The following article appeared in the Nov. 20, 2008 edition of Drive magazine in The Santa Fe New Mexican:

The following article appeared in the October 16, 2008 edition of Drive magazine in The Santa Fe New Mexican:

Richard C. Gross | For The New Mexican

10/15/2008 – 10/16/08

You could say Jim Hailey has the Cadillac of vintage-car collections — because most of the cars in it are Cadillacs.

The queen of the collection, parked in two garages that open onto a shaded brick courtyard at the side of his Santa Fe home, is his most recent purchase: a white 1958 Cadillac Eldorado Brougham with a brushed steel roof. The late Academy Award-winning actress and princess of Monaco, Grace Kelly, bought it for her dad.

She suffered a stroke behind the wheel of her Rover P6 sedan while driving to Monaco on a winding road in 1982, and the car went off the road and slid down a mountainside. She died a day later of her injuries. She was 52.

Hailey found her dad’s Cadillac on the Internet and bought it from a broker in Los Angeles earlier this year. He has since turned down a $190,000 offer for the car. There’s been a resurgence of interest in Cadillacs 25 years and older, Hailey said, particularly in Europe.

“There is so much quality,” Hailey, 38, said of the ‘58. “That car was built without cost in mind. It sold for $13,000, but GM lost $900 on each one. It’s an engineer’s delight.”

Nevertheless, he said, “I can’t stand celebrity cars. I don’t care if Joe Blow owned it; you’re buying the car.” It’s the car that counts, not previous owners.

Cadillac hand-built 704 of the Broughams between 1957 and 1958 — what Hailey calls the “heyday of GM,” when a Cadillac was the Cadillac of luxury cars. His is No. 525. It has 59,000 miles on the odometer.

The car has been repainted once, but the white leather interior is original. The chrome, including plating over the rear wheelwells, gleams as if it just rolled out of the factory on those tires with their thin whitewall strips.

The 6-liter V-8 has three two-barrel carbs under a monstrous air cleaner, covered in sparking chrome, and churns out 335 horsepower. But it’s really not enough to give zoom-zoom to the 5,100-pound Caddy — which is smaller and shorter but up to 700 pounds heavier than regular Cadillacs of the time. Don’t ask about gas mileage.

The Kelly car is one of five Cadillacs in the collection in Santa Fe, which Hailey made his permanent home three years ago. But he travels often to Dallas to oversee his commercial real-estate business and has another collection there in partnership with a longtime friend.

“In buying and selling, you end up in a dealer role without being a dealer,” Hailey said. His theory about the value of older cars is that the more undependable they are, the more they are worth.

For example, he said, a Dodge Viper “has a far better resale value” than a Mercedes SL. “People can’t tolerate being treated nice,” he said. “Mercedes is the best.”

The other head-turner in his Caddy garage is a black-over-red 1976 Eldorado convertible with a 500-cubic-inch V-8 and a mere 15,000 miles. The model was the last American convertible until a revamped Chrysler organization began producing droptops again in the early 1980s.

Nearby, the green 1969 Fleetwood Brougham, with a 472-cubic-inch powerhouse and 55,000 miles on it, is in all original condition. Hailey, an accomplished street racer — that’s another story — said he “runs the hell out of it.”

It’s parked alongside a white 1982 Fleet Brougham d’Elegance with a 5.7-liter diesel engine that has covered 21,000 miles. “GM didn’t know how to build a diesel, but by 1982 they improved it,” Hailey said,

A white 2005 STS with the 4.6-liter Northstar V-8 and 40,000 miles is more of a daily driver and is housed in another garage with the ‘58 and a red 1962 Corvette, top down, with a 327-cubic-inch small-block. A white 1979 Jeep Wagoneer Limited is nearby, for hauling. It, too, looks showroom bright.

It was Hailey’s dad who turned him on to cars. He always had one or two collector cars around their house in West Texas, near Abilene — Corvettes, Mercedes-Benzes, those types. But Cadillac was a mainstay around the Hailey home.

“My dad would buy my mother a 1- or 2-year-old Cadillac every six years,” Hailey said. “So I grew up around Cadillacs.” And he got to know them by driving and, later, restoring them.

He delighted in driving one, a 1976 Seville, a mile down the road to pick up the mail from the box. He was 12.

Richard C. Gross is a Santa Fe-based writer and editor. E-mail him at drive@sfnewmexican.com.

