Ferrari Heaven

There are times in life when all the suns and moons and stars line up just right and we find ourselves in our own version of heaven on earth.  Delivering Ferrari and other fine cars for Modern Classic Motors in Reno was about as good as it could have gotten for me at that point in my life.

I still remember the first time. I'd been hanging around Ferrari of San Francisco, supposedly working but since I never made a sale and therefore never got paid, I refer to it as hanging around.  One day my boss asked if I'd like to fly to Reno and pick up a car from MCM, drive it back to San Francisco.  I didn't have to think twice about that. Vern Keil, the Ferrari manager for MCM, met me at the airport, took me to the office downtown, then when we left for the warehouse to get the car he said "have you ever driven one of these things?"  I had, but it had been a long time and a different model. So he put me in the driver's seat and off we went.  The warehouse was a sight in itself -- a huge building filled with new Ferrari's.  I thought I'd died and gone to heaven right there.  Pretty soon, I was behind the wheel of a brand new 308 GT4 headed west.

As it turns out, that was a fateful day for me.  Vern told me they were building a new showroom and would be needing salespeople, asked if I was interested.  I didn't have to think twice about that, either, and when the showroom opened a few months later I was on the staff.  That's when it really got to be fun. There were opportunities galore to drive Ferrari, Rolls, BMW and all the rest of them.  I ferried a few more in and out of San Francisco (tales for another day) but really wanted a chance to deliver to dealers in Denver and Phoenix, whose owners preferred that the cars be driven to them rather than put on a transport.

Months passed, then our Denver dealer came to town and he, Vern and I went out to dinner. After some discussion, the dealer asked if I wanted to deliver a car he'd just sold.  Again, I didn't have to think twice.  "We'll pay your expenses," he told me, "and $100 for your trouble."  I looked at him funny.  "Trouble?" I asked.  He smiled, fully aware that I'd probably have paid him $100 for the privilege.  "We'll pay you $100," he said.  With the deal done I set off a few days later for Denver in a silver 308GTB.  "Take your time," he'd told me, "call us when you get to town."  Surprisingly, after I arrived they asked if I'd driven over to Aspen or taken other side trips.  Such a thing had never occurred to me, but they said I should have taken the time to see all these places.  They wanted me to enjoy the trip, have some fun.

I definitely had fun, although most of the first day was spent on two-lane highways full of RVs and trucks and few opportunities to pass.  When I could pass, I'd eventually have to stop for gas or food and then they'd all pass me again.  I got tired of the leapfrogging game and settled down just to drive, sandwiched between giant vehicles, frustrated.  I stopped at the Great Salt Lake and put my feet in the water just to say I'd done it, but other than that, the desert between Reno and Colorado didn't have much appeal for me.

The real fun came the second day.  I'd stayed overnight in Grand Junction and, as is my wont, left very early the next morning, around dawn.  As expected, the highway was mine alone at that hour and I was able to let the car loose, drive steadily at its easy-cruising speed of 90mph, and enjoy the scenery.  After I reached and crossed the Colorado River the scenery became truly spectacular.  On my left was the river, on my right a big stone cliff, no real shoulder on either side, not another car in sight.  The road was gently curvy -- enough curves for fun, but gentle enough that I could see the road ahead for a safe distance.  I was in heaven.

Then, all hell broke loose for a few long seconds.  Off in the distance I saw a pickup loaded with camper shells and towing a trailer filled with camper shells, sitting in a wide spot on the left, next to the river.  As I watched, it began to creep slowly toward the road and I remember thinking that surely he saw me -- sun shining on a silver car flashing towards him -- and surely, he wasn't going to pull onto the highway in front of me.  I let off the gas just in case.  In the seconds these thoughts took I was drawing closer to him and then, he began to clearly move onto the pavement.  I hit the brakes -- not in panic, but firmly, watching as the truck/trailer pulled at a snail's pace into my path and blocked both lanes of traffic, leaving me no place to go except the river or the rock wall.

