The Garber boys were all balding by the time they were 20. At least, that’s what their mother said when we moved into one half of her old frame house in Glendale, Ohio. So I wasn’t too surprised when I saw a bald young man pull up in front of her porch in a new car that grabbed my attention. Small, sleek and foreign looking, it was a Jaguar XK 120. In the spring of 1949, it was the hottest thing on wheels in the world, and Woody Garber had the only one in the Cincinnati area.
I had my first sports car ride in that Jaguar. It was painted the rich bronze that Jaguar had invented for the 120, and the interior was a two-tone dark brown and cream. The exhaust was a mellow explosion of power. Patches of bronze were peeling off the aluminum body, but that was a minor detail.
Woody Garber was a successful architect, probably in his early thirties. He never lacked a beautiful girlfriend and he never drove anything ordinary. In that time, when car collecting was something only very rich people indulged in, he was always on the lookout for interesting machinery at bargain prices.
He bought a four-seat 1939 Bugatti convertible. It was a supercharged 57SC with a Gangloff body, built for Ettore Bugatti’s niece. The car was not in the greatest of shape as far as paint and upholstery went, but the straight-eight under the looooong hood growled at idle and then screamed as throttle was applied. On the way to Cincinnati sports car club events, Woody would hit 100 in fourth gear, blower howling, and I would watch trickles of oil running out of the louvers on the side of the hood.
His girlfriend drove a cute silver gray Simca two-seat roadster. It had 1,100 eager ccs, but the performance was less than brilliant. I got to drive it once in a while and tried to keep up with Woody in the 57SC, winding the Simca’s little four way past the rev limit.
We took both cars to an event at the Cincinnati Race Bowl, an oval perhaps a third of a mile around. You could not walk up the banking. One Sunday, Woody demonstrated the Bug’s Cotal four-speed pre-selector gearbox. You chose the desired gear via a little shift gate on the steering column, and the next time you wanted to shift, you merely pressed and released the clutch and you were in that gear.
Reverse was selected by pulling back on a large wood-handled lever on the tunnel. In reverse, all four speeds were still available. Woody did two laps backwards, shifting through the gears and driving one-handed while looking over his shoulder.
After I ran the Simca through a gymkhana course in the dusty infield, Woody wanted to run the Bugatti. I rode with him as he slammed the big car around the cones, roaring up to the finish and leaping out of the car to punch the clock. I leaped out the other side to get a fire extinguisher. The right front wheel rubbed the inner fender on full lock and had set the lacquer on fire.
I blame Woody for stoking the fires of my sports car enthusiasm until they were out of control. Though my first car was a vintage Ford, my second was a British sedan, my third a VW and the fourth, finally, was a sports car, a white TR2. Though I didn’t travel around with Woody any more, the raspy voice of that TR called to mind all my earlier adventures, and its oil leaks contributed to the nostalgia.
In 1990, Jaguar was an honored marque at the Meadow Brook Concours in Michigan. I was company representative on scene, enjoying the festivities and the amazing array of vintage and modern machinery. The cars, displayed in their tidy circles, all glistened. The paint was spotless, the interiors dust-free, the engine compartments lacking any hint of oil. Call them show cars, museum pieces, whatever, they were beautiful, but, like that blonde in the eighth grade, unattainable–always to be admired but never desecrated by actual contact with a human body or a nasty old highway.
Thinking along those lines, I was stopped abruptly by the sight of an old friend. There, looking fresh from the showroom, was the 57SC. No longer faded gray with chipped green fenders, it was all wet-shiny dark green with a contrasting brown leather interior. But it was the same body, the same chrome grab handles topped the seats, the louvers marched down the sides of the hood. The sturdy wooden handle protruded from the top of the tunnel and its partner, the little Cotal shift gate, stuck off the steering column as before.
Always a handsome car, with the restoration the Bugatti had achieved real beauty, and I couldn’t take my eyes off it for a while. But finally I did, turning away while I could still remember scorching down the Springfield Pike in Ohio with Woody, fresh spring air streaming past and those little rivulets of oil escaping the mad but sweet cacophony of that blown straight-eight, screaming as the speedometer needle flirted with 100.
