Category Archives: Dave Hord

Of Women…and Ferraris

This past week an email came through my box that I just had to share. After showing a few fellow car friends, I quickly realized I had stumbled upon a piece of writing that was likely to hit home with every car enthusiast. Whether male of female, if you cherish a vehicle in your collection you can probably relate. The personal, and open nature of the email is what sets it apart from so many. Not only can we relate, but truthfully we can all learn from this too.

The discussion originally started on another event’s email list. One of the members posted to say his Ferrari would be participating for the last time, and he was likely to sell it. A brief discussion on the Ferrari ensued, and then the real truth behind it’s ‘retirement’ came out. The Italian machine was heading to storage, as his wife wasn’t too pleased about the latest purchase…another Ferrari. It was then that Scott Fisher joined the conversation. Whether your garage hosts a collection of Ferrari’s, or simply dreams of a $500 project, you will probably relate to his words. Hopefully, we all learn from them too.

…So a whole slew of years ago, I rode along with a buddy looking at a car he wanted to buy.  His girlfriend was riding along with us, I was in the back seat and we were talking about the car all the way to the seller’s house; she was silent — not exactly an icy silence, at least not until viewed in retrospect.

Well, it was a smoking deal — won’t go into the details (and of course, names changed to protect the guilty and all that) — and he bought it.

And I was then forced to witness the most humiliating chewing-of-a-new-orifice that I had EVER, and have ever SINCE, beheld a woman giving to the man she was supposedly in love with.  It was embarrassing, not only because of the specific and minuscule nature of the demands she made (“and would it KILL you if ONCE in a while you wore a shirt with BUTTONS?”), but because it was being performed in front of a third party.

We rode back to their place, I got in my MGB and headed back home.  On the way I stopped at the local Safeway and picked up a bottle of chilled champagne, my wife’s favorite beverage.  I walked in; she was sitting at the table doing some art or craft, and smiled at me as I approached her.  When I held out the champagne, she beamed.

“For me?” she asked.  “What’s the occasion?”

“Because you’re not Sue,” I said (not her actual name).  I explained the evening, and she just shook her head sadly.

Kim (my wife’s actual name) got many a bottle of champagne over the next 20 years.  Whenever a guy said he couldn’t buy a car because his wife would kill him, I’d be there.  Whenever a woman handed a guy a list of things to do before he could leave the house, I’d be there.  Whenever I’d read a Craigslist ad where a guy was selling his Jensen-Healey to buy a Honda Odyssey because they were expecting their first child, I’d be there.  I’d be all around them in the dark.

Kim passed away suddenly last June, a few days before our 31st anniversary.  Our own daughter even gave me grief for the car I purchased as Kim’s memorial — not coincidentally, a Ferrari, which is what prompted this outpouring.

So goodbye, Kim. I miss you like meat misses salt, and I owe you a posthumous bottle of champagne because our daughter isn’t YOU.

And neither is anyone else.

But it leaves me in a position that is enviable in at least one way.  I’ve faced the worst thing in my life and survived.  So If I ever lapse into a relationship with a woman again, and she gives me the least bit of grief for ANYTHING car related, I’ll have the strength to quietly start putting her shoes in a bag and never speak to her again.

Because if what my friends have had to endure is any indication, there appears to be a never-ending parade of controlling, joy-killing women in the world, but there’s only a finite number of Ferraris.

I’m just saying.

–Scott Fisher

Scott's 1966 Ferrari 330 GT 2+2

The Personal Touch in Retail

By Dave Hord

I had the unique opportunity to grow up in both the pre-internet days, and the post-internet boom. To folks just a few years older than me, I’m one of those “internet kids” who have always been attached to a computer. But, I’m old enough to appreciate the days when one had to use magazines, the yellow pages and a physical store to go about finding car parts. My younger days were spent reading Dad’s HotVW magazines, planning out the parts I would one day buy for as-yet-unpurchased vee-dub.

Fast-forward about 20 years, and I finally got around to buying a Beetle of my own. As is tradition in my family, I low-balled on a bit of a fixer-upper and soon had it sitting in my driveway. Before purchasing the bug, I had spent a couple of months catching up with some magazines, as well as the now-common practice of surfing the internet forums. When it came to actually buying parts for my car, however, I was fully immersed in the whiz-kid world of internet shopping.

It’s difficult to deny the convenience of shopping online. Catalogs expand and unfold with simply a click of a mouse. Should a description be missing, the manufacturer’s website is right at your fingertips. Still unsure about a particular part? A simple search on an enthusiast forum is likely to tell you everything you need to know. For most dealers you’ll even be told before you order whether the part is in-stock or backordered. I live in a fairly small town, and the closest air-cooled parts specialist is a two-hour drive away.  Can you imagine driving two-hours these days to find out a part wasn’t available or sold before you arrived?

It was at least a year that I was singing the praises of easy internet shopping. I could plan jobs ahead of time, order the parts, and know they’d arrive on Friday for weekend wrenching. I was confident I was getting great pricing deals, and always got exactly what I ordered. The problem with getting exactly what you ordered is perhaps we aren’t actually the best judge of which product we need. I over-spent on expensive items where the cheaper option would have been more then adequate. Vice versa, I broke or wore out cheaper options when I needed the better quality option. Have you ever tried to return an item to an online retailer? It’s not always so easy.

About the time that I was starting to see cracks in the internet masterpiece, I met some gents on the Spring Thaw Adventure. They happened to own the local Vancouver VW specialty parts store, and by the third day we were discussing why I purchased online versus locally. In the end, the best reason I could give them was that purchasing from their store vs. online would mean I’d have to pay for shipping. My online retailer offered free shipping for most of my orders. “We can work that out,” Art suggested “don’t worry about the shipping.” With that, I began to order from their shop.

We’ve all heard stories about how things were “better in the old days”. Well I must admit, my experience with buying parts over the past year has me longing for the ‘old days’ where we used to have to get to know the retailers we worked with.

Art, and his brother Rob, have taken the time to get to know me and my project. When I call with a list of things I need, they’ll often have a suggestion on a particular brand and explain why it suits my project and budget. When it came to shipping a heavy rear-disc conversion kit, Rob simply decided it would be worth taking a Sunday cruise with the family and brought it right to my door. Returns on bits I ordered and didn’t need have been seamless, and at one point they even offered to take a return on some cylinder heads I didn’t even buy from them!

I’m not suggesting every retail shop experience is going to turn out as well as mine has. But when it comes to classic cars, I think you’ll find that getting to know the owner and counterperson at a specialist benefits your projects in more ways than one. I only see Art and Rob at the annual car show and a couple of club events during the year, but our mutual interest in similar classics, combined with a mutual effort to get to know each other has resulted in a great friendship. There’s no reason you can’t develop an equally great relationship with your parts specialist just by simply taking an interest in their projects, and their business. Try doing that with a webpage!