Today, October 13, 2019, I uploaded three copies of my old radio shows from the 1960s, The Sunday Session. It ran on my dad's radio station, WHEE Radio, an AM daytime-only station in Martinsville, Virginia for about six years.

I started the show I believe around June 1962 as "The Sunday Session of Wheetime". "Wheetime" was an afternoon pop show on the station that ran 7 days a week and, when I started working on Sundays, I shortened the name to just "The Sunday Session". My program continued until June 1968 when the final broadcast aired.

The longest of these recordings was from the show on December 26, 1965, beginning at 1:45 PM and running until 5:00 PM when the station shut down because the sun was going down. Otherwise, our signal would go out a lot further than was legal at the time and mess with other stations on the same frequency. 

I also uploaded two other copies of the program that were recorded in June 1965 and my final show that was recorded in June 1968.

My show was live at first but, after a while, I decided to tape it on Saturday nights so I could spend time with my family on Sundays. The show was recorded in the WHEE studios on Franklin Street in Martinsville using one of the station's two Ampex 601 reel-to-reel recorders and Scotch brand 1/4-inch recording tape that I purchased from Wendy, the store manager of The Music Bar, a local record store, in downtown Martinsville.

The musical selections on these uploads have been "telescoped" out (removed) to avoid copyright issues with YouTube. I uploaded earlier versions to YouTube several months ago and finally took them down because of all the copyright problems. However, the rest of the recordings contain all of the musical intros and exits, commercials, and in most cases, the on-the-hour news broadcasts recorded in the program.

Radio Station WHEE was the brainchild of my father, John W. ("Johnny") Shultz, former Mayor of Martinsville. He, along with his close friend, Phillip E. Hedrick, who at the time was the chief engineer of Radio Station WSJS in Winston-Salem, NC, decided to go into partnership and open the station in 1954. WHEE would be in direct competition with the only other radio station in Martinsville, WMVA, which my father had managed since it began operations in 1942. My dad would run the business operations of WHEE while Phil would take care of all the engineering details and the FCC licensing requirements.

In the 1920s when my father was young, he wanted to join the circus. He was very popular, talented, and outgoing. Everyone who knew Johnny Shultz loved him. I have a separate blog dedicated to him with some nice colorized photos. Please take a look if you like.

In 1938. radio was king of the airwaves. Television was just being invented and wouldn't become popular for another decade or so. New radio stations were blossoming everywhere, in nearly every city and town in America. In Salisbury, North Carolina, my dad was called on to take the reins as the first manager of Radio Station WSTP when it went on the air in December of that year.

Two years later, I was born in Salisbury, NC, at Rowan Memorial Hospital. Two years after that in 1942, our family moved to my dad's birthplace of Martinsville, Virginia, where he had been hired to become the first station manager of Radio Station WMVA which had gone on the air in Martinsville a few months earlier.

I grew up in Martinsville. One of the announcers at WMVA, Paul Zimmerman also had a band that played at many local functions. My father hired Paul to teach me how to play the piano. I wasn't very good at it, but they put me on the radio anyway. Paul's wife, Barbara Harding, ran a local talent show on WMVA and I played the only tune I had memorized, "Country Gardens", on Barbara's radio show. It was my first time being on the air. I was 8 or 9 years old at the time.

In 1954, my dad left WMVA and he and Phil started up WHEE, a new radio station in direct competition with WMVA in Martinsville. Several months later, he asked me if I would like to have my own radio show on the station. I agreed to do it and, at the tender age of 15, I created "Tops for Teens". My voice had not matured yet and it was not much of anything to remember, but it was my first radio program and the show ran for several months on Sunday afternoons.

In the fall of 1959, I left to attend Wake Forest College in Winston-Salem, NC. I did a little announcing at WFDD, the school's FM radio station. One day, another student announcer at WFDD asked me to drive him to WTOB to audition for a part-time job since I had a car and he didn't. WTOB was the local top-40 radio station in the local market and very popular with young adults. When we got to the station, I decided on a whim to ask if I could audition for the job too. Unfortunately for my friend, the station liked me better and hired me instead. I had hit the big time.

I loved working at WTOB. The station played the top hits of the day and was rated #1 in the local market. I marveled at their cutting-edge production techniques, tight delivery, and state-of-the-art production equipment.

One day while I was working my Sunday morning shift, they wheeled in two brand new Collins tape cartridge machines. These were the latest state-of-the-art machines that played tape cartridges that looked similar to commercial 8-track cartridges but were designed especially for radio use. These machines were gargantuan in size, about 3 feet high and nearly as wide. And, in the center of the face of the machine, there was a tiny rectangular slot where a cartridge could be inserted. A green button set the cartridge in motion and a red button made it stop.

Tape cartridge machines were an enormous revelation to radio. Before this, all of the commercials and promotional cuts at WTOB had been recorded on vinyl disks using a 78-rpm lathe cutting machine in a separate studio next to the control room. 78 recordings were immediately abandoned by the industry and tape cartridges became the standard method for playing commercials and promotional cuts. They were a boon to radio stations around the world and enabled them to create multi-faceted sounds for a generation of fast-paced radio production.

When I left the station, I took some of the old WTOB 78 records with me since they were no longer needed by the station and were destined for the trashcan. I'll upload them later here on YouTube when there's time to organize them properly.

After my father died, in 1962 I moved back to Martinsville and began working at the radio station. I was uncomfortable (actually horrified) with the way the station sounded and wanted to make changes. Radical changes. Small-town radio to me was backward, boring, and a waste of the airwaves. My eyes had been opened by working at WTOB. I wanted my station, WHEE,  to sound creative, imaginative, and exciting.

But management said no. In retrospect, they were probably right, at least for a small-market radio station like WHEE with barely 50,000 population in the entire county. The station was making money with its current format. Changing it would have been risky at best. I settled on doing my own show. Naturally, it needed to run on Sunday afternoons, and The Sunday Session was born.

Thankfully, tape cartridge machines had matured over the previous few years. By the early 60s, the machines had become much smaller, compact, and much more affordable. Instead of Collins, Tapecaster and Spotmaster were the brands to buy. Radio stations around the world began to use these machines exclusively to play commercials and promotions easily with just the push of a button.

I built The Sunday Session from scratch. With the aid of the station's new Spotmaster tape cartridge machines, I made my own promotional cuts and show intros, and was really proud of how nicely they came out. I went through my own record library from home to find background music that brightened and enhanced the sounds of the show to make it more exciting, just like WTOB, if not even better. I came up with the sound of a gunshot as a time signature, and I used parts of the station's promotional recordings to create special sound bites to use only for the show.

