OK, you’ve decided to join the Porsche Club of America, (AKA: the PCA) and registered with their local region (there are some 50 or more national regions) in the USA. How VERY nice for you! You’ve got a nice 1970-1976 Porsche-VW Typ 47, otherwise known as the ubiquitous 914, that came in four cylinder and six cylinder versions, and you’re interested in what the PCA has to offer in terms of activities, socializing opportunities and so forth. Perhaps you’re more interested in learning about the care and feeding of your 50 year old German sportscar?

Oh really? Well, bunkies, let me give you the low-down on the Porsche Club of America, soon to be celebrating its 70th anniversary.

First of all, the kinder & gentler days of vintage 50s'ish sportscars are over and done with. Porsches first came to the United States back in the immediate post-war era year of 1949, when a couple of the slick little two-seat sports machines were brought to America for the first time. Think of it, if it helps, as someone sitting on the edge of a vast, salt-water swimming pool (such as the famous Fleischacker Pool in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park) measuring 1000 by 150 feet (that’s 300 by 50 meters, for you Europhiles).

[The below description is taken from Wikipedia, in case anyone wonders.]

“Fleishhacker Pool was a public saltwater swimming pool complex, located in the southwest corner of San Francisco, California, United States, next to the San Francisco Zoo at Sloat Boulevard and the Great Highway (in Golden Gate Park). Upon its completion in 1925, it was one of the largest outdoor swimming pools in the world and remained open for more than four decades until its closure in 1971. In 2000 it was demolished and entirely filled in with rocks and gravel, ultimately destined to become a large asphalted parking lot.

“The water was provided by a series of pumps and piping at high tide, directly from the Pacific Ocean 650 feet (200 m) away, filtered, and heated. The pool's heater could warm 2,800 US gallons (11,000 L) of seawater from 60 to 75 °F (16 to 24 °C) each minute, in theory providing a constant pool water temperature of 72 °F (22 °C),[3] though in practice it tended to vary between 65 and 75 °F (18 and 24 °C), which was sometimes too cold for comfortable swimming.”

Too cold for swimming? I should hope to SHOUT it was too cold for that purpose, since the heater system progressively failed (like most ‘progressive’ things, LoL) over the course of its erstwhile life and eventually, after the pool was converted to freshwater in 1972, remained pretty much a constant, frigid 60 degrees.

Now I don’t know if any of you reading this were ever on a high school swim team like me, but our sadistic coach believed that his team swam best at such ‘unheated’ temps, since it was so cold that you couldn’t wait to finish the race and remove yourself from the water ASAP! He was right, of course, as the pointy nipples of all the female swimmers quickly testified, hidden only by the flimsy wisps of the Nylon tanksuits they wore.

For our part (the guys), thoughts of sex and gorgeous girls’ bodies was about as far away as we were from the moon in that water, since a certain prominant part of our lower anatomy promptly did a disappearing act (not unlike that of a submarine), shortly after we hit the ice forming on the surface of the school’s pool at the start of a race!

For the sake of comparison, Fleischaker Pool was situated only 200 yards from the always blustery and fog-shrouded waters just off San Francisco’s Great Ocean Beach on the western side of the peninsula, where the average Pacific Ocean littoral temp was typically about 53 degrees or so, year-round! Yow!

But getting back to my analogy of someone sitting on the edge of a great expanse of freezing water like that, being a modern-day, PCA card-carrying Porschophile looks a lot better viewed from outside such a club than actually being in it. And so it was (and is) with the PCA.

The problem is that from that modest start, the marque that is Porsche quickly grew from a small group of quirky, like-minded Euro-car buffs who could afford the $2950 admission price that buying an early Porsche 356A roadster set them back (that’s about $35,000 in 2024 dollars), to today’s iteration, wherein an admit ticket will plunge you into debt roughly anywhere from $50 thou all the way up to the mid-6-figures (for the latest Porsche Wunderautos).

In fact, Porsche quickly established itself as a kiddie playground for upper-middle class, white collar working stiffs, with a top-heavy admixture of occupations such as doctors of medicine, attorneys, politicians, corporate CEOs and wealthy businessmen on the one hand, to pimps, drug-dealers, Hollywood celebrities and cartel ‘bad-boys’ lower down on the other end of the scale.

In so many words, if you wanted to be a ‘player’, you had to also be a 'payer'…and pay…and pay…and so forth.

