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Geography Lesson

Posted by Jeff Sabatini

The other day, two things happened to me that seemed incongruous at first, but upon later reflection seemed to be of a pair. The first was that I happened across a garage sale bargain, INXS’s underrated Listen Like Thieves, for just a buck. This is not the forum for debating the merits of this album versus its successor, Kick, which is beside the point anyway. I bought the CD because I used to listen to INXS in high school and have fond memories of the band. (Kind of sounds like the reason a lot of us buy old cars, too.)

The funny thing is that in playing my “new” CD, I remembered how when I was 16 I thought INXS was the most exotic band in the world. This was based exclusively on their being from Australia, which sounds foolish, but growing up in the Midwest during the pre-Internet era, around the time of Crocodile Dundee, Down Under may as well have been the moon. (I still haven’t been there, so perhaps it is?)

Later in the day I had the pleasure of attending Ann Arbor’s “Rolling Sculpture Car Show,” our annual local car event that’s as open and democratic as our beloved city. Parked downtown amidst the many Camaros and Mustangs and freakish crowd-pleasers (like a jet-engine-powered F-150) was a 1911 Ann Arbor. A short-lived product of the Huron River Manufacturing Company, this was a relatively nondescript brass era convertible with three rows of seats. But it had attracted quite a crowd -- somewhat unusual at this venue for a car of this sort. I’m pretty sure the onlookers were not admiring it because it is thought to be the only one extant. No, they were marveling at just one thing: This car’s connection to them, merely through the place of its manufacture.

With INXS playing as I drove home, I got to thinking about how important geography is to car collecting. To start with, we group and classify by national origins: British, Italian, German, etc. On a basic level, foreign cars evoke a degree of wonder not unlike my teenage fascination with INXS. Think of the Anglophile who pulls on his tweed cap before sliding behind the wheel of his Austin-Healey, refusing to raise the top despite a mild drizzle, all in the spirit of his car’s British heritage. Scenes like this are commonplace in our hobby, and though we sometimes poke a little fun at the more eccentric of these collectors, they’re really not doing anything so different from those who reenact Civil War battles or perform in period dress at museums and historical displays. It’s a short trip from geography to history.

Continue further along the path and you’ll arrive at cultural studies, namely the self-identifications we make with a car’s backstory that often influences our interest in other milieus: art, food, fashion, history, language. An Alfa owner may never get to wind out his Spider through the Apennines -- he may never even get the chance to visit the Old Country -- but the car forms his connection to Italy and its rich heritage. The car serves as a jumping-off point for further education and exploration. Of wine and cheese, maybe. Or politics and personality, football (soccer) and family, Roman Catholics and the Reformation. The trails you can trace across history from one Milanese automobile are countless.

Now certainly there are those collectors whose tastes run to “red, with a V8,” but I don’t think they get as much out of the hobby as they could. The cultural significance of the automobile is indisputable, but it’s merely one of many interesting phenomena of the past century. Discovering others in these cultural excursions that go beyond the realm of like-minded gearheads and car guys convening at events like Monterey makes for one of the most interesting aspects of the collector car hobby. Our cars open doors to life outside of our own narrow area of interest, no longer just taking us places, but bringing us the world.