The two tape cartridge machines in the WHEE control room weren't enough for me to create all the complex sounds I wanted to use with The Sunday Session, so when I set up to do the show, I unhooked the two other machines from the second studio and hooked them up to the main console. Now I had four tape cartridge machines that all ran together to create all the special sounds of The Sunday Session.

For the next few years, I made it my mission to continually tweak and massage the show every week to make it sound the best possible. I took requests for the tunes to play and, when a couple of listeners came by the station and offered their help in answering the phone, I agreed. Thank you, Alvin Jamison. And your friend, the girl, I forget her name now. They helped enormously by running into the main studio with requests that had come in over the phone from listeners requesting their favorite songs. The Sunday Session was a labor of love. I did my best to make the show exciting and enjoyable to my listeners.

I must mention here that I'm very proud of the three young men who credit me with helping them decide to make radio their profession. My hat's off to my close and dear friend, Barry Michaels, who blew me away when I met him in 1983 at the Winter Park Mall where he was doing a remote broadcast for WBJW in Orlando. These recordings would not be on YouTube without Barry's gentle urging. Check out Barry's website when you have a chance at https://www.thebarrymichaels.com/.

Barry Michaels at WCBX in Eden, NC (around 1972).

Thanks also to Reggie Campbell, who also went into the business, and, of course, to my dearly departed friend, Hank Hedgecock, who went on from WHEE to several stations around the country before finally settling in Richmond, VA on a couple of stations there. A special thanks also to Hank's brother, my dear friend, Sam Hedgecock, for having the presence of mind to take most of the pictures that appear on the Sunday Session CD's and the images that accompany these YouTube recordings.

You can listen to these shows at the following YouTube locations:

The June 1965 show is at https://youtu.be/wsaB9AjI688.

The December 26, 1965 show is at https://youtu.be/oBcyWs_iiMY.

The final December 1968 show is at https://youtu.be/0G3OJlOKjOA.

I sincerely hope you enjoy listening to these sounds from my radio show, The Sunday Session, from more than five decades ago.

Thank you for listening!

Rick Shultz
Santiago, Panama
October 2019

You will find another copy of this page at the special Blogspot location, https://sunday-session.blogspot.com/

UPDATE December 2019

My friend, John Franck, webmaster at Mavahi.com has added the news of the Sunday Session YouTube recordings to his site. Please check the link out and any comments at http://www.mavahi.com. Thanks very much, John!

UPDATE: December 12, 2020

I should also definitely mention Canada's Aircheck Archive, a Canadian website owned by Dale Patterson in Toronto. Dale worked at several radio stations in Canada and started a website in 1996 focusing on the history of Canadian and U.S. rock radio. The Rock Radio Scrapbook, Canada's Aircheck Archive, is one of the largest of its kind in the world. The website is at rockradioscrapbook.ca/dalerp.html.

A few years ago, in late 2013, my friend Barry Michaels wrote me to suggest that I contact Dale and send him my Sunday Session shows listed above. I did that, and in January, 2014, Dale put the first one on his website and it was warmly received. He wrote me back:

A few weeks later, I got this:  

Rick:

The numbers are comparable to previous months. Your number-one ranking is quite impressive, especially in that you had strong competition in January from Charlie Van Dyke and Larry Lujack, not to mention the hundreds of other airchecks on the site. Well done!

As I may have mentioned, I divided your aircheck into two parts. Part 2 will be presented later this year and I think it will also do very well.

Best wishes,

Dale

Well hello and thank you for visiting my personal blog!

I'm not sure what I'll be putting in here, but I promise to keep it as interesting as possible. Meanwhile, you are invited to visit my original blog at http://santiagoveraguas.blogspot.com/
where you'll find my latest "News of the Day" articles - these are stories that I've found interesting enough to share with the world outside of my regular email friends.

Welcome aboard!

June 30, 2018

And hello again! 

I've been very busy the last week or so putting together blogs for my grandchildren, or rather, updating them, after having some pains in my chest and going to the hospital a couple of times until I realized that a heat rash on my chest wasn't a heat rash after all but a secondary effect of a virus called Shingles. 

Shingles affects mostly older folks, which is why I've never had it before. But I did have chickenpox as a youth, and the virus from that apparently remains in your system for a long, long time until eventually emerging in about half the cases as Shingles later in life. According to the Mayo Clinic website, "after you've had chickenpox, the virus lies inactive in nerve tissue near your spinal cord and brain. Years later, the virus may reactivate as shingles." And it hurts like hell.

So I figured I was dying because of the pains in my chest so I got busy and started typing away in Elena, Devin and Drew's blogs about how much I love them and wish their father would wake up and realize that he's hurting them too when he doesn't let us communicate with each other.

So, I'm also thinking that I should also put in this blog some personal remembrances of my past so that when the kids finally get around to reading all this stuff, I will have left them something about myself too. It would be a lot better if I could just write them, but their dad won't allow that, so I'll put it here instead.

Here's an updated picture of myself, taken last year (2017) on the front porch of our house in Villas del Sur in Santiago. The tooth I broke when I was about 15 and had capped still looks great, but the others surrounding it have darkened a lot, so that's the only thing I've done with this picture - to fix my teeth. Otherwise, this is me pretty much as I look today while taking a selfie of myself.

I'd love to show you a decent picture of my car, but unfortunately, it's broken and has been for the last seven or so years when during a horrendous rainstorm I accidentally pulled out in front of this dude from David who was accelerating over the speed limit trying to get out of town and didn't realize there was the worst intersection in Panama directly in front of him with me pulling out.

The car really wasn't hurt too bad. But the driver's side airbag deployed and fixing that and the damage to the left front has proved to be nearly impossible after my shitty insurance company wouldn't cover the damages. I left the car at Elsie's brother's house (he's a mechanic) and he tinkers with it every couple of months. He even got it to work a few months ago after bypassing the car's computer system.

Most of the external damage has been fixed but the interior is still in rough shape and, of course, the airbag is no longer there. I still have the shirt I was wearing with a hole burned in it from the explosive charge of the Takata airbag. Yes, this was one of the ones with an airbag that was eventually recalled, although mine probably worked exactly as intended.

But enough about the car. Let me try to give you a short synopsis of my life up to now and how I wound up in Panama.