The following article appeared in the Sept. 19, 2008 edition of Drive magazine of The Santa Fe New Mexican:

Richard C. Gross | For The New Mexican

9/17/2008 – 9/18/08

Daddy, as Patricia Marko tells it, bought her a yellow 1949 Jeepster convertible in 1968 and kept an eye on it from his office window in the only high-rise building in town to make sure she didn’t waste the afternoons cruising up and down Main Street.

Daddy was an FBI agent.

“The town was so little that he could see all the way down Main Street, and he could see if you were cruising after school,” Patty said. “I could do it once, but then I had to go home.”

Maybe in part to try to replicate the experiences of those high-school years, Patty now has a 1950 black-over-yellow Willys-Overland Jeepster convertible that she bought four years ago and can cruise whenever she wants. But she wheels it out of her garage only during the summer — and then only on weekends, to keep the mileage down.

“I’m not going to put too many miles on it because I want to keep it,” she said. The black-faced odometer with the white numerals has recorded 85,988 miles.

And Patty doesn’t go more than 55 mph in the Jeepster, which has a three-speed manual that shifts the 72-horsepower 134-cubic-inch four-cylinder, and she’s never used the overdrive. The speedometer reads up to a maximum of “8,” short for 80.

Patty’s dad paid $350 for the 1949 model, which he found with chickens roosting in it in a barn near El Centro, Calif., the tiny town 50 feet below sea level and right up against the Mexican border where Patty grew up. He had it repainted and re-upholstered at a shop across the border in Mexicali.

In contrast, Patty paid $15,000 for her ‘50 Jeepster, which she bought online from a dealer in Whidbey Island, Wash., who had it for two years. He bought it from a California family that had stored it for many years, she said. It’s worth up to $25,000 today.

The black manual convertible top and the black vinyl upholstery with the white piping look as good as new. Chrome spotlights adorn each side of the two-piece windshield. A spare tire wrapped in black is propped on the rear bumper.

The light yellow paint, which Willys-Overland dubbed “Nassau cream,” was redone years ago and shows signs of wear, with chips on the fenders. There is minor rust on the chrome grille, and the whitewall tires have faded to match the yellow of the car.

The starter is a big, fat button on the floor, above and to the right of the gas pedal. Most of the chrome — and there’s lots of it — gleams.

Willys-Overland produced 19,132 Jeepsters between 1948 and 1950, including those sold during the 1951 model year. The company figured it would try to take advantage of the popularity of the World War II Jeep by trying to appeal to civilians with a passenger car, but the vehicle just didn’t catch on.

Willys revived the Jeepster name in 1966 with the Jeepster Commando. But the moniker died in 1971 even though American Motors, the successor to Willys-Overland, rebadged the vehicle as the Jeep Commando for the 1972-73 model years.

Patty’s original Jeepster, the one Daddy bought, “was hard to drive, and it was slow; you couldn’t go fast or race.” But it was a convertible, and she loved convertibles. It was handed down to her younger sisters when Patty went off to college.

From her dad’s view from his office, the car must have stood out on El Centro’s Main Street like a yellow banana on black velvet. It was the only one in town. Did Patty feel spied on during her after-school cruises?

“Well, my father was an FBI agent, so we figured it was his job to keep a close eye on his own kids,” Patty explained. “We never really felt spied upon. We did get to drag Main a couple of times after school, but then we’d head home. [It was a] small-town kind of thing, too. You couldn’t get away with anything even if you wanted to.”

Santa Fe’s high-schoolers probably can relate to that.

As for the “new” Jeepster, Patty bought it because she always was into collectible cars and convertibles and “ran across ads for Jeepsters and thought, ‘Why not?’ I wanted one that was in good condition and working order, and it had to be yellow/black.”

Seek and ye shall find.

The following article appeared in the July 3, 2008 edition of Drive magazine in The Santa Fe New Mexican:

Richard C. Gross | For The New Mexican

7/2/2008 – 7/3/08

Muscles sometimes must be flexed to keep them in tone, even iron ones.

These particular muscles are under the hoods of nine hot rods and souped-up cars dating from 1937 on in a priceless collection owned by native Santa Fean Cervantes “Buddy” Roybal, 62.

“I’ve loved cars ever since I was a kid,” he said. “I had tons and tons of car magazines. It was always a matter of always wanting them but not being able to afford them.”

Not now. The all-American collection — there’s not an immigrant among them — has been a dozen years in the making.

Immaculate automobiles need protection from the elements, chiefly from the intense Santa Fe sunshine, and that doesn’t mean parking them under the nearest tree. Roybal solved the problem by building a 5,500-square-foot garage in the backyard of his house off Santa Fe Trail, where he just moved.