The Ferrari stopped mere feet from impact -- no fuss, no squealing brakes, no fishtail or skidding, no bother.  "You want me to stop? OK, no problem."  From 90 mph to a dead stop in seconds.  I think that was when I first began to truly appreciate the Ferrari engineering.  Anybody can make a car that'll go fast.  Not everybody can make one that'll stop so effortlessly from such speeds.  The entire incident took much less time than it takes me to tell the story and I'm not even sure the driver of that truck ever knew I was there, at least  not until I passed him a few moments later, heart pounding, adrenaline flowing.

Soon enough the traffic was with me again and I was playing leapfrog.  This time, there was another player -- two guys in a red Porsche who were also playing leapfrog.  Eventually, we both stopped at the same gas station and they started chatting. They, too, were headed to Denver, mentioned that the road would widen to four-lane past Glenwood Springs and I could turn the car loose.  I questioned the issue of cops and tickets.  They told me to just shadow them, since they'd draw the cops if the occasion arose.  They also suggested that we meet for coffee in Dillon, and off we went.  I stayed close enough that I could see them, but not so close that we'd appear to be racing or together, and we all had a good bit of fun on that stretch of Colorado freeway.

This wasn't the most spectacular run of mountains, but it was the least crowded and therefore best place to park and get mountains behind me in a photo, atop Loveland Pass.

The Ferrari, unfortunately, wasn't happy with the altitude.  When we met in Dillon they suggested that instead of driving through the Eisenhower Tunnel, we take the scenic route over Loveland Pass so I could have a good look at the Rockies.  I hesitated because the car was running so rough, but they said they'd stay with me and be sure I'd have help if needed. They were right about the scenery --  utterly spectacular.  Little did I realize that I'd be following this same path on a bicycle a few years later.

The men offered directions to get me near the Ferrari dealer once I arrived in Denver.  We stayed together until our paths forked, said goodbye with a beep and a wave.  A quick stop at a phone booth (no cell phones back then) and soon I was enjoying a nice dinner with the dealer before hopping a plane home.

Later, I drove two more back-to-back to Phoenix, but that was mostly just flat desert and, for better or worse, nothing of real interest happened.  I do remember stopping at one gas station and having a guy ask, "did you win this thing in Vegas?", and at another, "Are you a movie star or something?"  Guess they didn't see too many of these things in the backwoods of Nevada back then.

Uncle Bill

One of the finest parts of my time selling Ferrari at Modern Classic Motors in Reno was Bill Harrah, better known to those of us who loved him as “Uncle Bill”. Make no mistake, I didn’t ‘know’ him in any sense of the word – in fact, I don’t believe he ever spoke a word to me – but he was in the showroom almost daily. I got to know him mostly through observation and tales told by his bodyguards and the person who’d probably known him longest, the Ferrari manager Vern Keil. My only personal encounter with the great man was a near collision, as I rounded a corner in the showroom one day and ran smack into him. I, of course, apologized profusely. He simply walked away. Vern and others who knew the man told me he was not unfriendly, he was merely painfully shy. Hard to believe, but true.

I heard so many wonderful stories, but there are only a few that I really remember and those are the subject of this story. The first comes from personal observation. When I moved to Reno to work at MCM, workers were racing 24/7 to finish the new showroom in time for a scheduled opening party. It was quite an affair – rather formal (I wore a long black slip dress and sexy Bruno Magli 1940s style open-toed pumps) and elegant. Hordes of local dignitaries were invited, the showroom was beautiful and filled with a shining example of every make we would be selling (Rolls-Royce, Ferrari, Aston Martin, BMW, Peugeot, Fiat & Lancia) except Ferrari. Even though we were distributors of Ferrari west of the Mississippi, the new 308 GTB models were scarce and we didn’t have one to put on display. Mr. Harrah had a bright red 308 as his personal car and since it was on the premises, he ordered that it be brought into the showroom. And nobody said ‘no’ to Bill Harrah.

