Shifting Gears

Soon you will have the entire contents of 35 years of SCM at your fingertips. We are about to unveil a project we’ve been working on since the very first issue was created. This magazine was born in the midst of a revolution in desktop publishing and database management for microcomputers. The database program dBase…

January 6 was the fourth anniversary of my stroke. That day in 2019 started like any other. I was up at 5 a.m., put on my Hoka running shoes and pounded out a relaxed 5k along the Willamette River. I had just turned 68 years old, and I was trim and healthy. Little did I…

Let’s make one thing clear right from the start: A car is only “as-born” once. It can never be returned to that state. Any attempts to do so result in a fictional re-creation, done to please the owner and whatever standards he is aspiring toward. And that’s okay. We can’t go back in time. We…

In all my years of selling cars at auction, I have never had a “miracle moment” where the bidding went far beyond my expectations — until our 1971 Citroën DS21 Pallas sold this past fall. When I saw the car offered on Bring a Trailer in August 2021, I was immediately curious. I had been…

I was recently doing my three-times-a-week stroke and cardio rehab at Oregon Health & Science University. My post-exercise resting blood pressure is down to 88 over 58. I haven’t had those numbers since I was a Juilliard dancer. Mobility and shifting are still challenges, but I persevere. To while away the time during my sessions, I…

The confetti cannons fired as owners Lee and Penny Anderson were presented the Best of Show trophy by Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance Chairman Sandra Button. The swirling bits of colored paper marked the culmination of Monterey Car Week, the largest car-enthusiast celebration in the world. On Sunday, August 21, their 1932 Duesenberg Model J Figoni…

Sixty-six thousand. That’s how many miles cars wearing an SCM 1000 roundel traveled last summer. And we’re just counting the entrants. The tally doesn’t include the dozens of support staff and amazing volunteers involved who kept the events running like a Halda Speedpilot. The SCM 1000 AMG Invitational was held in Bend, OR, in June…

This is all Miles Collier’s fault. I attended one of his early symposiums on collecting. I was the guest of noted collector and Lamborghini expert Simon Kidston. During the seminar, I was first introduced to the notion that we were not owners, but just the current caretakers of our cars. They had a past that…

In the era before Cars & Coffee-style events, it was rare to see gatherings of collectible cars outside a highly organized setting. These were generally semi-formal concours-style events. They started with the early arrival of the entrants’ cars, sometimes before dawn. Cars were most often shown with the hoods shut, so that the overall design…

Fred Amigo lived in a modest house on 28th Avenue near Quintara Street in the Parkside District of San Francisco. You could see the Pacific Ocean from the back of his home. I lived eight blocks away at 20th and Taraval. I first met Fred at an Alfa event in 1969, when I was 18…