The garage, with space for 14 cars, is more like a hangar. At one end is an office and a separate bay with a hydraulic lift so Roybal can “fiddle around.”

“I love muscle cars and hot rods,” he said. “The cars were all unique — the lines. Nowadays, you can’t tell a Lexus from a Buick. My favorite thing to do [as a boy] was to go to the dealers when the new models came out in September and just look at them.”

Now he has his own showroom.

Each car, each with a mirror shine, is parked on mats set on the polished white floor, some with battery chargers plugged into sockets. It’s like a living museum, with vintage automobile memorabilia scattered about, including a premium gas pump from a Chevrolet dealer dating back to an era far removed from $4-a-gallon gasoline.

Here’s the Roybal read-it-and-weep list for muscle-car lovers:

• A yellow 1964 Chevy Chevelle SS with a supercharged 350-cubic-inch V-8, Roybal’s collection starter. He bought it in 1996.

• A white 1971 Chevy El Camino with a 454-cubic-inch engine copped from a Corvette.

• A white 1957 Chevy Bel Air convertible with a 327-cubic-inch engine.

• A maroon 1937 Ford cabriolet with a 350-cubic-inch Chevy small block.

• A red custom-made hybrid Corvette convertible with a 1962-style body on a 2000 chassis, making it wider and longer than the original 1962 version. It’s powered by the Vette’s LS1 engine.

• A two-tone green 1940 Chevy hot rod with a 350-cubic-inch V-8.

• A red 1967 Mustang Fastback with a 390-cubic-inch powerplant.

• A red 1970 Vette with a 454-cubic-inch engine.

• A blue-and-white 1969 Dodge Charger with a 383-cubic-inch engine.

“I’ve always loved cars, so you always want more than one,” Roybal said, seated in the garage office. Wood shelves against the walls display toy cars of various sizes and more than a dozen car-show trophies. “I would have 100 cars if I could afford it.”

He goes to the garage every night until about 10 o’clock, “straightening things out” even though things look pretty straight. The place sparkles like an auto-show exhibit hall before the crowds enter. All that’s missing is the new-car aroma.

“I’m more a Chevy man,” Roybal said, recalling the days when American teens favored either Chevys or Fords. “Even the Fords have Chevy engines,” he said of his collection.

Nevertheless, his first car, in high school, was a green, two-door 1957 Ford. But his love is of Corvettes, and his first muscle car was a 1959 model — in 1978. His favorite is the hybrid 1962/2000 Vette droptop, which was built by Classic Reflection Coachworks in Lakewood, Wash., outside Tacoma.

Roybal, whose family goes back 200 years in New Mexico, has owned Coronado Paint & Decorating on Cerrillos Road since 1984 and has been president three times of the 25-year-old Santa Fe Vintage Car Club. His son, Mike, 22, is a budding car collector and attends all of SFVCC’s monthly meetings.

Roybal exercises his muscular engines at least 30 minutes at a time, but he doesn’t roar beyond the speed limit. He drives each one less than 500 miles a year.

“I hate to tear them up,” he said of the cars. “I take them up to the speed limit, but I don’t tear them up anymore. I use a lower gear so the rpms go up.”

Ever get challenged while stopped at a traffic light, the would-be dragster gunning it?

“They look at me, but I won’t do it,” Roybal replied. “I don’t feel I need to do it. I know what I have. If you know you’ve got it, you don’t have to flaunt it.”

Richard C. Gross is a Santa Fe-based writer and editor. E-mail him at drive@sfnewmexican.com.

This article appeared in the June 5, 2008 edition of The Santa Fe New Mexican’s Drive magazine:

The following article appeared in the April 17, 2008 edition of Drive magazine of The Santa Fe New Mexican:

The driving tests they’re required to pass put to shame the notion of civilian driver ‘training’

If you think you know how to drive, try telling that to the New Mexico State Police. They wrote the book about what it takes to be a good driver.

Eliminating bad driving habits and learning motoring skills good enough to be prepared for anything is so important to the state police — a patrolman’s car is his office — that fully one of the 20 weeks of recruit training is devoted to teaching correct behavior behind the wheel.

Why the emphasis? Why can’t a recruit just go with what he or she learned in driver’s ed?

Because the difference between what law-enforcement personnel must learn to be rated as good drivers and what civilians must learn to get a driver’s license is like the difference between driving a race car and sailing down the interstate on cruise control.

