The ongoing saga of Billy Bob's collection

[Bill Murray]

I will try to make this short as possible.

Last weekend, I thought to look in a rather odd piece of furniture I purchased some 23 years ago. It is a cabinet that stands 8 feet tall and has 24 drawers that hold standard US dimension 8"x11" paper and each drawer is about 4" deep. It's original use was for storing Engineering drawings for a company that made various kinds of systems for large office buildings. Steam plants, electrical systems etc. There were perhaps 100 such drawings still in the cabinet, some dating to the late 1800's. Fairly old piece of furniture for the US.

Anyway, to now relate to our favorite subject on this thread, Bart Vanderveen and I agreed in the mid 1980's to purge our collections of stuff we no longer needed for either research or publishing in his case. I put the bulk of my collection in large cardboard cartons and worked my way through quite a lot of it and sent him many boxes of redundant stuff or stuff I was not interested in but had just gotten in one form or another.

Bart, in turn sent a certainly equal amount of stuff back to me.

As I was up to my eyeballs in my job at the time, I ended up with a whole bunch of stuff that I wanted to keep that had not been "cataloged" and that got mixed in with the stuff Bart had sent. As it was good materiel, I stuffed it in the drawers of the above mentioned cabinet with the idea of sorting it all out at some point in time. Well, that time never seemed to come and it just lay there.

Years have now passed and that cabinet sat there unmolested for almost 20 years. A side note, I had used it earlier to store some other stuff and never changed the tags I put on each drawer to indicate that something different was in some of the drawers.

Why I do not know, I got the urge to look into that cabinet and found 8 drawers were full of the stuff mentioned above. That is where the Guy and Staff Car stuff is coming from. And a lot more than that.

Life is good sometimes.
Bill

[cliff]

Darn wish I lived closer I would shift my puter to your house and scan the lot to disk for you (and me of course LOL )

[Bill Murray]

Cliff:

You have no idea how close Pat and I are coming to some sort of divorce over this whole issue. Not just that I have started my pursuit of the hobby after so many years but now all these new discoveries and the fact that I have a scanner, albeit a very poor quality one.


What is really frightening to me is I have more or less twenty cardboard boxes of stuff in the basement that I have not opened and another similar amount of boxes in a loft over our garage that I have also not looked into.

For sure, a lot of those will contain normal stuff that I got that covers a lot of postwar vehicles, both military and civilian that I did not even bother to catalog. On the other hand it may be that more treasures await me.

Since text does not seem to eat up much bandwidth, let me mention that I collected not only military vehicle stuff but also anything I could find on such subjects as limousines, hearses, fire trucks, taxis, police vehicles and perhaps more volume related, anything I could find on the subject of US oriented/origin vehicles sold overseas, in this case normal civilian cars and trucks.

Some other things that I just unearthed are a run of the South African magazine titled "Car" from the 1950's to the 1970's and similar type runs of magazines from Sweden, Finland, England, Italy and France. Not too much use for forums such as this one but at some point I hope someone can get some benefit from all of this stuff.

Time for bed. If you have a really good scanner and a cheap airline ticket, we have a spare bedroom if you wish to camp out with us for a while.
Bill

[David_Hayward (RIP)]

Bill, those old issues of CAR might be worth something! They often have unique Road Tests of rhd N American cars and they appeal to people like me who [used to] be really excited about the SA assembly operations.

[Bill Murray]

Neat Ford, 1937 I suspect, as a canteen wagon
It is from an obscure Dutch magazine from the 1970s, but I am not sure if it is an actual British vehicle or Dutch. I can translate the caption pretty well but I cannot identify the uniforms.
Perhaps one of the family can clarify what country it belongs to.
Bill