That is, today, the sorry state of the Porsche Club of America, a poor-man's Bohemian Club where just uttering the magic word ‘Porsche’ rings someone’s quantum cash-register, somewhere (that’s that weird, muted ‘KA-CHING, KA-CHING’ sound you seem to keep hearing on the breeze, whenever there’s a Porsche in the vicinity).

Of course, PCA regions vary one from the other almost as regularly as do people and Mid-West, East Coast and Southern California regions reflect their variegated and vastly differing regional demographics…much as the US Census does.

First of all, most Americans have been conned, beguiled or socialised into the ‘new-car’ consumer cult, if one’s personal salary stats permit such hundred-thousand dollar-plus extravagances (after mortgage payment, health insurance and family expenses are all met) required by owning the latest Wunderwaffe P-Car from Stuttgart.

I won’t bore you with specifics and technical details of all the latest 911, Cayman, Boxter, Cayenne, etc., models that can make just about any mouth salivate like Pavlov’s dog. Suffice it to say that they bear about as much resemblance to the Porsche Grosser-Grossvater of all subsequent Porsches (the 356A), as Kamala Harris does to a genuine black American with Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. certified Southern roots (that is to say, ZILCH), or Joe Biden does to Wernher von Braun (even ZILCHI’ER). Think F-35 stealth fighter and Sopwith Camel, here.

But when a car (that is really only a slightly milder, street-legal FIA race car) has anywhere from 300 to 800 BHP and a top-end speed of in excess of 200 mph, we’re no longer talking about streetability and practical transportation, are we? The early 50s Porsche 356, which was pretty much a sexed-up Volkswagen 4-banger with a fancy bodywork package, used to be able to be purchased used for less than a thousand dollars and fixed up in the home garage for the price of a jar of peanuts.

That quickly changed, and today buying a Porsche supercar for 6-figures is just the start of the game; it helps immeasurably if you have a live-in personal mechanic on immediate 24-hour-call-back and can afford an auto insurance policy that is equal in cost to the California State Governor’s annual salary.

And so we have the modern PCA, which publishes a monthly, 170+ page slick magazine, two-thirds of which is filled virtually wall-to-wall with advertisements by dedicated Porsche after-market specialty shops, selling a range of costly high-performance toys and performance upgrades for your P-car that would make your eyes water.

But back to reality. My reality, at least, as a retired, formerly fairly-well-off world adventurer who has worn many professional hats in various places around the world, but who remains now mostly a pensioner of modest means with a fixed monthly income.

I presently have a 1974 VW-Porsche 914-4, yellow in color, that reflects the sportscar state-of-the-mind of that simpler 70s era I so much miss. The 914 (or VW Typ 47) development began life as a design exercise by Volkswagen to come up with a suitable replacement for their Karman-Ghia, VW’s sporty VW model. Owing to a very complicated arrangement with Porsche, the details of which I won’t bore you with here, the 914, a two-seat machine standing only 48 inches tall, with a removable Targa roof (it stowed in the car’s aft trunk, or ‘Runk’ as we call it) and a four-cylinder engine shared with the VW Typ 2 (transporter) of about 1.7 to 2.0 liters displacement was theorized as an intermediate-stage sportscar, sold to younger individuals who wanted a set of stylish, yet affordable wheels in the European manner.

What also set off the 914 from other small German sportscars was its ‘mid-engine’ configuration, a sophisticated engineering feature that made it road-handle like a Lotus (Europa), or a Ferrari (Dino 246GT), both also mid-engine vehicles, and its suspension, which made it maneuver like its far-more expensive Porsche 911 big-brothers. Further, it had a removable hard roof panel that could be stored in the after trunk, turning it into an open-air machine.

After a verbal deal was made between VW and Porsche (by Heinz Nordhoff and Ferry Porsche) the 914 was intended to be niche-marketed as both an upscale VW (in the 4-cylinder version, known as the 914-4) and an interim step up model (packed with a Porsche 911S engine, known as the 914-6) just below the Porsche 911 flagship. When it was initially introduced in 1970, The VW version cost somewhere in the vicinity of US$ 3700 only (the Porsche version roughly twice that)! In other words, the 914-4 was affordable by just about anyone making a modest salary and the target buyer for this car was a 20s-something young person who wanted to enjoy a certain stylishly hip lifestyle.