Indeed, some techniques used in the teaching of good driving are taken from the world of racing, where the driver must remain fully alert to avoid injury or death.

“There’s always the unknown,” said Senior Patrolman Scott McFaul, 36, a driving instructor.

New Mexico’s 350 to 380 uniformed state cops in the force of 530 — authorized strength is 640 — spend between four to eight hours of each eight-hour shift in their vehicles, depending on their districts, performing duties that range from traffic enforcement to narcotics-related crimes to homeland security, said Capt. Patrick Werick, 41, of the Special Operations Bureau.

“Driving is very important because we spend a lot of time in our cars,” he said. Most officers drive their cars — or units, as the police call them — about 20,000 miles a year.

In the civilian world, driving is often taken for granted.

“Driver training as it exists today among civilians is extremely poor at its very best,” said Tim Sharpe, 59, who wrote the original driver-training manual for the New Mexico State Police from 1979 to 1980 and now teaches driving at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Artesia. He’s been a driving instructor for 32 years, 14 of them at the state police.

“What does it take to get a driver’s license?” he asked rhetorically. “It’s pretty rudimentary stuff. It’s a very substandard approach to driver training.

“We take drivers and vehicles up to the limit of their ability. Civilians never get close to that. They’re never given emergency-type situations. … It would be ideal if drivers had the opportunity to feel the real dynamics of a vehicle. They never do. They don’t know how to respond because they learn in a perfect world.”

Not so at the state police, where an officer is regarded as “an army of one,” said Lt. Eric Garcia, 36, the lead driving instructor at the Law Enforcement Training Academy on Jaguar Drive.

“The idea is to train people so that [good driving] becomes like habit,” he said. His day job is operations supervisor of District 1, the Santa Fe area — one of 12 state-police districts.

“This kind of course gives you an idea of the [safety of the] public — you just can’t blow through an intersection,” said Bryan Waller, 26, of Carlsbad, one of 17 recruits relearning how to drive recently. “The class makes you more aware of your surroundings.

“There’s a million things going through your mind when you get that [emergency] call. You’ve got to be composed. You get that hot call, you can’t just stomp on the gas. If you don’t get there, what good does it do?”

State-police vehicles include two basic modes of transportation: 500 rear-wheel-drive Ford Crown Victorias and 90 front-wheel-drive Chevrolet Impalas. They’re all equipped with engines more powerful than civilian models as part of the “police package” that’s put together by the manufacturer.

The $21,000 Crown Vic interceptors come with 4.6 liter V-8s that put out 250 horsepower and the $17,000 Impalas are powered by 3.9 liter V-6s that produce 233 hp, Werick said. The department is experimenting with two Dodge Chargers with 5.7-liter Hemi V-8s that top out at 340 horses and cost $23,000 each, he said.

The state police try to retire the units when the odometer hits between 94,000 and 100,000 miles after four or five years of hard use. But that’s the ideal because, as with almost everything else, much depends on how much money is available. The budget for vehicle replacement is between $1 million and $3 million a year, but the department could use $4.2 million, Werick said. “We need to replace 200 cars a year,” he said.

Though most American police sedans come in three flavors — Fords, Chevys and Dodges — Werick said his force also has 12 Ford Expeditions, six Chevy Tahoes, including one for a K-9 unit, and 25 Ford F-150 pickups.

But it’s the Crown Vic — the black-and-whites so familiar to everyone who’s been on New Mexican roads — that’s the workhorse of the force.

“The Crown Vics work best for us because of all the highways” officers have to travel, Werick said.

The recruits drive white ones for practice, zooming over an asphalt track laid out behind the academy.

The trainees make tire-punishing twists and turns through narrow sets of orange traffic cones designed to simulate sudden lane changes, sometimes accelerating up to 35 mph. They brake to full stops at intersections and at one point start from a full stop after turning on their flashing lights as if they just received an emergency call from a dispatcher. Screeching brakes are a no-no, a sign of bad driving.

They’ve got to do it under a strict time limit without knocking over any of the cones. The penalty: lying on their backs as a group and doing flutter kicks.

“You’ll hit more cones if you think about hitting the cones,” said Garcia, the chief instructor. “The idea is to do it” without thinking. “We teach them the skills and techniques here, and they have to use them in the field.”

“I drive a lot of different cars, and I prefer the Crown Vic because of its reliability, creature comforts and because it’s well built and well designed,” McFaul said. He smoothly twists through gut-wrenching turns on a practice run at speeds above 40 mph. He doesn’t hit any cones.

