Your car and I have known each other for a long time!
Do you feel the same way? On some occasions, you come across the same cars again and again - at meetings, in front of exhibition halls or sometimes even just standing on the side of the road in a parking lot. Some of these cars become familiar to you, such as the Lancia Fulvia Berlina of a contemporary I don't know at all, who uses the car as an everyday car in the summer where I live and leaves it parked here and there in the alleyways. The owner, however, remains a stranger to me to this day.
This also happened to me many years ago with a gray-blue Volvo Amazon station wagon. The car with a contemporary roof rack kept turning up somewhere in my home town of Lucerne, always parked and with no sign of the owner. So I didn't know who it belonged to. So I was all the more surprised when I organized a public slot car drive on an off-stage at the municipal theater, the place was called "UG" or "Junge Bühne" back then - it's been a long time. I brought my Scalextric track with only two lanes, and a friend of a colleague from work at the time, an architect, came down the stairs of the basement bar as support with boxes piled high with Carrera tracks. So far, so good, the details of the evening are lost in the darkness of the past. All I remember is that there was a lot of smoking back then and that I was constantly running around to put the cars that had flown off back on the track. What I remember most is the moment when we carried our streetcars to the cars at the end of the evening: The Volvo Amazon in question was right in front of my black DS at the time! We both exclaimed simultaneously: "Oh, it's you!" We've been close mechanic friends ever since.
I had a similar experience another time with a 1949 Lincoln Capri - a picture of a car, quite apart from that. The car was always parked somewhere in a parking lot at a meeting or in front of a popular restaurant. But I had no idea who the owner was. I got to know him, so to speak, when we lay under his car together and dealt with his retrofitted electric fuel pump, which wasn't working properly. On the way home from a meeting, the Lincoln driver had been stranded on the side of the road a few car lengths ahead of me with fuel supply bottlenecks.
I have even been able to uncover secrets while sleeping: At a big US car meeting in the Bernese Simmental, it was pretty warm on the airfield that served as the venue. Sleepy at lunchtime, I lay down on the back seat of my DeSoto for a siesta in the heat. When I woke up after an hour or two, there was a green 1954 Firedome next to my gray 1953 Powermaster. It was THE green 1954 DeSoto Firedome with a trailer hitch that I had come across from time to time. My pressing question to the owner would have been how he had convinced our authorities to obtain a corresponding entry in the vehicle registration document for his car, even without official information about the manufacturer's maximum towing capacity. I hadn't managed that myself - but I had always wanted to. I then waited until we two DeSoto owners were allowed to get to know each other. No, my DeSoto still doesn't have a towbar.
We are now acquainted, the owner of the green 1954 DeSoto Firedome and I: another meeting at the Swiss Classic World 2021
So we occasionally pass each other by for months and years. But the pinnacle of these "acquaintances with the car instead of the owner" is our Studebaker. I first came across this car as a five-year-old child and then again and again when I went to school. However, I only got to know the owner, or rather her granddaughter as the heiress, 45 years later when I handed over the keys to the car after I rediscovered the car, which still existed but which I had long since forgotten, and bought it for my daughter.
