http://clubs.hemmings.com/northcoastamc AMX-Clamation!!!VolumeVolume 17 Number 4 July-Aug. 2008 American Motors Ramblings We Did It! Dale Veverka June 8th, 2008 has come and passed. The “School’s Out” car show now needs to be critiqued. Tempera- tures were in the high 80s when over twenty cars graced the show field including a dozen member cars. Cars included AMXs, Javelins, Gremlins, Rogues, Pacer, Rebel, Hornet and Eagle. One car arrived from Dayton, others from Grandville, Norwalk and a forth from Pittsburgh. Club members traveled from Sheffield Village, Medina, Middleburg Heights, Parma, Ashtabula, Wickliffe, Akron, Bath, Brooklyn Heights and Brunswick. Members with no healthy AMC available showed up in whatever they could find. New members were added to the club. Everyone interested left with a door prize. Food offerings included burgers, hot dogs, potato chips, pizza, popsicles, pop, donuts, pasta salad, and more. We were so busy that the 50/50 raffle never got off the ground. Gary and Debbie Steely spent the night at the farmhouse to help with the final preparations in the early morning. Javlynn Sue and Amber Veverka had cameras full of pictures. Amber quickly assembled a slideshow on her computer that included individual car pictures along with Forrest Barber’s aerial photographs that were taken as he battled wind gusts over the show field. Lessons were learned and additional feedback is needed. Many of the people on hand suggested that a date further from high school graduation time might be better. People seemed to indicate that the show was a success, but… we discovered that the entry fee was actually too low to adequately fund the show. Folks that arrived with- out their AMC rides bought dash plaques. Some plaques remain and may be purchased from the president for a mini- mum $3 donation to the club treasury. Here’s hoping that we have another great showing of AMC cars at the Independence Home Days Car show where the theme is “All American”. We had over a dozen AMCs last year. Contact Information... President: Dale Veverka 6934 Brookside Rd., Independence, OH 44131, Phone: 216-524-5977, E-mail: [email protected] Past President/Club Historian: Scott Campbell 5340 Columbia Rd., Medina, OH 44256, Phone: 330-725-3824, E-mail: [email protected] VP/Membership roster: Shaune Zavertnik 1254 Catherine Dr., Brunswick, OH 44212, Phone: 330-220-7264, E-mail: [email protected] Treasurer: Debbie Steely 701 E. Schaaf Rd., Brooklyn Hts., OH 44131 Newsletter Editor: Javlynn Sue Leair 4904 Edsal Dr., Lyndhurst, OH 44124, Phone: 216-381-7859, E-mail: [email protected] Web Master/Events Coordinator: Ken Walker 8800 Tiffany Dr., N. Royalton, OH 44133, Phone: 216-392-5699, E-mail: [email protected] Deadlines... Sept./Oct. newsletter – Sept. 1 Sept. 1 for articles/Aug. 21 for classifieds Nov./Dec. newsletter – Nov. 1 Nov. 1 for articles/Oct. 21 for classifieds Events…… Ken Walker Weather permitting, every Thursday evening 6 to 9 is Grace Church cruise in night. Grace Church is located at 7393 Pearl Road, Middleburg Heights, south of Bagley road and north of Webster road on the East side of Pearl. Good food at good prices and good company. Out east be sure to check out cruise nights like Annabelle’s Diner Friday and Saturday nights. Annabelle’s is located at 8637 Twinbrook Road in Mentor. Also Saturday nights check out the Super K Cruise in at the plaza located at 9200 Mentor Avenue in Mentor. August 16th from 1pm to 5pm is the Chalet Debonne Vineyards Classic Car Show in Madison. Registration is only $3. Food, cheese, and wine are available at The Grill all day long. A little more up scale than your normal run of the mill car show. It was fun to watch the reactions as people passed by the AMC group last year. August 17 - 21st Annual Motor City All AMC Family Meet at Greenmead Historical Park. SS AMX #50! Shaune Zavertnik At the Holley Hot Rod Reunion during Fathers Day weekend there were several vintage drag cars, one of which was an original owner SS AMX. This is known as car “#50” of the 53 on the registry owned and raced by Bill Ridekoph for the greater Kansas City Dealer Association. Hurst assigned this as car #47. He gave Don and me the honor of starting it for us. Hopefully someday I can figure out how to put this video on our web site. It has a stock oil pan with no cross member cut out when delivered. First pass ever was 11.00 @128 mph, and has run a best of 10.50. This car was ordered in a r/w/b paint scheme for a suggested retail price of $5994.00 (with no warranty of course) and had a shipping weight of 3,050 pounds including the jack and spare tire. Events cond…… August 27 - Woodside Village Car Show – Bedford, Ohio - 6pm to 8pm is a car show at Woodside Village Indepen- dent and Assisted Living. There will be awards and enter- tainment provided. 