The sharp swerving and weaving, the lean-in on the curves that can twist a driver’s body and the sudden braking look like amusement-park fun. But it’s serious stuff adapted from racecar driving so that recruits learn new steering techniques and are prepared mentally for the rigors of emergency responses and pursuits.

The idea is to prepare an officer for any eventuality on the road — for a child suddenly appearing on his bike from between two parked cars, for someone backing into a street, for avoiding debris, for swerving away from an animal darting across the highway.

It’s to train for what recruit Waller, the third in his family to join the state police, termed the “what-if situation. It makes you more aware that you’re not the only one on the road. You have to have a proactive attitude.”

The state police take driving so seriously that officers receive an annual refresher course that includes up to three hours in the classroom and up to six hours on the track, Garcia said.

Seven instructors, drawn from districts around the state, focus on eliminating the bad habits that civilian motorists might not even realize are common to their daily driving — see the sidebar below.

“What we look for in recruits are bad habits and to correct them,” Garcia said. Their vehicle “is their home away from home. We want to teach them their limits. We want to teach them control.”

It’s something that Sharpe, who wrote the book for the state police on good driving, said could be learned better by young civilian drivers.

“Statistically, the young, inexperienced drivers are the most dangerous out there,” he said. “They’re just not mature enough in some ways and don’t understand the concept of what it takes to stop a 4,000-pound vehicle.

“These cars have gotten so nice, so comfortable, you have no sensation of movement. People don’t understand that they can overdrive these vehicles. It’s hard to get people to slow down.”

Richard C. Gross is a Santa Fe-based writer and editor. E-mail him at drive@sfnewmexican.com.

Richard C. Gross | For The New Mexican

4/2/2008 – 4/3/08

If the devil is in the details, then Louis Straney owns one hell of a Land Rover.

“I wanted mine to be typical of a safari-equipped vehicle so it would look at home in Kenya, Tanzania or Nigeria,” said Straney, 61, who spent a month hunting with a camera in Kenya over the 2002-03 new year.

What he’s got is a pristine 1965 Land Rover Series IIA in bronze green on Birmabright body panels, the same aluminum-alloy skin that the British used for their World War II aircraft. It’s attached to the frame with rivets, and the dimples were left showing for authenticity.

Straney bought his two-door Land Rover on eBay in 2002 for $11,000. He didn’t have much restoration to worry about because, according to the selling agent, the previous owner parked it in the living room of his Pennsylvania house for 17 years. The canvas-roofed vehicle on an 88-inch wheelbase has 108,000 miles on the clock.

“I always liked Land Rovers, ever since I knew about them in the ’60s,” said Straney, a Kentucky native who just moved to Lamy from Columbus, Ohio. “I always liked the simplicity of a four-speed, four-cylinder metal box.” Those gasoline-powered four cylinders chug out 77 horsepower and can take the Land Rover into off-road worlds.

“It’s very slow, very torquey — not made for freeway speeds,” Straney said, adding he gets it up to about 65 mph on Interstate 25. But it’s very noisy, with the canvas top flapping. “It’s made for the soggy British countryside or the desert,” he said.

His Land Rover is one of 15,000 exported to the United States in 1965, and today, Straney said, it “may be the nicest one in the country. People who have seen a lot of them say they’ve never seen one in this condition. To me, it represents a different time, a different attitude toward vehicles.”

It won first place in seven shows and best of show in an eighth, all in Ohio.

The original Land Rover was introduced in 1948, and the Series IIA was produced from 1961 to 1971, when it was redesigned. The British army bought them in huge numbers, much as the U.S. military relied on Jeeps.

Straney spent a mere $3,000 over 18 months restoring the electrical system, getting it repainted and adding the details that make the Land Rover look as if it’s ready to set out for Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park or the New Mexico wilderness.

“Places around here remind me of places in Africa,” said Straney, who first visited Santa Fe in 1994 “and just loved it.” “There are places in Africa very similar to the scrub I walk through in Lamy, going down to the train station.”

Then there are those details.

Land Rover built the vehicle for export with the idea that the end user would customize it, whether it would be some Third World army, police having to patrol rugged regions, scientific explorers or hunters and tour guides on safari in African lion and rhino country.

To get his Land Rover into safari mode, Straney bought a 1960s British military shovel at a vintage-gun collector’s show, made a leather sheath for the blade and bolted it to the tire that sits on the vehicle’s hood — or bonnet, as the British would put it.

