Hershey 2024 by Brandes Elitch

Story and photos by Brandes Elitch

In this brief column, I would like to introduce you to two organizations that are worth getting to know: the Antique Automobile Club of America, and the Society of Automotive Historians.

The AACA is the largest car club in the world, and the Eastern Fall Meet in Hershey is the largest car event in the world. The club was founded in 1935. In 1955 a new group petitioned the club to become a region. This became the Hershey Region, and the first Fall Meet was held then. Things started slowly, but by 1965 there were 1100 cars registered for the show and 35,000 visitors. They were just getting started, and by 1979 over 5000 spaces in the swap meet were filled.

Two years later, the show grew to cover 80 acres, and by 1985 there were 2100 show cars registered for the meet. In 1990 there were over 10,000 swap meet spaces. By the end of the nineties, the vendors took up four fields covering 134 acres, and the Car Corral (cars for sale) covered 15 acres. At that time, it was estimated that 250,000 people attended the event. I was one of them, going with my friend Stanley for a dozen years, and staying with a local family at their house – one of the best experiences of my life.

Today, the AACA has a comprehensive new library and research center adjacent to the show (the world’s largest automotive archive library), and just up the road, a beautiful new museum, both of which are highly recommended if you are there. You can find out more at their website: https://aaca.org, where you can also see pictures of the big show. Today the club has about 55,000 members. They define an antique as a car that is at least 25 years old, so this is a big tent. My two daily drivers (Lincoln Town Cars) are each over 25 years old and they don’t seem particularly antique to me, so there you go. Annual membership dues are only $45, and there are over 400 regions and chapters, so you are sure to find one near you.

It is hard to describe an event this big and varied. The swap meet runs Tuesday through Thursday and the car show is on Friday. I have attended for more than thirty years. To state the obvious, it is all about the weather, but this year, the weather was perfect. Many people have gone to the meet with the same friends for decades (I went with my friend Guy whom I met in 1965 in college, where he drove an MG TC and an XK 120). We walked the fields for about 5 hours each day, and Guy sold some old car parts from his spot in the swap meet. It is good to have a place to sit down.

The Car Corral takes a few hours to walk, and there was also the obligatory auction during the show week, although I do not attend auctions. The program shows all the vendors and their spot and their area of interest. There are food trucks throughout the area and yes, you can get crab cakes!

I should add that Hershey is a lovely town, and the Hershey Hotel is one of the truly great hotels in the country. When Milton Hershey started his chocolate factory, he built a company town which was very successful, and at the turn of the century set up numerous farms in the area to get milk. The farmhouses were run by husband-and-wife caretakers, and about a dozen boys lived in the home under their supervision. The boys milked the cows, and then went to the Hershey School during the school day. In the early days, these boys were mostly orphans, who had no other place to live. Hershey did not have children of his own, and he set up a trust to care for the orphans in perpetuity. Today, there is a modern campus that looks like a university, and the Hershey School Trust today has in excess of $17 billion of assets, whose purpose is “to house and educate an indefinite class of poor children.”

The closest airport is actually Baltimore, although I usually use Philadelphia. It is only a few hours’ drive to the meet, but you should have your accommodations reserved in advance. Hershey is something that I think everyone in the car world should attend at least once.

The other organization I want to profile is the Society of Automotive Historians, which like many car clubs had a tent at the show. The website is https://autohistory.org. The SAH was founded in 1969. The website says the following:

“It is an eclectic community of professional and amateur historians, academic scholars, automotive journalists and publishers, museum and library professionals, educational and cultural institutions, car collectors, and restorers, and general automotive enthusiasts.”

Here I will quote from an article about the SAH by Mark J. McCourt in Hemmings.com.

“That group, now 800 strong, and this year celebrating its founding a half-century ago, is owed a nearly unimaginable debt, for its collective work has enabled…every other serious automotive publication that has informed and entertained readers for the past six decades or more.”

Since the beginning, the SAH has always gathered at Hershey and provided a tent for members and interested parties to meet. The SAH publishes a bi-monthly magazine, The SAH Journal, and a semi-annual Automotive History Review. In addition to their presence at Hershey, they held a conference on Automotive History in the National Automobile Museum in Turin in October, organized jointly with the AHG in Germany and the SAH-Britain in the UK, with sponsorship from FIVA. Coming up in November will be a Symposium for International Motor Racing History in Watkins Glen, co-hosted by the International Motor Racing Research Center. This will feature two full days of presentation sessions including 15 half-hour individual presentations and one round table discussions. You can see that this is a pretty serious group of historians. Most car collectors are not likely scholastic historians, but I suspect that many are.

They have an annual print membership which includes printed hard copies of six bi-monthly issues of the 16 page The SAH Journal and one annual issue of the 96 page The Automotive History Review for $50. If you are interested in automotive history that you will not likely find elsewhere, I recommend that you check out the SAH.

Hershey is an event that you must experience to really understand it. The car show is about as large as it has always been, with multiple categories, including one for Historical Preservation (unrestored cars). As you might expect, it is mostly about American cars, but there are always some interesting foreign cars too. You can cover the car show in half a day. I am not sure that you could cover the swap meet and car corral in three days, but it would be worth a go. There is no formal organization to speak of, so each aisle will be a surprise. To some people, that is what makes it worthwhile.

Hershey in art and images