I was born to John W. (Johnny) Shultz and Ruth Eunice Moser Shultz on September 27, 1940 at the Rowan Memorial Hospital in Salisbury, North Carolina. The hospital was torn down many years ago to make way for the Interstate highway that was built through Salisbury.

My dad was working as manager of Radio Station WSTP in Salisbury and my mother had been working at the Carolina Theater in Winston-Salem at the ticket booth but probably quit that job when they moved to Salisbury from Winston-Salem. It was there in Winston-Salem that they met and fell in love. 

Mom was originally from either Muscatine, Iowa or Humboldt, Minnesota but moved to North Carolina to live with her closest sister, Edna Moser Cook, after getting into a wee bit of trouble and, according to my Cousin Jerry, after having an abortion.

Anyway, dad met mom at the ticket booth and couldn't keep his eyes off her and they were married. Along came me shortly after they moved to Salisbury.

When I was two years old, my dad got an offer to move to Martinsville, Virginia to become manager of Radio Station WMVA. He had been born in Martinsville and gladly accepted the job. We moved there in 1942 and moved into a first floor apartment at 628 Mulberry Road.

My grandmother, Jessie Pedigo Shultz, purchased a house just up the street in, I believe, 1944, at 611 Mulberry Road and moved there from the Staunton, Va. area with her older brother, John Harden Pedigo who was a rather famous retired lawyer having practiced mostly in the State of Washington.

When I was about 11 or 12, my dad built a house at 607 Mulberry Road on part of my grandmother's property, and we left the apartment and moved there.

At about the same time, when I was in the fourth grade at Patrick Henry Elementary School in Martinsville. I was taking piano lessons at home from Paul Zentmeyer, who had his own touring band and worked as an announcer at WMVA. I wasn't very good at piano, so Ruth Pace, the choir director at school, suggested I join the choir. It turns out I wasn't very good at choir either, but I definitely was showing some musical talent, so I decided to join the band.

Every male student in school with any musical talent wanted to play the trumpet, so I did too, and they put me in the band along with about 22 other young men. Ralph Shank, the band director, suggested I try something else, and I took up the baritone.

Turns out I wasn't very good at the baritone either, although I do remember one Easter when my parents gave me some Easter chicks and I loved penning them up in our garage and then chasing them around scaring them half to death, chasing them and blaring the baritone at them and then watching each one fly up into the air and try to escape. (I'm glad that evil streak died out early in my life!)

By the seventh grade, Mr. Shank realized the baritone wasn't my best instrument and he needed an alto sax player in the high school band, so he suggested I try playing one of those instead. My dad bought me a used Paris Selmer (made in Elkhart, Indiana, but I didn't know the difference), and I took to it like the proverbial duck to water. I was good. Very good. Excellent, in fact. I loved playing the alto saxophone and the more I played it, the better I became.

I was so good that The Melody Boys, a high school group that had been organized by members of Martinsville High School and was so good that they were hired to play at events around town, well, I was so good at the alto sax that they asked me to join the band, and I was only 13 at the time! Can you imagine that?  

By the time my senior year rolled around at MHS, I'd accumulated four Virginia State Band 1st Place awards and a whole drawer full of countless others. I had even formed my own band, Warwick Shultz & His Orchestra, after all the rest of The Melody Boys had graduated from high school.

The school voted me as the 1958 recipient of the prestigious John Philip Sousa Band Award and, when I wasn't doing so well with my senior grades, and should have been placed in the class of 1959 anyway since my birthday was at the end of September, it was decided to let me take a fifth year as a senior. This made me eligible for the Sousa award an unheard of second time, and I would have won it easily if I hadn't gone against Mr. Shank's wishes and told the band before they voted that I didn't think it was fair for them to give the award to someone twice. I really did want it, and Mr. Shank wanted me to get it too, but I was embarrassed to take the award from someone else who also deserved it, and I already had one of the awards under my belt, so I preferred to let someone else get it even if I was eligible as a second year senior.

Here a good shot of me with The Melody Boys on stage at Martinsville High School during one of our school concerts. I'm the one closest to the camera standing next to Billy Kirk, on tenor sax, and then Jerry Prillaman, on the clarinet. Terry Mitchell is on trombone behind me and you can see just the edge of Johnny Crews' head as he played his trumpet. You can also see Reid Stone Moore on bass just off to the left in the picture. Benny Eanes would have been playing the drums, but he would have been sitting down, and I'm not sure if Jim Hodnett was playing with us on piano or not, but you don't see him in this picture.

I went on to college at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem. I was going to major in Philosophy and took some classes under an old schoolmate of my father's, but that turned out to be a joke when I found myself with half a dozen philosophy books stacked up on my desk in the dorm and not a single one had been opened. Soon, very quickly I might add, I switched my major to music, and then college was a breeze after that. I played first chair alto sax under Dr. Emerson Head and was featured in a number of concert performances, garnering even more awards at band camps and symposiums while I was at college. I really was pretty good at it if I do say so myself. 


And it makes me so happy to learn from son John than Andrew, my youngest grandson, has taken up the alto sax himself at about the same age I did when I was in Martinsville.

This is a picture that his dad sent me last week of my youngest grandson with his brand new Yamaha alto saxophone. He also sent me the link to a short video and, honestly, he has a very nice tone especially for just starting out. I am so very happy that he is taking up the sax just like his grandfather! ;-}

I had been on the radio a little while at WHEE during high school, so when I went off to college, I got a job with the college radio station, WFDD. And when the top-40 station in town needed a part-timer, I applied for the job and was selected to work the Sunday morning shift at WTOB, the number one station. Later, I took a part time job with WSJS, also in Winston-Salem, but when I left college and moved back to Martinsville, I continued with my radio career and pretty much left music behind for the rest of my life.

In 1954, my dad got together with a close friend of his, Phil Hedrick, a radio engineer from Winston-Salem who worked at Radio Station WSJS, and together they built and opened up Radio Station WHEE in Martinsville.

At about the same time, he had begun to dabble in politics and had run for the office of City Mayor and won. I believe he didn't win a single district, but accumulated the most votes by coming in near the top in nearly all the districts. A remarkable achievement!

My dad had a drinking problem, however, and lost the next election which apparently depressed him greatly.  More to come later.

October 15, 2018

Over the years, I've added videos and soundtracks into YouTube and somehow wound up with two different accounts. I've tried to combine them but wound up being afraid that one or the other would dissolve and never work again, so I've kept them both. 

