Cinderella's carriage

Took in the car show over at Pumpkinfest in Port Elgin on Saturday. It offers substantially more bang for the buck than the Cobble Beach extravaganza that happens two or three weeks earlier. That’s because Port Elgin charges zero admission, whereas Cobble is $45 per, if I remember correctly.

Port Elgin is a little more grass-roots. Pretty much everything there drove to Port Elgin under its own power, which isn’t a claim most of the field at Cobble Beach can make.

Port Elgin is where you’ll find a late-sixties muscle car that the loving owner spent ten years and all his disposable income restoring.

Cobble Beach is where you’ll find the rarest of rarities that the doting owner dropped off at a high end resto shop and dropped several hundred thousand dollars on its restoration.

They are both well worth-while.

There was some very cool stuff on view. How about a ’69 SS 427 Yenko Chevelle?

Saw a ’67 Impala SS identical to one I owned; 327 Powerglide, but in blue instead of the beigey-brown of mine.

There was a Rebel Machine in red. First one I’d seen although I’d read there was some built that weren’t the red white and blue of the Machine I owned.

Perhaps my favourite was a ’69 Coronet R/T, plain white, black interior, buckets, four-speed, dog-dish hubcaps… that transported straight back to my late teens. A beautiful car!

Big turnout of Corvettes this year, especially the latest ones, which isn’t very interesting because you can see those anytime you want in the showroom of your local Chevy dealer.

There were a number of older Vettes as well, all the way back to the fifties. One that caught my eye was a ’62 that looked like it was in barn-find condition, cracked fibreglass and all. I remember seeing one just like it back in the early sixties at Pinehurst Conservation Area down near what is now Cambridge.

At the time, my dad worked at Omark, and they had their annual factory picnic out at Pinehurst. Are factory picnics still a thing?

Anyway, I was impressed with the cool cars some of Dad’s coworkers could afford, including a very pretty little ’62 Corvette Convertible. It made such an impression on me that I recall it to this day.

In hindsight, it’s amazing that factory parking lots used to sport all sorts of the high-end muscle cars. Working-class guys were 99% of the market for those cars.

But times changed. Insurance and pollution regs pretty much put the kibosh on the muscle car genre. Then NAFTA came along. Twenty dollar an hour factory jobs in Ohio or Michigan or right here in Ontario became two dollar an hour jobs in Mexico.

Factory parking lots in my home town aren’t that big anymore, because much of the workforce takes the bus. What cars remain in the parking lot are more likely to be fifteen year old Hyundais rather than late model Corvettes.

Thank goodness for progress!