One of the features of the new showroom was an office for Mr. Harrah that was accessed from a private garage. He could stay in that office, which I never entered, or he could enter the showroom from a door he controlled. Another feature of the showroom was its design. Because BMW insisted upon its ‘own’ showroom, the layout consisted of two round pods connected by a low-ceilinged bridge. BMW had one pod, the lower-priced cars had another pod, and the bridge area was meant to hold a Rolls and a Ferrari. The Ferrari was moved from Harrah’s private garage into the empty spot on the showroom and all was well – until the fire alarm went off, blasting loud and clear throughout the showroom and shop. To make matters worse, nobody knew how to turn it off – after all, the showroom was barely finished in time and I guess this issue hadn’t come up. We had to wait until the fire department arrived to quiet the noise. What had set it off? Heat from that mid-engine Ferrari wafting upwards through the horizontal louvers over the engine to the sensors on that low-ceiling. It wasn’t a mistake we made again.

Another from personal observation played out over the next couple of months. Harrah was known as a stickler for neatness and cleanliness and insisted that the giant service shop be cleaned from stem to stern every Friday evening. The mechanics cleaned their own areas, tools were always put away, then a team came in to do the floors. Made of polished concrete, the floors were washed and waxed every week with huge, powerful machines. Despite a sealant and every other trick the cleaners could come up with, grease stains still showed and this drove Harrah up the wall. Yes, he did check it, every week. Finally, he shut the entire service department down for a week and had the floor covered with glazed Italian terra cotta tiles. Yes, a dropped tool could chip one, but the offending tile could be and would be removed and replaced. The tiles worked – an expensive solution, but he didn’t care. Money was never an object for Bill Harrah. The floors were still washed and waxed every Friday night, but there were no more grease stains.

Harrah always traveled with a bodyguard. When he was alone, the guard rode in the car with him, but when he was with his wife or others, the bodyguards had a little 246 Dino chase car. During his visits to the showroom the on-duty bodyguard would generally come out into the showroom and visit with us and we got to know them rather well. They weren’t goons at all – they were nice men who looked like anybody else, but I would not have wanted to get in their way.

The story of the chase car is fairly well known. When the 246 Dino was first released, Harrah ordered one for himself and one for the bodyguards to use as a chase car. Over time, it became apparent that the chase car was faster than Harrah’s car. A lesser man might have insisted that they switch, but Harrah didn’t. He kept the slower car and made a game of trying to outrun the faster one until his Dino was traded off for something else. When he died I was living in Beverly Hills, and I flew back up to Reno to commiserate with some friends who cared about him. Harrah’s personal cars were cared for at the old MCM, a tiny converted garage in downtown Reno. We visited that garage during my visit, and there the famous chase car sat, for sale. I would have mortgaged my soul to buy that car, I think, but my soul wasn’t worth that much and neither was anything else I owned.

One final story – and I wish I could remember more of these. In between his many marriages Harrah was quite a ladies man. When courting a young woman he would always give her the car of her choice. Most of the time, that was easy to do. On one occasion, however, the woman requested a car that was no longer in production – I don’t remember what it was, but it was some big, flashy Detroit model from the previous year or two, and she wanted it with specific accessories in a specific color. Harrah set his auto managers to work trying to find the car in time for some specific occasion – perhaps her birthday. Finally, they located a decent car with all the right toys somewhere in southern Nevada or California, but it was the wrong color. Harrah ordered the car brought to the Harrah’s Auto Collection, which had one of the best auto body restoration shops in the world. Working around the clock, that team stripped and repainted the car the desired color and Harrah was able to present it to his lady love on time.

He was quite a man, well-respected and well-loved in Reno. He lived his life to suit himself, and while the casinos produced his fortune and fame, his first love was always his cars. The auto collection was the finest in the world, and I’m grateful I got to spend time there, see all those cars, before the collection was sold off after his death. I’m also grateful I got to know the man, if only from the outside.

The Ferrari Kid

I was born for Ferrari. I just didn’t know it until I was a teenager and I never saw a real one until I was 25 years old. It was lust at first sight.