“A British military shovel is usually mounted on the fender, but I couldn’t stand the idea of drilling holes in the fender,” Straney said. He didn’t bother installing a shooter’s seat on the fender, a typical East African aftermarket addition, he said.

At a flea market, Straney bought a World War II jerry can from a German BMW motorcycle, painted it red and mounted it to the forward wall of the rear passenger compartment. Behind the can, which is empty, is a fold-up U.S. military shovel, a lug wrench and a tow strap.

A rope the thickness of a man’s wrist that came from a batch of ranch gear is looped around the front bumper. It imitates the sisal hemp that was wound around the bumpers of off-road vehicles of that era for use in emergency towing; there were no nylon or steel cables then. Straney never has had to use it.

“I don’t drive it off-road because I treat it as a show car even though it’s capable of doing things off-road,” Straney said.

Richard C. Gross is a Santa Fe-based writer and editor. E-mail drive@sfnewmexican.com.

The following article appeared in the March 20, 2008 edition of The Santa Fe New Mexican’s Drive magazine:

If Bernard Ewell wanted a work of art to reflect his professional life as a world-renowned art appraiser, he found it in the white 1967 Avanti II that has become something of a Santa Fe landmark.

“I’m definitely driving a piece of sculpture,” he said. “When you see an Avanti, you don’t confuse it with anything else.”

The distinctive fiberglass coupe with the black leather interior and worn gold carpet sits hugged on three sides by rock walls outside Ewell’s one-story office building at the fork of Old Santa Fe Trail and Old Pecos Trail — it can’t be missed by anyone driving up the hill from downtown.

“I like to stand here and envision what it was like when you were coming along over the Santa Fe Trail and you arrived at this point and you could see the town below you, knowing that booze, babes and a bath were just ahead,” said Ewell, 64, who lives in Apache Canyon.

The original building dates to at least 1846. The faithful would gather at the fork to greet the archbishop returning from visits to outlying pueblos, not knowing which trail he was taking, Ewell said. They would then escort him down to the cathedral.

The site is an apt parking spot for the Avanti II, a quintessential Santa Fe car. Its original owner was Fremont F. Ellis, Ewell explains, a renowned artist who, with four others in the 1920s, put together an exhibition group known as “Los Cinco Pintores,” or The Five Painters.

“It really is a Santa Fe icon because of Fremont Ellis, who was very well-known around town,” Ewell said.

Ellis bought the car new in 1967 from the brother of one of the owners of the Avanti Motor Corp. of South Bend, Ind., trading one of his impressionist paintings for it, along with an older car. The company had bought the rights to the Avanti, the equipment to build it and the remaining parts from Studebaker in 1964. Ellis’ was one of 60 of the virtually hand-built 1967 Avanti IIs.

Studebaker, a name more than a generation gone from the American automobile scene, produced the Avanti from 1962 to 1964. The maker of sedans and station wagons wanted a sports car to boost sales.

Avanti in Italian means “forward” or “advance,” and the car certainly was ahead of its time because of disc brakes in front, seatbelts and other safety features. The fiberglass body was installed over a steel cage bolted to a Studebaker Lark platform. The new owners added the Roman numerals to set it apart from the original.

Studebaker put its own engine into the Avanti, one version of which was a supercharged 289-cubic-inch V-8. But the Avanti II got a 327-cubic-inch small-block Corvette engine. It was paired to a three-speed automatic transmission on the floor.

About 8,000 Avantis of both stripes were produced, and more than 4,500 of them “are still out there,” said Mike Baker, of Greenfield, Ind., president of Avanti Owners Association International Inc. The club has about 2,100 members worldwide. He said Avantis are worth between $10,000 and $25,000, depending on their condition.

Easing into the driver’s bucket seat is like climbing into the cockpit of a plane; toggle switches abound. A wraparound dash, which glows red with the lights on at night, has eight chrome-ringed, white-on-black gauges that seem to monitor everything but the tire pressure. There are no idiot lights.

Ewell, who moved to Santa Fe from Colorado Springs in 2000, bought the car in 2005 for $15,000 from Ellis’ daughter, Bambi, now 85. It had racked up about 100,000 miles, and Ewell, who drives it maybe once a week, has added only 400 miles.

“I thought it would be a kick to have it,” said Ewell, an internationally recognized expert on the work of Spanish surrealist Salvador Dalí. “I’m a very visual guy. It was really the lines and design of the car. It has a wonderful unified design — the whole thing works visually.”

Ewell cruises the Avanti II on Interstate 25, “but I don’t push it,” he said, acknowledging, “I’m not a car guy.”