The first channel is currently located at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNxn8J5XXepLC1hkxFNO2sA

I have no idea how much longer the folks at YouTube will allow me to have it, but it's free, so enjoy it while you can. There's some neat music by Kai Winding and Jimmy Smith that I used back in the 1960s for my Sunday Session radio show, a short film I made in 2009 when attending my 50th Martinsville High School reunion, and a tribute to my great band teacher and friend, Ralph Shank.

The second channel is currently located at https://www.youtube.com/user/rs99cool/featured?view_as=subscriber


There's a nice cut by Art Farmer doing Jubilation which is a tune I absolutely love, and some other stuff I don't know why is there. You have to page off to the right to find some dog videos and a video of my goddaughter Diny from 7 years ago. But the best thing about this channel is the children's videos that I sent to my grandkids several years ago in care of Brenda and John that they never showed to them. That angered me royally, to say the least, but I've since found out that they don't want me to contact my own grandchildren and as much as I've argued and pleaded with them, they won't budge. The videos are extraordinary and I hope the kids get to see them eventually.

A special note about and for my grandkids, Elena, Devin and Drew, who I hope will be visiting this blog at sometime in the future. If you've just found me on this blog, I'm very happy! Please, your individual blog is also nearby, so ... 

Elena, please go to https://elenashultz.blogspot.com/

Devin please go to https://devinshultz.blogspot.com/; and

Drew please go to https://andrewshultz.blogspot.com/.

Yeah, I know that they all pretty much say the same thing, but I wasn't comfortable writing you en masse in a single blog and wanted to make it more personal. I thought it was better to make each of you individual blogs, even if they each say almost the same thing, at least right now.

Please write me before I die!

panama.rick@ymail.com or rickinpanama@gmail.com

Much love from your grandfather!

【ツ】

Me and The Cobra

Here’s pretty much the history of me and my Shelby Cobra. A lot of this comes from the Cobra Registry, courtesy of SAAC Cobra Registrar Ned Scudder who was kind enough to send me a copy of the report on my car. According to Ned, the car is currently owned by Robert Rubens of Homer Glen, IL.

Part I

Around the middle of 1965, I decided that it was time for me to enjoy owning and driving an authentic sports car. The cars that I had owned up to that point had pretty much all been American, including a 1956 Mercury (which I wrecked), 1957 Mercury, 1959 Edsel, 1958ish Renault Dauphine and a 1965 Chevrolet Corvair Corsa. I had lots of information to go through since I subscribed to a bunch of car magazines, so I started combing through them doing some intensive research to decide which one to buy. There were lots on the market, fast ones, good handling ones, expensive ones and some that were really pretty. But, living in a small town in southern Virginia posed a problem. I figured that if I bought a Porsche or Jaguar or anything like that, where would I get the car serviced? I could just imagine the car breaking down and not being able to get it fixed, and the nearest dealer would be some 300 miles away in Richmond or Charlotte or somewhere even further. Then I ran across an article about Shelby American and the Ford Cobra sports car they were selling that was based on an English body from AC Cars in England but had mechanicals from Ford.  The car had even won the 1965 World Manufacturer’s Trophy. That’s the one I want, I said!

The best part was that the local Ford dealer was located just a few blocks from my work. What a perfect location if I ever needed service or parts. I could drop it off in the morning, walk to work, walk back at the end of the day and pick it up. And one of my best high school buddies worked at Mitchell-Howell as a salesman. So the next day I went to Mitchell-Howell Ford and went to my friend, Linney Mahon’s office.  Linney was happy to see me.  It had been several years since high school and we had a lot to talk about. Then I told him that I wanted him to order me a Shelby Cobra sports car. Linney thought I was kidding. But after I assured him that I was not, he got on the phone to find out that the cars were only available from some of Ford’s franchised dealers and Mitchell-Howell was not one of them. However, he did say that he could order the car from Ron’s Ford Sales, the nearest authorized Shelby dealership, in Bristol, Tennessee, and the two dealers would split the commission.

There was a problem though. I wanted the 289 version, but Shelby had stopped making them with the 1965 model.  When we tried to place the order, Shelby's representative told us that there were no more 289's to be had, and if I wanted a Cobra, it would have to be the 1966 427 version, so we went ahead and ordered one in blue with black interior. The price was $6,995.

According to the Shelby Registry, these are the details of the transaction: “CSX3146, was originally billed to Shelby American on 6/21/65. Shelby invoice #A 1496, dated 12/14/65, billed Jack Loftus Ford, Inc. (Hinsdale, IL) for the car, but this billing was later cancelled by credit memo. Invoice #A 1667, dated 12/30/65, billed Ron’s Ford Sales (Bristol, TN) for “CSX3146, 427 Cobra - Blue/black” at a cost of $6,145.00 plus freight, $315, for a total of $6,460.00. The car was scheduled for delivery by rail to Mitchell-Howell Ford (Martinsville, VA) to go to the buyer, John W. "Rick" Shultz.”

I intended to take the car with me to Europe in early January, 1966. Shelby normally shipped the cars by rail fright, but that would not get the car from California to Virginia in time for the trip. So I called my contact, the Shelby-American representative in California, Mr. Dante Cardone, and explained the situation. Cardone suggested that Shelby-American could air-freight the car from California to New York's JFK airport, where it could be picked up in plenty of time for the trip. I agreed, and Shelby-American shipped the car to JFK.  Once it arrived, Linney and I flew to New York to pick up the car at the airport. We went directly to the airline terminal to ask where the car was.  It was pouring down rain at the time.  We were told that the car was parked off at the side of the terminal. They gave me the keys and we walked over in the rain to get the car.

When we first saw the car, from a distance it appeared that the top was missing! We had awful visions of the inside being completely filled with water making it all but impossible to drive. But once we got to it, we discovered that, thankfully, Shelby had snapped the tonneau cover in place which covered the seats. Although it was deeply stretched by the falling rain, the interior was still completely dry.  We opened the trunk and found the regular top, got it out, removed the tonneau, and “constructed” (if you will) the top properly.  

The car had been shipped from sunny California with the tonneau cover snapped in place, but this was New York City in the middle of December, and it was pouring down rain. Thank God it wasn't sleeting or snowing!   If you've never tried to put the top on an English sports car from this era, it’s a definite challenge, especially without instructions, in the pouring down rain, in the dark, in the middle of the black tarmac of an airport, without a flashlight, you haven't lived in this lifetime!