Predictably, however, its very affordability hastened its subsequent regard as a sort of ‘disposable’ consumer sportscar, very much like its lowly sibling, the Volkswagen ‘Bug’, and over the years it was undervalued, underrated, and taken not very seriously by ‘real’ Porsche people. After all, a chief attraction of having a ‘serious’ Porsche is the exclusivity (i.e paying $$$) that owning such as car (as a vintage 911, on up through the latest Super-Porsches) confers upon its owner.

Over the years, the PCA changed from a national brotherhood of semi-eclectic American gear-heads who appreciated German precision and design, to a frusty clique of elitist hoity-toities, who pride their ability to live a ‘better life’ than all the proles a bit further down on the consumer food-chain.

In this ‘new era’ PCA, while everything from early 356As up through the latest, most exotic and race-derived street-legal homologations are welcomed in the PCA, 914 owners generally need not join (think: “No Irish need apply” bias, as it was back in the late 1800s).

Or at least that used to be the case. Today, the humble Porsche 914 has finally been grudgingly accepted by hard-core Porschophiles everywhere…but only because with late-model used Porsches now costing an arm a leg as well as one’s first-born-son, the prices of 50-year-old 914s have also risen to an appreciable status of minor-exclusivity.

And so, while a 914 and its owner are now tolerated by ‘real Porsche’ owners for the most part, there’s still that slightly arched eyebrow to contend with every now and then at PCA social activities, or the subtle nose sniff that seems to suggest that a slightly less-than-acceptable odor is in the air. (“Oh…pause…you own a 914?... How very nice.” ).

Social activities, at least in my own PCA region, reflect a dollop of this “Something smells in the State of Denmark” air, whenever you admit that you own a 50-year-old 914 and not a late-model Turbo-Carrera RSR. Back in 2005, when I first joined PCA and my local chapter, I made the awkward mistake of making my inaugural social debut at the club’s annual Christmas Party that was held in the exclusive Sacramento Sutter Club, across the street from the State Capitol. Everyone was dressed to the nines, many in formal evening wear, and I and my Chinese wifie attended in our fancy duds (I in my Tyrolean Trachtenanzug and wifie in her red silk Cheong Sam), LoL.

The vague air of condescension we ran full-on into (not unlike a tanker running head-long abaft of a San Francisco ‘Pea-Souper’ of a fogbank on Potato Patch Shoal) that evening, once it was known we were new members (and a 914 owner, as well!), was palpable. You could physically feel the restrained chill in resulting conversational chit-chat.

Needless to say, we didn’t stay very long, after a few seasonal quaffs of Christmas Gluhwein, and I can’t say I wasn't relieved to depart before a certain level of general inebriation was achieved by all there, since the kid driving gloves would probably by that time have long since disappeared and genteel manners would have likely become a lot less commonplace.

Back then, I had a couple of 914-4s in sequence. First was a white 1975 2.0 liter, followed by a red 1973 1.8 liter, and after that my first ‘serious’ 914-6, a 6-cylinder version of the car that had a Porsche 911S engine stuffed up its nether end.

Eventually, however, I sold these excellent specimens of my favorite Porsche type, thinking that perhaps I had hit my sportscar menopause. I was definitely NOT impressed by my far more well-off fellow PCA members, but I was also a tad put off by the lack of technical interest in the 914 by them (since, after all, the 914-4 engine was essentially only a slightly upgraded VW unit).

This was disappointing, since I had hoped that there would be a few other modestly motivated 914 people in the local club with whom I could share my enjoyment of the remarkable capabilities of this type. But that was not to be, since most contemporary Porsche people seem to forget entirely that the very first Porsches were just fancy VWs in drag., when I got my latest 914 ('Jezibel').

Not long afterwards, I let my membership expire and that, so I thought, was that….until earlier this year (2024).

Perhaps it’s a manifestation of my childhood ADHD, but some years thereafter (2023), after promising wifie that I would forsake my beloved Japanese crotch-rocket, rice-burner bikes, I decided that although my slowing reflexes probably marked me out as a potential two-wheeled organ donor, I could still drive a sporty car better than most others (I was, after all, a former SCCA…Sports Car Club of America…club-racer and race worker). So I again began searching for another nice example of the 914.

By this time, 914 prices had begun to climb inexorably skyward, like all consumer goods in recent years, but I found one nice specimen, a 1974 yellow 914-4 (that I promptly named ‘Jezibel’…the saga of which has been amply covered elsewhere in my AUTHORS DEN writings) that seemed in good condition and that matched my need of that moment.

