But the Appia Zagato ads were enticing.
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I went thru Nashville where I called on Bill Pryor--my Europe
co-driver--and we flew up to NYC. We got in late and invited the
stewardesses (those were in the days when stewardesses still looked like stewardesses) to have a late dinner with us at Reuben's. Is it still in
existence?
I knew I was in New York when we all went into Reuben's at
1:30am with our luggage and I told the hostess/cashier that we liked the place so much we were going to live there and she didn’t bat an eye. A couple of the girls invited us to sleep on the couches in their house, and at sunrise and after 4 hours' sleep we took a cab to Grand Central and a train to Rhode Island. The train was in crummy shape, just like
I used to read about. We got a taxi at the station and after the
driver asked some people how to find the town we wanted (in Rhode Island
for pete's sake!) we took off. It was hot and humid and we were tres fatiguee. The cab had a flat. He had no spare. We tried to doze on the hot plastic upholstery for the hour or so it took for a spare tire to arrive. Then we found out we were about 3 blocks from the dealership where the car was!
The car's owner, Dr. Maurice Schlossberg (any relation to Caroline
Kennedy Schlossberg, I wonder) was at Lime Rock or something. I
discovered I’d left my checkbook at home. The guy at the dealership
said "No one is gonna come up here from Oklahoma to steal an Appia
Zagato!" and so I wrote a check on a piece of paper like we could do in
those days. The car did not have a license plate on it, so Bill, an
artist, wrote "in transit" on it very neatly. Also there wasn't a
title, just a bill of sale.
The paperwork completed, as we drove off I noticed the wheel shimmy but it went away over 10 mph. We stopped for gas but the nice old Polish lady wouldn't let me use my Texaco credit card since the card form required a tag number which we didn't have. This took about a $3 bite out of our traveling cash.
Dr. Schlossberg had said the car had reclining seats but they didn't seem to do that, so Bill wadded up his jacket and used it for a pillow to nap as we headed for Nashville. I took a back road shortcut and we stumbled upon an SCCA rally checkpoint!
We continued and got onto some tollroad. It was now evening and we were
very tired and saw a Howard Johnson's motor lodge at an exit. It was an
unmanned exit and required 25 cents and we had just 20 cents in change,
so I threw it in and drove on--there was no barrier. I still do a great
imitation of the horn that went off. It surely had been designed to
embarrass violators. bleaahhhh! The rest of the trip was without incident but as I retrieved a pen which had rolled under the seat as we disembarked in Nashville I saw a lever under the seat cushion. I pulled it and the back simply flopped backwards. Bill could've been much more
comfortable after all...…
Zagato seats
laid flat back, if you could find the lever.
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I knew the car was classified H production in the SCCA, so I had a single-hoop rollbar put in and went to a race in Independence, Kansas. The front shocks were
adjustable with a little brass wingnut on top (the front suspension was
sliding pillar with included shock, much more sophisticated that the
Morgan's system). Running with the muffler and the air cleaner and the
Michelin X tires, i.e. absolutely stock, I got a third place out of five
or six cars.
Around this time George Starch bought one of the show cars, with a wooden headliner held in by chrome bows; it had kickup rear fenders like a Fiat 1100tv. It also had a trick racing muffler that hung just below the driver's seat and had dual outlets right there. Not only was it noisy it gave me a nice buttocks massage at almost any rpm. I got bigger carb venturis and suitable jets and planned to run the car seriously in H production the following year, but it was dropped from the production car list. I mentioned that to Tracy Bird at the SCCA convention and he told me to write a letter but the way I was in those
days I just said to heck with it.
Ann Carr Porter from Clarksdale, Mississippi, standing by Toly's first Appia Zagato at Opelousas, Louisiana, airport SCCA race in 1964.
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While I was off somewhere a friend decided to
overhaul the car for me without my asking. he took it apart and borrowed
an Italian restaurant owner's limo to haul the parts in the trunk. The limo chauffeur somehow got the car and thought the stuff in the trunk was junk and took it to the Nashville dump. Somehow I got the thing back together and swapped it straight across for a Lotus XI climax, complete with working headlights and all upholstery! I raced it once and the owner decided to swap back. I'd put new tires on it but it'd also blown its head gasket so we called it square.
