Car auction stirs many memories

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Car auction stirs many memories

Sports

Friday, 21 January 2011 12:46

Rick Pedone
Sports Editor
Since 90 percent of this column won’t make sense to 90 percent of you, I’ll throw in a couple of football picks at the end just to make it worse.
“Grumpy’s Toy” is going to be in town next week at the Mecum Auto Auction at Heritage Park along with a dozen more 1960s- and ‘70s-era drag racers billed as “Quarter Mile Legends.”
Grumpy what, you ask?
Patience, please.
Actually, there will be two Grumpy’s Toys here — a 1970 Chevy Camaro and a 1974 Chevy Vega. Both ran in the National Hot Rod Association’s Pro Stock Class and won championships while Richard Nixon was being impeached.
Sox and Martin’s 1971 Plymouth Barracuda will be at the Mecum auction next week and so will “The Collector,” a butt-ugly 1967 Mercury Comet station wagon that accelerated way better than it looked.
These cars, and 1,700 others, will be auctioned by Mecum over five days starting Wednesday.
If you remember the “Wide Trackin’” Pontiac commercials or the “Beep-Beep” Plymouth Road Runner TV spots of the 1960s, you might appreciate why a bunch of 40-year-old race cars raises the pulse in some of us who can’t rise from a chair without hearing a disturbing series of cracks emanating from our bodies.
Grumpy’s Toy cars (there were several, all Chevrolets) were campaigned with enormous success by engine-builder Bill “Gumpy” Jenkins for more than a decade. When you saw Grumpy’s Toy on the track, like I did several times in the 1970s at the now-defunct Lakeland International Speedway, you saw drag racing’s best.
The Sox and Martin Barracuda, with its signature red, white and blue paint job, was a Chrysler factory car driven by Ronnie Sox, one of drag racing’s legends. It won 14 times in 1971 and so dominated the Pro Stock class that the NHRA had to rewrite the rules to handicap the hemi-engined cars that were dominating the sport.
Not all of the race cars at next week’s auction require memories that date back to Jed Clampett.
One of Dale Ernhardt Jr.’s NASCAR racers, a 2007 Monte Carlo in No. 8 Budweiser red, is up for sale.
Auto auctions largely attract car nuts, but you don’t have to be one to appreciate the event. It doesn’t cost much ($15 a day) to watch the auction or to walk around the staging area and examine the cars for sale. Even if you don’t know a four-speed transmission from a four-barrel carburetor, you’ll run across a car that cracks open the memory bank.
Looking through the auction brochure, there’s a 1956 Cadillac much like the one my uncle drove; there’s a 1959 Pontiac Bonneville, which looks almost exactly like dad’s ‘59 Catalina. (Dad didn’t like the plain rear flanks of his Catalina, so he bought some Bonneville emblems and had them put on his car, which was black. He should have bought air conditioning instead.)
There’s a blue 1979 Trans Am identical to the one my brother drove 30 years ago and a gold 1967 GTO like the one I almost bought for my first car. I didn’t get it because I couldn’t shift the three-speed manual transmission. One of the worst decisions of my life. I ended up with a turquoise LeMans that toasted the automatic transmission about a month after I got it.
They all bring memories and for a few minutes you forget about 12 percent unemployment and orthodontist appointments and remember what it was like to cruise confidently through Lakeland’s Searstown Shopping Center in 1974, right before the first gas crisis of that decade, thinking your ride (now a 1970 Formula Firebird) was right there with all the shiny iron rolling around the parking lot.
That era’s long over. How much longer car nuts will flourish when many drivers now think hybrid over horsepower is debatable. But, they’re hanging on. There still is the Saturday night cruise at Old Town, and downtown Kissimmee hosts a classic car show the first Friday of each month.
The gates open at 8 a.m. and auctions start at 10 a.m. Wednesday through Saturday; noon Jan. 30. There will be a memorabilia auction Sunday morning starting at 9 a.m.
Visit www.Mecum.com for more information.
ooo
We wanted to avoid still another NFL playoff embarrassment (So far I’ve picked everyone but the Keebler Elves to win the Super Bowl), but here goes:
Green Bay (-3.5) at Chicago: Slight edge to Chicago defensively; monstrous edge to Green Bay offensively. Pack by a monstrous 2.
N.Y. Jets at Pittsburgh
(-3.5): It’s a pick ‘em. Who who do you want at QB, Big Ben or Broadway Mark? Stillers by 3.
Young Jackson says: Packers by 10, Steelers by a shaky 1 and some of Polamalu’s hair.
Brian “Big Man” McBride’s Super Sniffer Upset Special: J-E-T-S by 7.
Last week: Philly Flyer (3-1, 105-73) Stymied Scintillating Steeler (2-2, 105-73).