After fitting the top onto the car, we started back to Virginia. It was late in the day and all seemed well. However, just a few minutes after entering the New Jersey Turnpike, I began to hear some strange noises coming from the front of the car. Thump ... thump ... thump ... and then CLUNK! All of a sudden, the left front part of the car simply dropped!  My heart stopped as I watched in amazement to see the car’s left front wheel go rolling down the highway directly in front of us. It rolled slowly and steadily further and further away as we looked on in horror, and then, down at the bottom of the hill, incredibly, it hit the curb and we watched it bounce up into the air above the grass. I found an exit just ahead, thank heavens, and swerved the car to get onto it.  

I could see the wheel, merrily rolling down the hill all by itself, while I we were limping along, following behind it, on three wheels, with the left front disc brake holding up the left front of the car. The New Jersey Turnpike was above me, going off into the distance. The exit ramp was in front of me as I limped along on three wheels, watching this wayward spinning tire bouncing up and down through the grass, up onto the exit ramp, and then down the concrete road, rolling slower and slower until ...

There was a tiny little patch of grass at the end of the exit ramp. I swear, it couldn't have been much more than a yard or two square. A little further away was a service station, ESSO I think. The grass patch was boarded with a curb, and everything around it was solid New Jersey concrete.

I watched as the tire bounded along, right into the middle of the exit ramp. And then it slowed down and spun around about one and a half turns ... and then landed DIRECTLY IN THE MIDDLE OF THE SMALL PATCH OF GRASS!

I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes!  There was a service station right in front of me on the corner.  I pulled into the station, walked over to the patch of grass, picked up the tire, walked back to the service station and asked them if they could put it back on the car. TIGHTLY! I figured that the spinner holding the wheel on the car hadn't been on tight enough.

I was wrong.

Several hundred miles later, on US 360 south of Richmond, Virginia, at 3:30 in the middle of the night the next morning, we were driving along when I heard this CLINK ... CLINK ... CLINK.  The same sound I'd heard before.  S....T!, I said, out loud (not directly though to my friend, Linney, who was sound asleep).  I said it mostly just to myself, as the spinner hit the pavement followed by a WHIRR ... WHIRR ... WHIRR, as the wheel began spinning off the axle and then, while leaving the car, making this WHUMP sound!  Yes, I was on three wheels again!

I carefully slowed the car and steered it to the side of the road, and then walked down the highway to find the wheel, but couldn't find the spinner. There was an all-night diner just back up the road behind us and we walked back to it to decide what to do next. From the phone in the diner (remember, there were no cell phones back then), Linney called the Mitchell-Howell Ford wrecker driver and he said he'd come and get us.

Meanwhile, an 18-wheeler pulled up alongside the car and parked directly in front of it. We started looking for the spinner.  Another 18-wheeler pulled up and parked behind us. He offered to help too.  Then, a third 18-wheeler pulled up, parking BESIDE me.  WOW! I was completely BOXED IN. Protected, so to speak, from God Knows What Else Could Possibly Happen!

One of the truck drivers found the spinner, and we attached the wheel again.  We called the Mitchell-Howell wrecker driver to tell him not to come and rescue us, at least not yet. That we'd try to make it back to Martinsville on our own, and that if we needed him, we'd give him a call.

We started again, slowly, limping back to Martinsville. For the next 10 miles, I'd stop and hammer the spinner to make sure it was tight. Then, I'd drive another 20 miles, stop, hammer the spinner to make sure it was on tight. Then, I'd drive another 30 miles, stop, hammer the spinner again to make sure it was on tight.

It was still tight each time I stopped, so we kept going and, finally, at 7:30 the next morning, we got into Martinsville just as the sun was starting to come up.  There was some damage to the area around where the wheel had come off, but it wasn't much."

Shelby wanted the entire wheel assembly sent back to them, just so they could figure out what was wrong.  They sent a complete new one, under warranty, of course.  It was determined that the hub had been improperly machined at the factory and the hub, brake disc and knock-off spinner were replaced under warranty on 1/10/66. 

When I went to the DMV in Martinsville to register the car and get my title, the gal at the registry office exclaimed that there was no manufacturer listed for a Shelby, Cobra, or Shelby-American. Mine was the only 427 Cobra in the State of Virginia! To avoid a lot of hassle, I registered the car as a "Ford Cobra" and that made everybody happy.

Part II

A few weeks later it was time to leave for New York and our trip to Europe. I would like to have taken my girlfriend with me but she was under 18 at the time, so Jerry Gibbs, a friend of mine from Bassett, and I started out in the Cobra from Martinsville on a cold and snowy January morning.  The snow slowed down soon and we had no trouble heading north on US 360 into Richmond and then on to Washington where we somehow managed to run over a nail. The tire was now losing air at an unacceptable rate and we needed the tire patched. Since the car was fitted with Goodyear Blue Dot tires, I thought finding a Goodyear Service Store would be the best place to get the tire repaired, so we found the closest one in a Washington suburb, and sat down in the waiting room until the tire was repaired. 

I looked through the glass doors into the work area and watched as this very large black dude, upwards of at least 275 pounds or more, was taking the wheel off the car. The next step was for him to “break the seal” so the tire could be removed from the magnesium wheel, and I watched him take this huge sledge hammer and swing it toward the tire.  But his aim was just a little off and he accidentally grazed the edge of the wheel creating a hairline crack in the wheel. At this point, I didn't know if a small crack in the wheel was serious or not. I decided to call Dante Cardone again, this time to ask him if we should just forget about the crack or if I needed a new wheel.  He said it would be dangerous to drive the car with a hairline crack in a magnesium wheel and that I needed to get a replacement wheel (the cost then was $100).  The poor guy at Goodyear had to pay for it!  I felt so bad about that!

The problem was that there was no way Shelby could ship us a replacement wheel before we were scheduled to board the SS United States in New York. So Dante said Shelby would ship me the replacement wheel to the Southampton dock in England, and when it got there, I could drive down from London to pick it up. I had the Goodyear folks put the spare wheel on the car and we continued to New York without a spare tire in the trunk.

When we stowed the car at US Lines, they told us to leave the car and trunk unlocked for the voyage. That was because, they said, the longshoremen were notorious for opening everything possible in the hold and if the trunk was locked, they might break in to see what was inside. Naturally, I figured they would leave everything alone if I locked the trunk, so because I was smuggling two cartons of cigarettes and a fifth of bourbon in the trunk, I figured everything would be OK. Foolish me!