“I don’t own this or any other car because it’s a muscle car — it’s the structural aspect,” he said. “When I tell people where my office is, they say, ‘Oh, that’s where the Avanti is parked.’ “

But it might not be visible there much longer. Ewell wants to restore the body because of chips along the passenger-side quarter panel, and the car obviously could use paint.

After the restoration, Ewell said, “I may put a roof over it.”

Richard C. Gross is a Santa Fe-based writer and editor. E-mail drive@sfnewmexican.com.

The following article appeared in the Feb. 21, 2008 issue of The Santa Fe New Mexican Drive magazine:

By Richard C. Gross

For The New Mexican

You may have seen an older dude, with a white ponytail sticking out behind a ballcap, tooling around town in a 1957 Corvette with the top down, summer or winter. That would be Gene Beck. He’s 85. He bought the car new 51 years ago.

“I drive it all the time,” he said. “I always keep the top down, unless it rains. It’s got a good heater. I’ve got a warm jacket, and the heater keeps my feet warm.”

Using the orange-and-pale-yellow convertible as a daily driver might be why it’s on its sixth engine — the other five engines just plain wore out. He and a friend installed the current engine, a 350-cubic-inch Chevrolet V-8 rated at 450 horses, two years ago, modding it further when they put it in.

Beck has no idea how many miles he’s driven his ‘Vette. But swapping engines is no problem for Beck, a mechanical engineer. The Navy trained him during World War II to keep diesel ship engines running, and he served aboard an LST — Landing Ship, Tank — that participated in the invasion of four Japanese-held South Pacific islands.

The newest engine in his Corvette, fueled through a four-barrel carburetor, is shifted by a Muncie four-speed manual transmission that General Motors bolted to most performance engines from 1963 to 1974. Beck dropped it in about 35 years ago in place of the original three-speed.

That’s why Beck’s vanity license plate says “G-Force.”

And the exhaust note growls like that of a ’60s muscle car, as if the Force is with his little baby.

“I’ve never opened it up, but it’ll probably go 130 miles an hour,” he said. “But I don’t even get it out of first gear until 60 miles an hour, and that’s at 6,000 rpm. It probably would do 120 miles an hour in second.”

Anyone in Santa Fe ever challenge him at a traffic light?

“Once in a while,” he replied. “If they do, they’d better be ready for a race.”

Chevrolet built 6,339 Corvettes in 1957, the fourth year of production for the iconic American sports car. The base engine was a 283-cubic-inch V-8 that put out 220 horsepower. Beck’s car originally was what Chevy dubbed Polo White, the only color choice when the Corvette was introduced in 1953.

Beck paid about $4,000 for his, and he says it’s worth about $140,000 today, far more than the 1988 Corvette he bought new on a whim, and has 100,000 miles on the odometer but mostly sits in the garage now.

He said of the ‘57, “I wouldn’t trade it for a new one for anything. I’ve had it too long for that now.”

Beck was born in Topeka, Kan., raised in Anaheim, Calif., and moved to Santa Fe in 1982, when he and his wife of 35 years, Kay, bought a house on Old Santa Fe Trail, where they still live.

What gave Beck the time and ability to cruise around and “goof off” was the money he received from what perhaps was his biggest professional achievement — an invention. He developed a flavor extract embedded in processed foods — like the mint globule in Certs — and the machinery used to manufacture it that’s now used worldwide.

“I wouldn’t say I got wealthy, but I made some money,” Beck said. “I haven’t worked since 1969.”

He originally was a Ford guy. His first car was a 1930 Model A, when he was 15 and still in high school. He bought it for $125 when he was earning 15 cents an hour picking rotten oranges out of an assembly line. Ford built 4.8 million Model A’s, successor to the Model T, between 1927 and 1931.

“First thing I did was put overhead valves on it and dual carburetors, Stromberg 97s,” he grinned. The Stromberg 97 perhaps is the most famous of all hot-rod carbs. “I hopped it up, and it went like hell. It might go 100; it was pretty fast.”

Next came a 1937 Ford V-8 coupe, which Beck also reworked to “go like hell,” then the war years and then, in 1946, a new Chevrolet with a straight six-cylinder and three-on-the-tree stick that cost him $1,460. Then the Corvette in ‘57.

Any plans to sell it?

“I’ll keep it until I kick the bucket,” Beck replied. “I told my wife to bury me in it.”

Richard C. Gross is a Santa Fe-based writer and editor. E-mail drive@sfnewmexican.com.

