Not Again

Having no place to display them, I quit collecting old car models several years ago. They need to be behind glass, because left sitting out, keeping them dusted becomes a major thing, and with every dusting there’s risk of breaking something. So, I’ve given several to Ryan for birthday and Christmas gifts. But other than a Chevy pickup truck that’s out to hold paperclips in the truck bed, and a Chrysler Airflow, the rest are in a cabinet here in our family room, seldom thought of, never seen.  

One of my favorite scale model cars is an early thirties Marmon sedan. Marmon dates back into the nineteenth century when they manufactured milling equipment, and the name is still alive today, the Marmon Group, a holding company. In the early days of automobiles, Howard Marmon brought out cars that came to be admired for quality and reliability. 

Just about the time the Great Depression came along, Marmon was developing a V-16 engine and was ready to introduce it, but Cadillac beat them to market with the first V-16. 

Both company’s V-16s were two straight-eight engines put together to a single crankcase, and requiring such things as separate tuning and then synchronizing them to run smoothly as a unit.

Through the 1930s Cadillac had two iterations of their V-16, first a flat head then a valve in head. The Marmon Sixteen was only offered a couple of years. Marmon car production ceased two years before I was born, with the 1933 model, and less than 400 Marmon Sixteens were produced. The company was wiped out by the worst year of the Great Depression.

My toy scale model is as close as I’m likely ever to get to a Marmon unless I find one in a museum. 

Anyone who scans my blog may realize this is a scanty post. That’s because halfway through writing about Marmon cars I realized that I’ve BTDT recently, so backed off and started over, because NSA spies are watching my blog post, eager to dispatch the Bug Wagon to pick me up for committal soon as my posts display the next stage of dementia. Just because I’m paranoid, that doesn’t meant they’re not out to get me.

Anon.