19455 Rockside Road in Bedford. The Chilson Event in Lawrenceville Pennsylvania is an all makes car cruise in on Friday the 29th and an AMC only car show on Saturday the 30th. The cruise in will take place at the Chilson-Wilcox Chrysler, Jeep, and Dodge dealership in Painted Post, New York. The AMC show takes place at the old Chilson AMC dealership in Law- renceville. The Chilson AMC dealership is a mini museum frozen in time and the Chilsons pull out all stops to see you are well fed. I hear the buffet can sit 90 people at a time. This event is nearly legendary. Some very prime AMC iron has been known to appear there. Can you say Wally Booth cars and S/C Ramblers? There are a number hotels in the Paint Post and Corning area that are close to the event. As Gordy Chilson told me, “It starts when you get there and ends when you leave.” September 13 - American Parts Depot, APD, 7th Annual Car Show & Open House! Lots of fun, food, music, and gifts, plus our annual townwide yard sale! Questions? Call APD (937) 678-7249. Porter’s “Crap” is Our Treasure Amber Veverka While browsing for books at the library, a certain title caught my attention: Crap Cars. “Come take a ride in fifty of the most craptastic cars ever to hit the American highway” the inside flap said. Richard Porter, the 33 year old author and screenwriter for BBC’s Top Gear, and also co-author of “Top Gear”: My Dad Had One of Those, takes some humorous stabs at cars like the Suzuki Samurai, the Datsun B210, and the Dodge Dakota Convertible. Since the cars inside were produced from the 60s to the 90s, I scanned the index for AMCs and was surprised to find that the author had almost as many AMCs on the list as Chevys! Among the crap list, I found the Pacer, the AMC/Renault Alliance, and one of my personal favorites, the Gremlin. The first Pacer I remember seeing up close was Scott Campbell’s. I recall liking it right away, but apparently Mr. Porter has different taste. He jokes that if the Pacer was a cartoon, “it’d be teenage mutant mangy turtle” and ranked it #3 on the list just behind the Yugo GV at #2 and the Ford Mustang II at #1. Mr. Porter isn’t as hard on the Pacer as he is on the offspring of AMC and Renault. Even though the AMC/Renault Alliance took home the award for Motor Trend’s Car of the Year in 1983, Mr. Porter thinks very lowly of it (ranking it #36) and American Motors as a whole. Not only does he say that no one liked the Alliance, he implies that AMC produces the most unattractive group of cars out there. As a proud owner of an AMX, this was a poke in the eye. However, I tried not to take it too personally as I moved on to the Gremlin, my first love. Porter thinks that the excuse for such a car was that in order for the designer to make a deadline for the subcompact and to get home to his wife on time, he just hacked the back end off of it. Ranking it at #15, Porter says, “Sometimes a car can look like its name. And a gremlin is a small ugly monster that causes trouble.” As much as I didn’t like the author making fun of the cars I like or have even driven, I did enjoy reading about where we agreed on the others that made this self-proclaimed crap-car expert’s list. But you can be sure if he made fun of an AMX, I would have used his book as fuel for my dad’s garage stove. No matter what you think about pink cars, they’re really chick magnets. The One I Just Let Get Away Gary Steely Here we go again, Gary makes a wrong turn and guess what happens. On our way home from Kingston, Ontario, Saturday, July 5th, Gus and I were heading into Toronto, just before sunset. The map I had taken off the internet only showed two highways entering the city from the east and we needed to exit the QEW at Route 10 in Mississuga and head north to our hotel. The sun glare was pretty bad and I had let Gus do the driving for a while, needless to say, there were four highways entering Toronto and all had those damn express lanes.