Done Died and Gone to Heaven
Friends may not appreciate being named in places like this, so not;
but yesterday a friend emailed me a piece with pics of engineer Louis Chenot’s miniature functioning replica 1932 Duesenberg SJ.
My favorite body style, it’s a LaGrande dual-cowl phaeton, 1/6 size.
Taking Chenot years to build to drawings from scratch, everything works, even the tiny 8-cylinder engine and transmission.
It is beyond incredible.
Duesenberg went out of production in 1937, but there are collectors’ cars around, sometimes for sale and fetching north of a million dollars.
Unlike most cars, one cannot tell the model year at a glance, because most were sold as chassis, engine, etc. ready for shipment to custom body works for building whatever body the customer wanted.
Apparently a batch were built in 1929-1930 anticipating demand that the Great Depression dampened,
so they were kept and shipped out as ordered over the next several years.
The Duesenberg SJ is instantly recognizable by its radiator and headlamps, but not the year of build.
A 1929 may be indistinguishable from a 1934.
Receiving the email yesterday stirred memories. On a trip to see Joe and Patty some years ago,
Linda and I visited an antique car museum in North Carolina.
They had a Duesenberg SJ.
In 1980, driving from Harrisburg to Milwaukee to participate in a business seminar for the Australian Department of Defence,
I detoured down to Auburn, Indiana to visit the Auburn Cord Duesenberg Museum.
The Auburns and Cords are splendid,
but the Duesenbergs are beyond spectacular.
It’s the stuff of dreams.
If there’s golf in Heaven, and mansions, and baseball, and football,
surely there is a Duesenberg for every soul who wants one.
Why else would they have streets paved with gold, for heaven's sake?
Put me down for a red one to park in front of my mansion.
Actually, I won’t need the mansion, because I’ll be driving my SJ across the LQG cluster at the speed of light over the next four billion years.
That’s practically forever.
T