When we got to Southampton, we discovered that the trunk had indeed been broken into. The bottle of bourbon was gone (I’m sure the Longshoremen had a great party with that!), but the cigarettes were still there. Naturally British Customs was there to take a look too, and they were not at all happy about the two cartons of cigarettes that I was apparently trying to smuggle into their country without paying any tax. We nearly got thrown into the slammer!  I told them it was just a mistake, paid the duty and they let us go.

It was getting late and we started off on the road toward London.  Driving the car in England was a blast.  Except at night.  Driving a left-hand drive car on the left side of the road took a bit of getting used to.  But there was a serious problem at night. The Cobra's low beam headlights. They were aimed, of course, off to the lower right so as to miss oncoming traffic in the US. But when driving in England, on the left side of the road, they were miss-aimed, and the beams went directly into the eyes of oncoming motorists!  They were blinded!  They'd blink their lights at me, hoping that I would lower my beams - but they were already lowered! Clicking them upward, sent the beams straight up into the darkened sky, especially because of the heavily banked road.

This situation was much too perilous for us to continue, so we stopped at the next town and spent the night. The next day I drove to AC Cars in Thames Ditton, Surry, to have the trunk lid repaired and to have the lights adjusted for British roads. They were unable to match the Guardsmen Blue paint however because it was a Ford color. The original AC colors were British, not American.  Meanwhile, all the workers there gathered around the car.  It seems they'd never seen one before!  AC just shipped the bodies to Shelby-American in California, but nobody had ever brought one of the modified cars back from the States to England until they got a look at my car that day. 

A couple of weeks later, the replacement wheel arrived from California.  We went to Southampton to pick it up and British Customs wouldn't release it without me paying import duty!  But it's an INTEGRAL PART OF THE CAR, I explained.  We argued for an hour or so before a supervisor came and they finally let me have the spare wheel for my car!

I had intended to take the car on a driving tour of Europe. However, I found that most of the typical pump gas in England caused predetonation in the 427 engine.  With the highest available octane gasoline in England, and some detuning by the folks at AC Cars, the car would run relatively well there. However, I was warned that gasoline on the European mainland was of lower quality and higher octane versions were simply impossible to find. Reluctantly, I left the car at AC Cars for them to fix the damaged deck lid and repaint the trunk as best they could even though the color wouldn't be an exact match.

Our trip back to the States was pretty much uneventful. Driving from New York back to Virginia was nowhere near as much of an ordeal as it had been the first time when the wheel came off, twice. We arrived back in Martinsville without any problems at all. The only modifications I made to the car were to add a fog light and driving light to the front bumper and install a radio under the dash.  No changes to the engine or exhaust system. I did take it out with friends on occasion to show off the car’s acceleration. Zero to 60 actually did take only 4 seconds, a remarkable feat at the time. I remember driving the car on some back roads in western North Carolina and waiting much too long before passing another car. What a showoff, I was. Gunning the engine to pass the other car, going uphill much too close to the crest of the hill, and then zipping by and pulling back into the right lane at an absolutely astounding rate, all to the amazement of the car I passed and the passenger who was riding along with me. But what fun it was to show off that marvelous little car!

I really didn't drive the car much, a little over 6000 miles total before I traded it in in 1970. Eight miles to the gallon was one excuse, and even at 28 cents a gallon for ESSO Premium, it was more than I wanted to pay. And trucking along back and forth just to go from home to work and back again, using all that horsepower just didn't make a lot of sense.  I did take it to VIR (Virginia International Raceway) near Danville one weekend when they were having an event and got it up to 145 mph on the back straight. When I finished my run, somebody asked me why I didn't go any faster. Honestly, to me it was a bit too scary. The telephone poles were going by much too fast for my taste! 

When I would take it to local gymkhanas put on by our sports car club or others in the area, it would just barely beat the Vettes.  Then one day a friend showed up in a brand new Lotus 7, and we all were put to shame. It ran rings around everything else at the event. I was amazed. And embarrassed. That was the first time I had ever seen a Lotus go around a circuit, and I was hooked forever.

In 1970, I decided it was time to fulfill my dream of actually having what I considered a true sports car.  In March of that year I drove the Cobra down to Jacksonville, NC and talked with a salesman from James Robards’ Sports Car Centre, Ltd. Robards was the nearest Lotus dealer and I ordered from them a beautiful little Lotus Elan in Bermuda Gold. No, not a Lotus 7. 

When I picked up the Lotus, I got nearly all the way back to Martinsville and stopped at a gas station. The tank read 1/4 full, but it was only a 6 or 7 gallon tank, so I figured that the reading must be wrong. I filled up near Eden, NC and when the tank was full, I calculated the reading was right all along. The little Lotus had gotten an incredible 40 miles per gallon on the way back. A lot different from the 8 mpg of the Cobra! 

The Elan was much more to my taste than the Cobra. It was everything I wanted in a sports car, it was fun to drive, it got incredible gas mileage, and I began winning my own gymkhanas in that neat little car, even beating my friend who had the Lotus 7 every time!

Update November 24, 2020

I want to give credit for a lot of the history I added here about my Cobra to Ned Scutter, Cobra Registrar for Shelby American Automobile Club (SAAC), who resides now in Vero Beach, Florida. Ned was very helpful in helping me remember that the serial number for my car was CSX-3146 (I couldn't remember if it was 3146 or 3156), but Ned assured me that 3146 was correct. Membership and information in the SAAC costs $50 annually and even though I'd love to pay to become a member, it's just not in the budget during these retirement years. But it's no problem contributing my remembrances about the car to their files in exchange for Ned's wonderful help in letting me know what became of the car after I traded it in for the Lotus.

In 3/70, Shultz traded the 427 for a Lotus Elan at James Robards’ Sports Car Centre, Ltd. (Jacksonville, NC). Later that month, 3146 was purchased by Ronald L. Stafford, of Stafford Performance (Lake Lotawana, MO). Although the Cobra showed only 6,000 miles on it at this time (Shultz confirms that the mileage was accurate), Stafford Performance completely redid the car to what they described as “showroom condition.” Robert Appleby (Springfield, MO) purchased the Cobra for his son, Leon, in 12/70. It was acquired from them in 3/73, showing 22,000 miles, by Bob Rubens (Lockport, IL) at a cost of $7,750. As Rubens recalled, “the engine consumed a quart of oil every 75-100 miles. There was a crude roll bar loop welded between the two frame rails. Fortunately, the loops did not penetrate the bodywork. The roll bar was useless, however, in that it was not tied to the frame fore or aft.” Rubens yanked the center-oiler with low-rise heads and 2x4Vs and replaced it with a Carl Holbrook side-oiler equipped with a Holman and Moody single 4V LeMans-bowl Holley mated to a sidewinder intake. Using 7.5˝ Sunburst wheels and the IL plate “AC 427,” an S/C fiberglass hood scoop and stainless steel side pipes were added to complement the deep Guardsman Blue paint. CSX3146 was exhibited at SAAC-15 (Dearborn, MI) 7/90.