The following article appeared in the Jan. 10, 2008 issue of Drive magazine:

By Richard C. Gross | For The New Mexican 1/10/08

Oru Bose doesn’t like to be categorized. He moves from architecture to horses to acrobatic flying to tennis to cars with the ease of getting on and off a jetliner. Yet his collection of exotic automobiles has a common denominator: They’re all convertibles.

“I love convertibles because I’ve always been a motorcycle fan — the wind blowing through your hair. It’s fun,” said Bose, 63, a world-renowned, award-winning architect. “They are like moving sculptures.”

Four dazzling cars compete for Bose’s attention when he isn’t traveling half the year to construction projects and between the offices of Bose International Planning and Architecture in Houston, Warsaw and his native New Delhi, which he left for New York 40 years ago.

“When I come back from my projects, I like to detach myself from the business world and play with my cars,” he said.

The impulse to collect the exotic is spurred by Bose’s love of the automobile, beginning when he was a 7-year-old in Delhi and longed for an Alfa Romeo; he eventually owned six of them.

“The epitome of living would be to have the cars as part of my studio, to get up in the middle of the night to polish them,” he said. “It’s a real love affair. It’s not an obsession.”

It’s love when the eye pictures a shape, a bend of metal that seems to move though it is still, when the hand caresses a fender or feels the road through a steering wheel or traces a finger over leather stitching, when the ear picks up the song of an exhaust. The mind melts into smiles.

“Just as I want my buildings to stand out as a piece of architecture, I want my cars to stand out,” Bose said. “I have a weakness for beauty.”

His design studio is in his modest home in Eldorado, where he has lived for nine years with his photographer wife, Patricia, and son, Rajah, 13. His architectural think tank is in a rented house, also in Eldorado.

That’s where he parks his red 1999 Ferrari 355 F1 Spider with its 4.2-liter V-8 guided by a six-speed Formula 1-style manual transmission controlled with a paddle shifter. It’s Bose’s “most thrilling” car.

“For high performance, there’s nothing like the paddle shift,” he said.

Possibly the queen of the foursome sits in protected comfort at Santa Fe Municipal Airport — a sky-blue 1988 Rolls-Royce Corniche II with a white parchment interior. It’s powered by a 6.5-liter V-8 Rolls engine that’s joined to a four-speed automatic transmission. It’s his “most elegant” car.

At home, within spur-of-the-moment polishing distance, are the newest exotics. One is a white Bentley Continental GTC driven by a twin-turbocharged 6.0-liter V-12 mated to a six-speed automatic that can be manually shifted. It’s Bose’s “most civilized” car.

Then there is the white Morgan Aero-American, a limited edition made for the U.S. market. Barely squeezed into the long snout is a 4.3-liter BMW V-8 attached to a traditional six-speed manual transmission. It’s Bose’s “most fun” car.

“Each model represents the best in its class,” Bose said. “The Ferrari is one of the nicest ever made. The Morgan has classic looks, one of a kind. The Bentley is a good example of German engineering and British coach building.”

As a mere 27-year-old, Bose was appointed design director for Disney World’s host city of Lake Buena Vista, Fla., in 1972. His career took off, closing the gap between his taste for exotics and his ability to afford them. An early exotic for him was a Lamborghini Espada. He bought a Maserati Merak in 1975.

Bose “got tired of Disney” but stayed in Orlando, where he founded his own company in 1976 to design everything from apartment buildings to amusement parks all around the world.

One Bose design is the Rosemarie Shellaberger Tennis Center at the College of Santa Fe that opened in 2002.

Despite owning cars that are the stuff of dreams for many auto enthusiasts, Bose said he doesn’t consider himself special.

“I’ve never been wealthy,” he said. “It’s a relative thing. It’s priorities. I lived in apartments even when I was doing well. I think of myself as an average guy. The only difference is that when I see something I like, I go after it.”

Between designs, he made time for acrobatic flying in a twin-engine Beechcraft, auto racing, hang-gliding, skiing, pro-level tennis, equestrian show jumping (he has three horses), motorcycle racing and, of course, collecting and driving exotic cars.

“I don’t like to be categorized,” Bose said, adding later. “There’s a little shade of daredevilness in me. I’m not very good at many things, but I like to try out different things. I don’t have to be the best.”

What’s next? “I would love to have an Aston Martin DBS or a Maserati coupe,” Bose replied without hesitation.

Richard C. Gross is a Santa Fe-based writer and editor. E-mail him at drive@sfnewmexican.com.