And so, once again I got back into the ranks of the PCA earlier this year, hoping the same hopes as before: that the club had a few more eccentric 914 enthusiasts like me in it, but also that the club was now far less sniffy than it had previously been about the type.

As mentioned earlier, the PCA publishes an impressive, monthly 160+ page glossy magazine that in all likelihood costs a bundle to produce. It is mostly filled with after-market Porsche advertising and reviews of the latest Porsche cars that seem to me less technically critical than barely-restrained paeans of sycophantic adulation for all the latest gee-whiz Porsche models. Porsche track victories are covered in exhausting detail, of course, complete with ‘golly-gee’ recapitulations of performance specs, ad infinitum. Ho-hum.

Now, I enjoy following the advances in automotive engineering as much as any other ‘car person’ but I am also an old-school historian at heart. By my reckoning, the historical past of Porsche achievements is far more interesting than any Philistine recounting of how much horsepower the latest model Porsche has, or what outrageous speeds may be obtained from it.

Consequently, I would really like to see more articles, columns and so forth about the older Porsches that helped originally helped make the marque’s name in the autosports world originally. There are precious few of them in the PCA mag these days, sadly.

Noticeably absent in this posh magazine for ‘wealthy’ Porsche owners with too much disposable income, are more down-to-earth, less aestheticly 'schmartzy' technical articles, service insights and/or more material dealing with the nuts and bolts guts of owning various older, classic Porsches. The kind that established Porsche ownership as a status symbol!

And naturally, there’s hardly anything at all that ever appears dealing with my favorite 914s…plainly a latent vestige of that sniffy disregard for these VW-Porsche 'bastards’ with mixed heritage alluded to earlier. I had hoped that by rejoining the PCA, I would be able to avail the collective wisdom of older Porsche owners, instead of an exclusive clique of younger wannabe, jet-set concourse participants, eager to show off their expensive late model toys at Pebble Beach, every year.

But I quickly rediscovered, as the French put it: “Plus les choses changent, plus elles restent les mêmes!"

And that, bunkies, is the way things are in the world of Porsche enthusiasts these days, seemingly.

One last note about today’s PCA Porsche marque following: The older enthusiasts, who started off with 356s, as now falling by the wayside due to advanced age and many of their cherished old Porsches are being instantly snapped up by collectors, who hide them away in safe storage areas (like Jerry Seinfeld, Jay Leno and Ralph Lauren, et al). A sort of modern take on the old ‘hoarding’ habit, I guess, but by the super-wealthy.

I’d venture to speculate that the majority of Porsche owners today are those ubiquitious upper-middle-class professionals I mentioned earlier in this narrative whose cars serve mostly as visible symbolic indications of their superior economic and social standing, more than anything else (think: four-wheeled ‘bling’).

I, by contrast, am definitely 'old school.' For me, the 70s decade was a formative period in my life and thus the 914 Porsche represents to me a strong and nostalgic link to those Halcyonic days of my youth that today provide a comfortable ‘happy place’ of the mind for me to retreat into when life gets a little too chaotic. This association, as much as anything else, remains a primary motivation for me to hang on to my much loved, 50+year-old 914 car(s). Besides, on todays highly congested roads, highways and public thoroughfares, even thinking about driving a modern supercar capable of 200 MPH around and among others on the roads to me verges on the certifiably insane.

With 356 'bathtubs' now priced WAY out of reach of mere mortals such as moi, the 914 remains a wonderful way of celebrating the fascinating Porsche story with a car that is both unique and unconventional enough to satiate my inherent need to separate myself somewhat from the rest of the herd. Besides, I've always championed the underdog and the 914, while an underdog of the wheeled sort, is also a very special expression of the genius of both Volkswagen AG and Porsche companies.

Perhaps in some greater sense, this constitutes a striking indictment of the fact that I am getting OLD, like it or not; but my 914 also serves me as a sort of ‘Picture of Dorian Gray’ that hangs on the wall in the vast empty caverns of my recollections...so neener-neener!

As a big fan of English (a transplanted German, actually) economist E.F. Schumacher, I truly believe that ‘Small is beautiful!’ And the 914 is the perfect personification of both of these ideals.

Human scale! Human scale uber alles!

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NOTE: In the event anyone wonders about that image of two nubile young ladies lounging on the Targa top of an orange  914 that leads off this piece, those are actually 70s vintage Porsche 914 Trunk Monkeys (standard equipment on 911s, but optional accessories on 914s).