 

Once Upon a Time ...

Somehow I seem to have missed this article that I just ran across thanks to my trusty little smartphone which, again, seems to always be smarter than me.

In 1967 my first wife, Emma, and I were tooling down US 220 from Martinsville (Virginia) where we lived into Greensboro (North Carolina). I don't remember the reason for the trip, but as we got into the outskirts of Greensboro we passed by Rice Motors. Several years earlier, I had spent some time with Garson Rice, the owner of the dealership, and had bought from him a beautiful little red Fiat 850 Spider. Rice had been the local Jaguar dealer for as far back as I could remember, and had begun expanding into other foreign cars, the first being Fiat. They had recently also taken on the Japanese Toyota brand, and as we passed by I spotted on the showroom floor this incredibly beautiful white sports car. I didn't know what it was and told Emma I wanted to take a better look at it, so we turned around and parked in the front parking lot.

As we entered the showroom, a salesman came up and tried to make casual conversation by saying, "Hi, is that your Chevrolet outside?"  This was probably his tried and true way of greeting prospective customers, and I probably would have been nicer and continued on with the conversation, except that I was a little taken aback by being associated with a Chevrolet in the first place (I wouldn't have been caught dead in one), we had arrived in my beautiful (and obviously more expensive than a Chevrolet) Shelby Cobra (which he should have noticed), and third, if I wanted to talk with someone there, I would go see Garson Rice himself, not some lowly salesman who didn't even know what I had driven up in.

So I replied, "No, that's my 427 Cobra...", and with that, he dropped his jaw and pretty much just stared at me, I guess either because he was embarrassed to have apparently insulted us as Chevrolet owners or possibly that he actually really didn't know what a Shelby Cobra was. In either case, he just smiled and we walked on by to look at the gleaming white 2-door sports car in the middle of the showroom floor.

The car was a Toyota 2000GT. Made by Yamaha for Toyota, I was told later that at the time, it was one of only two in the country. It was exasperatingly beautiful on the outside, but the engine was even more so. I had never in my life seen such extraordinary craftsmanship in an engine. In a word, it was simply breathtaking to behold.

I went to Garson's office and he and I talked about the car. Having it on his showroom floor had brought in a lot of visitors, and he was reluctant to sell it.  But he said it had been there long enough, and I was offering him something he needed, a boat that he could use as an incentive for his top salesmen to spend some relaxation time on. 

We had bought the boat several years earlier from Emma's former employer, a doctor in Martinsville. It was a lot of fun, when we used it, but it was a lot of hassle hooking it up to the Thunderbird and then dragging it all the way to a nearby lake to spend only a few hours on it just a couple of times a year. The rest of the time it just sat in my grandmother's garage next door gathering dust, pretty much useless.

In addition to the boat, I was going to give him back his Fiat 850 Spider and my Ford Thunderbird, which we didn't really need anymore if we weren't going to keep the boat. All that added up to the asking price of $7495 for the car. Both of us thought we were getting a pretty good deal. 

The Fiat had been a joy to drive, but after I had seen pictures of another one in the newspaper that had been in a wreck, I was horrified at how fragile the thing was.  It was smashed so horribly that nobody could have survived, from a relatively minor accident. The car was so fragile in fact, that one morning, as I went out to get into mine, I was startled to find dozens of tiny little dents all over the sheet metal. What could have possibly done this, I thought? Well, it was autumn and there were oak trees in our back yard.  Every year acorns would drop from the tree and cover the ground. I usually parked the Fiat in the back driveway, and it turned out that the acorns falling from the oak trees were denting the car! Acorns? Yes! I couldn't believe it. So getting rid of the thing had been in the back of my mind for awhile, and this was the perfect opportunity.

The Thunderbird was a '67 and a nice enough car. I had traded my old '66 Ford Mustang for it, but we really didn't need more than two seats, and Emma didn't drive. Plus having two cars in the family was enough. The Mustang, by the way, was the car we took across the country to visit her brother Billy at the Naval Base in San Diego. On the way back, we stopped in Las Vegas to get married the second time around.

The next day after buying the 2000GT, I went to work at the radio station (WHEE) and parked on Franklin Street just down from the station.  I was met by my dear friend Hank Hedgecock who was brimming with excitement. He said, "Come here, I want to show you something!" Hank had just purchased a brand new TVR sports car and he was so thrilled to show it to me. I said it was very nice and congratulated him. Then I told him I had something to show him as well, and we walked down the street to where I had parked the Toyota. Hank's eyes lit up with a mixture of all kinds of emotions - of course he was happy for me, but I felt sorry because he was also saddened by the fact that of the two cars, mine was the much greater prize.

Years later when our twin sons were on the horizon, I talked with their mother about us needing a family sedan.  There was no way we would be able to cart the two of them around in either one of the 2-seater sports cars we had at the time.  So after thinking about it, I decided that we should keep the Cobra and swap the 2000GT for a nice sedan with a comfortable back seat that the children could ride around in.  So, during a trip to my Aunt Edna's in Winston-Salem, we stopped by Southern Motors, the Mercedes dealership on the north side of town, and I traded the Toyota for a green Mercedes 280SEL that had been on the showroom floor.

The first chance I had, we took the car out for a drive through the local countryside. It was nearing autumn when the trees begin to change colors, so I suggested we drive up to the Blue Ridge Parkway. A little less than a mile before we got to the Parkway, I noticed a state police car in my rear view mirror. I hadn't been speeding or breaking any laws, so when he turned his lights on to pull me over, I had no idea what was going on. We stopped and the officer walked up to my window and I asked him why he had pulled me over. He was very apologetic and said, "I just wanted to get a better look at your car." HA! I told him a little about it and he thanked me and went on his way. What a remarkable moment that was!

All of this is because of the story I came across this morning on my tiny little smartphone about an auction where an identical Toyota 2000GT to mine was sold last year. It was yellow, and mine was white, but other than that, they were probably identical. The story gives some numbers that I don't remember seeing before. It seems there were only 62 of the left-hand-drive version of the car imported into the US market out of a total of just 351 that Toyota ever made. That makes it even more plausible that there were only 2 in the country when I bought mine.  And if mine was one of the first imported, Rice Motors would easily have been one of the biggest dealers for Toyota to add to their dealership ranks.