Some of my earliest memories revolve around sitting on the front steps of the old house on Main Street in Cedartown, Georgia “counting cars” with my grandfather. I was very young – pre-school -- so the simplicity of the game matched the simplicity of my age and our lives. In a small town in the deep south in the late 1940s, we had to find our own diversions where we could. With the delight and glee that can only spring from a child’s purity, I would shout out “Ford!”, or “Pontiac!” or “DeSoto!”. As far as I can recall, no tallies were kept so I really can’t tell you where the term “counting cars” came from. That’s what we called the game, nonetheless. In the dark evenings we’d progress to guessing what make the car would be by the sound of its approach. I don’t recall what percentages of those guesses were correct, but that didn’t matter. All that mattered was spending that time with my grandfather, who was the light of my young life.

I also can’t say if these evenings fostered the love of automobiles that was to permeate my life, or if the fascination with autos fostered my interest in the game. I do know that I continued a fascination (my mother would have called it an obsession, no doubt) with the American car that didn’t waver until I was 16 and uprooted once more to follow my career Army father to yet another new assignment. This one was particularly cruel because it presaged my senior year in high school, a time when most of us are unusually vulnerable. It was also particularly interesting because it was my first overseas assignment. We would be going to Germany where, although I didn't know it at the time, my father would be a key player in the first of many nuclear-armed Nike missile sites that would form a shield against the dreaded Soviet Union. In my first act of rebellion against the discipline imposed upon me by my southern birthright and also by my military existence, I tried to refuse to go. I tried to stay with family in south Alabama.

None of this worked, so in the summer of 1959 I found myself in the small town of Idar-Oberstein, Germany. My father was stationed in Baumholder, a very large military base in a very small German town. I’m quite sure I was still pouting and unhappy and refusing to even consider enjoying this new land that surrounded us. Fortunately, that didn’t last long. We would spend Sundays driving and exploring our new surroundings. Mostly, I remember long stretches of thick woods and narrow, twisting roads broken up by quaint taverns or villages. I do remember quite clearly seeing my first “sports car” parked along the side of one of these roads and feeling my heart go right up into my throat. Lust! This was a new experience. Up until now my love affair with autos had been limited to American behemoths, because that’s all I’d ever known. I suppose there were places in America where cars such as these were seen, but certainly not in my existence, which was limited to army bases and small southern towns, for the most part.

The car that started it all. Mine was black, but photo is not scanned. 190SL photo courtesy of automotivetraveler.com

When we passed this sleek little car I had no clue what it was, but I knew I wanted one. I don’t recall if it was that day or on a later sighting that I isolated a chrome circle with three prongs on the the car. Had I even heard of Mercedes then? I’m not sure. I know I didn't recognize the logo and I asked around until I discovered what manufacturer that mark belonged to. A little more research proved that this first love was a 190SL, a classic blend of sleek lines and rounded voluptuous curves in just the right balance. Many, many years later I would own one of these, but for now it was simply the beginning of a lifetime obsession with European sports cars that eventually led me to the conviction that the ultimate of the genre was the legendary Ferrari.

Fast-forward about 10 years and I was walking down Van Ness Avenue in San Francisco one Saturday, on a break from a part-time ‘job’ at British Motors. That, perhaps, is a story for another day. Parked on the curb in front of the Porsche dealer was a sleek bit of gold that stopped me in my tracks. Until this day, I had never seen a real, live Ferrari and I stood on the sidewalk with my mouth gaping and eyes wide as I drank in the sight and bent over to take a peek inside. I jumped like a scalded cat when a voice behind me said “Like that, do you?” I turned to see an attractive older man, who turned out to be the owner of the gold beauty, a 330 GTB. His name was Al and he sold Porsche. Right away, we had things to talk about aside from the Ferrari and soon became friends. I can’t recall with any detail my first ride in the car, but I do remember walking from the bus stop to my ‘day job’ in San Francisco one morning early and hearing a high-toned car horn blowing insistently behind me. Since my southern mother had tried to teach me to be a lady, I ignored the insistent and continuing sound until I saw the car and realized Al had come by looking for me to say good morning. And I do remember the first and perhaps only time I was allowed to drive the car. I remember much more about this car and Al, but their purpose in this story is that they introduced me to the world of Ferrari for real, rather than fantasy.

