know anyone who knew how to work on those. His wife said she was asking $4,000 and she’d take less for it but I couldn’t get up the nerve to get it because I didn’t know what the cost would be to get it back in shape.

The other one would have to be a ’59 AC Ace. It was just beautiful, a very deep red with a chrome exhaust header that had blued a little bit from the heat. Its engine bay was just a jewelry box. It too was $4,000!

Any design favorites over the years that tend to catch your eye?

I like pre-Countach Lamborghinis. The 350 and the 400 and the Miura of course but after that they got kind of Transformer-esque. It’s like what they did to the beautiful 911 Porsche. They flared it and sloped it and be-tailed it until it looked like it would be ready to take off and fly like a bat.

Speaking of things BaT, how’d you find the site?

I’d heard about it through a number of people and thought that with the name of the site they must just have a bunch of junkers, but the thing I liked about it was the interesting cars listed that you didn’t see every day, and even more than that it was a forum you were allowed to comment on. Try that on eBay. That was the attraction—a group of like-minded people who loved cars, many of whom had never bought or sold one on the site but who, like me, could talk about things and share things that they’d seen and done. There was a really rich tapestry of folks who’d seen all manner of automobiles, from very elaborate expensive cars to rare cars to very mundane cars and all had stories to tell. I think that enriches the experience immeasurably and that’s why I love the site. It’s a good way to go and clean my brain out every now and then.

You’re a very popular commenter.

I just blather when I’m on but sometimes I’ll write things because I know people will identify with what I write about and I really enjoy that, but honestly I’m not out there trying to harvest likes. I’ve just read a lot about cars so I know a little bit about a lot of them. Like, there was recently a Graham Hollywood sedan on BaT, and I commented that the body of that car was built from the dies of the ’36 and ’37 Cords, which Graham had bought to build its own cars, so the body is very similar to those wonderful Cord cars from a few years before!

It’s just little details like that that are fun to share with folks, and since there are a lot of other folks who know a whole lot more than me about various marques, I learn a lot from them. It’s a great exchange of information that serves to bind us together as a happy band.

Okay, let’s wrap things up with one last Best Car Story.

I went through a period where I’d go the Bahamas on vacation, and the first time I went to Nassau I went with a buddy and we stayed at the Nassau Beach Hotel (where all the pool scenes and some of the interiors were shot for the James Bond movie Thunderball). Long story short, we were walking down the beach from the hotel and came to where there were some residences and at one of them there was this nice-looking young girl in a bikini waving “hi” to us from behind a little gate. We said “hi” back and she invited us in and explained to us her boyfriend was out of the country for a couple weeks and had left her there by herself with a car to get around in but she was afraid to drive it. I asked what it was and she took us to the garage, and there it was—an Iso Grifo! She said maybe we could all go for a ride in it but that one of us guys would have to drive if that was okay with us. Well, yeah!!