I also know that some of the first cars imported to the States didn't have the Toyota nameplate. I don't know exactly why, but apparently in the rush to import the car into the States, somehow they forgot to attach the Toyota nameplate. At some time after that, the cars started appearing with the name Toyota, but on mine there was no indication of the brand. The reason I remember this so vividly is because of the laughable story that one time when I had parked the car outside the radio station, and the parking meter was expired. We would always wait until the very last second to plug a nickel into the parking meter to get another hour because putting in a second nickle before the time ran out didn't give you any more time, it only pushed the timer back up to the 60 minute maximum, so waiting until the last minute was the accepted procedure.

So, one day as I watched the meter expire through the front window, and just as I was about to reach into my pocket to take out another nickle and go outside and "feed the meter", a police officer walked up to the meter from down the street and got out his ticket book. I started to rush out, but stopped.  Sure, sometimes you could argue your way out of a ticket and sometimes you couldn't, but at that moment it hit me that there was something special about the 2000GT. It had no mention of the name, Toyota, on it. I waited to see what would happen when the officer needed to fill in the blank for the brand name of the car.

Several of us watched as the police officer took out his pen and ticket book and started walking around the car. The first thing he needed to do was to write down the name of the car on the ticket. He looked up and down the left side of the car, and then he walked around to the back. Still holding his ticket book, he walked around to the right side of the car, and then finally back to the front again. He was exasperated! There was simply no sign of a name for the car. And he had no idea what it was!  Nowhere on the car was the name, Toyota, or anything else, and he couldn't write the ticket without knowing what kind of car it was!

He gave up, closed his ticket book and proceeded to walk further on up the street.  We waited until he was out of sight, and then laughed so hard you could have heard us across the street. It was probably one of the most hilarious things I've ever seen in my life. What a joy to be able to share it now.

In April 2013, an original Toyota 2000GT, exactly like mine except for the color, sold at RM Auctions for 1.15 million dollars:
http://www.roadandtrack.com/go/news/auctions/go-news-auctions-1967-toyota-2000gt-brings-record-price

Wow! Brings tears to my eyes now.
_______________________________________________________________________________

Update August 17, 2018

I was reading an article this morning about the 2000GT in Road & Track and the two custom made convertible (roadster) versions that were made for the 1967 Bond movie "You Only Live Twice". The article says, "most 2000GTs were white or red, but the car looked spectacular in yellow as well. A nice hardtop is easily a $2 million investment today."

Update October 30, 2020

Today I found a delightful article in an Australian magazine (www.uniquecarsandparts.com.au) about the 2000GT. I was looking for anyone who might have the owner's manual for the car since I thought mine was one of the funniest pamphlets I had ever had the pleasure of reading. The article mentions some of the wacky instructions:

"The owner's manual is a gem of demolished English - something you would expect from your latest Chinese made electrical appliance, but not from a car costing more than an E-Type Jag. An example, dealing with wheel changing: "To loosen the hub nuts instal (sic) the hub nut wrench to the hub nut and then drive out the hub nut wrench with the hummer in the tool set, carefully damaging theand disc wheel. Caution. Right-side hub nut is left-handred (sic) and left-side hub nut is right-handred (sic), therefore to loosen the hub nut turn the hub nut forward of the car."

"There are others, too. Like the instruction for back window de-icing. This reads: 'Caution. Off the switch as soon as removing the blur.'"

The only other thing in the article I wanted to point out is that, in my experience, yes the gears were not well suited for driving, but in my car, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd were really tight together and 4th and 5th were, well, waaaaaay over on the other side of town. And with the Yamaha engine not coming on until nearly 4,000 rpm, there was a monstrous dead space between 3rd and 4th and not the "great gap" from first to second as the author in the article stated. However, somewhere I read that there were several different gear ratios available, so mine might have been different from his. 

Oh, one more thing. The cable for my car's parking brake snapped and I ordered a new one from the dealer. I waited and waited for it to arrive and, finally, 13 months later, I got a call from Rice Toyota to bring the car down to Greensboro as the replacement cable had finally arrived. Thank God it wasn't a major part!

Update November 24, 2020

A few months ago I began working for Sports Car Digest and last month I was assigned the delightful task of writing an article about the 2000GT. What a fantastic deal! I get paid for writing about one of my favorite cars! Anyway, the article is at this link and please take a look and send it to any friends so my Google rankings are nudged up a little higher. I'm not sure what good that will do, but humor me anyway, okay?

The link to my article is here: https://sportscardigest.com/toyota-2000gt/

Thanks!

Update November 28, 2020

I updated some of the paragraphs above to include the mentioning of the broken brake cable that I hadn't mentioned earlier after looking on the internet for a 2000GT owner's or fan club and discovering the Toyota 2000GT (MF10) 1967 Appreciation Group on Facebook. The group has 370 members (up from 369 I suppose after I joined it) and I related this section of my blog to the group.

A nice reply from:

Lapere Stefaan

great story 🙂

And the website owner who kindly allowed me in as a new member:

Luc Aellen

Can you remember the chassis number ?

Have you got some pictures to share ?

Rick Shultz

No, nothing. I'm sorry to say that after several moves and an unpleasant divorce, I lost all the paperwork and pictures. I don't know how far records go back with the Virginia DMV but it would probably be possible to find the info. Sorry! 😌

Rick Shultz

I've written the Virginia Dept. of Motor Vehicles a note on their Facebook page asking if they can furnish me the VIN number for my car. (All the listed official site links are bad). Whether their records go back that far, I don't know, or if they would even bother trying to find the information, but it's worth a try anyway.

I did have one more short story to tell about my experience with the car. After owning it for some time, the emergency brake cable snapped. I contacted Rice Motors to get a replacement installed (under warranty, of course). They ordered the cable, and I waited and waited, and called, and they assured me the cable was on order and would be received soon. After 13 months, the cable finally arrived and Rice installed it. I have no idea why it took so long, but am very thankful it wasn't something that would have kept me from being able to drive the car. It was just more of an inconvenience, since my employer at the time was located on a rather steep hill and parking at the nearest spaces that didn't require the emergency brake was a lot further than I liked, but I it was worth the walk to make sure the car didn't pop out of gear parked on the incline.