Fast forward another few years to around 1973, when I was living in Newport Beach, California. Those were the days of the gas crisis, long lines, fuel shortages and theft by siphoning. I had spent a weekend in San Francisco and that Monday morning was driving to work with a close eye on the dwindling gas gauge of my red Datsun 240Z. I’d intentionally left it low while I was out of town, and because of the lines thought I’d take a chance on getting to work then fill up later, when I had time to wait in line. The car had other ideas and sputtered to a slow halt along a stretch of lightly traveled four-lane road that was, naturally, the only portion of my commute that took me outside a densely populated area. I steered off to the side of the road and sat there deflated, wondering what the hell to do now, when in the distance I spotted a car stopped and backing towards me. I watched its approach with some combination of incredulity that somebody was actually stopping to help and a dawning bit of disbelieving astonishment as the car neared enough for me to see the Ferrari logo on its rear.

I couldn’t move. I was dumbfounded and speechless and seriously wondering if I’d moved into some fantasy world where things like this might happen. They sure didn’t happen to me aside from fantasies and dreams. But there it was right in front of my car, big as life, prancing horse and all staring me right in the face. Then a tall man who I later characterized as a cross between Burt Reynolds and Clark Gable unfolded himself from the Ferrari and started walking back to where I sat trying to take it all in. All I could think was "holy shit, this can't be happening." But he was here, he was real and he was outside my window wondering if maybe I was afraid he was an ax murderer.

I forced my body to move, rolled down my window and after a bit of conversation he piled me into the Ferrari and off we went in search of a gas station, where he filled up a gas can and returned me to my car, primed the carburetor and made sure the Z was running well before he left. If all that wasn’t enough, in the course of our search for gasoline our conversation had shown the unlikely coincidence that he and I lived in the same apartment building in a huge singles complex in Newport Beach. We dated and became friends and he had many wonderful Ferrari stories to tell. I never drove his car, which I believe was a 365 GTC, but we had some wild rides in it. I remember going out for ice cream and flying down a stretch of Newport Highway at about 130 mph.

My Ferrari of San Francisco Auto Sales License

By 1976 I was living in San Francisco once more and it was quite a year in my life, for many reasons. One day in late summer I presented myself to the owner of Ferrari of San Francisco and told him I’d like to sell Ferrari. He was fine with that, since he didn’t have to pay me anything, but I’d have to scare up my own contacts because anyone walking in the front door belonged to his existing salesperson. I didn’t care – I just wanted to be there, to hang out with these cars. I got my first auto sales license and thought I’d reached big-time. One day I offered to wax the cars in the showroom – there must have been 4 or 5 used classics that he thought needed help, and I took the paste wax he gave me and began applying it to each in its turn, which worked out quite well. I really didn’t know what I was getting into or how difficult it would be to take all that dried wax film off the cars. I found out soon enough and in fact think the realization set in about half way through the first car. Leaving the stuff on the cars wasn't an option, so with the thrill of rubbing those fabulous cars dwindling rapidly, I struggled for hours, as the men stood around watching and laughing at their little joke before finally stepping in to help. I was exhausted!

This opening led to me working with them setting up and staffing the Ferrari booth at the San Francisco International Automobile Show that fall and from there to becoming a real Ferrari salesperson at Modern Classic Motors in Reno, NV, the legendary holy grail of Ferrari on the west coast. MCM was owned by Bill Harrah and had imported and distributed Ferrari west of the Mississippi for many years. In December of 1976 they were opening a new showroom and I opened it with them. I also latched onto a gig delivering Ferrari and Rolls Royce in and out of California and a few multi-day trips with brand new Ferraris to places like Denver and Phoenix. If you’ve never been turned loose with a brand new Ferrari, unlimited expenses and no time schedule, you haven’t lived.

I never managed to own one – or to like one of the owners well enough to marry them – but my memories will last a lifetime and my heart still goes right into my throat when I hear that unmistakable growl of a V-12 or the tight whine of the newer mid-engine V-8s. I'm a Ferrari Kid for life.