Swan Dreams-3 (Porsche ''Ugly Duckling'' syndrome)

Back in the days when I was still a reasonably valuable, contributing member of society (instead of merely another retired, pension-drawing geezer), I wore many hats. Among them was that of a life support specialist in cranial protection (e.g. the human noggin). Part of my work involved evaluating various specimens of civilian and military head protection systems and as both an aviation wonk and a long-time motorcycle rider, with additional sportscar (SCCA) affiliations. After a couple of decades of this work, I ended up with quite a collection of helmets…both civilian (motorsports) and aeronautical but I definitely developed an acute awareness of the importance of wearing a protective helmet in ANY activity involving sudden, high-G decelerations.

Today, having received an advance warning of a date with the future Grim Reaper (a la Monty Python’s skit in their film, The Meaning of Life), the sort that takes shape as an intuitive guess that that bright light at the end of the tunnel is actually a speeding locomotive, barreling towards one, rather than the end of a tunnel, I decided it was time to start clearing the house of its myriad relics of my former preoccupation.

Thus it was, that I put a couple of notices in the local area CRAIGSLIST adverts, offering to sell many of these often fascinating and historically significant examples of protective helmet at very modest prices.

Among my vast store of brand-new, unused and merely examined specimens, are a number of what we call ‘fast-jet’ head protection designs that were developed and used in the air force and navy. Included are helmets from WW2, the Korean War and more modern decades, and a goodly selection of ex-Soviet/Russian, European and American types. Also in the inventory are many motorsports helmets intended for both motorcycle and sportscar operation.

My immediate next-door neighbor, although still in his early 30s, is from a family of wealthy Iranians who fled the Shaw back in the 80s, before the radical Islamists took over the country and chased the terminally-ill Shah (oh, pshaw!...) into exile. He is also very well-eddicated (sic), with a broad, upper-class appreciation of the finer things in life (despite his age) and the European cultural heritage that the wealthier classes typically manifest.

One of his many interests is classic old German and Italian motorcycles and motor scooters. Mainly BMW and the Italian makes. Another is ‘eccentric’ European sportscars (i.e. several Citroens, pre-2000 BMWs, etc.). Since his means are modest, he can’t quite afford Porsches and Ferraris, but his is a good example of Schumacher’s ‘Human scale’ philosophy of living within your means, but none-the-less elegantly.

So, last week my younger neighbor told me that he had a friend coming over who might be interested in looking at some of my classic helmets. This friend is slightly older and more affluent (he owns and regularly drives a Cunningham Super-7 and a Lotus Europa, for example, giving the BBC television series The Prisoner’s star of Patrick McGoohan a contemporary peer. ‘Fine, let him drop over and take a look’, I advised my neighbor.

At around midday, said friend did show up, so I popped the garage door and invited him in to take a look at the goods. He was a lean, somewhat spare individual, with a moderately austere map that looked not dissimilar to that of stage actor Willem DaFoe in a pensive mood, and as he entered, he spotted Jezibel, my 914, and paused for a few moments to take a closer look at it.

Suffering a bit, I suppose, from the sublimated inferiority complex that most 914 owners are plagued with, and assuming him to be unfamiliar with the convoluted story of the 914’s development, I began to give him a thimble-sized backstory on the car’s heritage and history. I was therefore slightly surprised when he intimated that he was well up-to-speed on the subject and not necessarily in need of my prefatory elaborations.

This he did in a manner that was almost as spare and laconic as his appearance, something that always tends to confuse and make me a bit uncomfortable, since I am used to people who provide other than verbal cues to their mind-set on a particular subject (i.e. body language, gestures, etc.) as well as vocal affirmation or remonstrance to whatever is being discussed.

He was one of those unusual individuals who is apparently quite adept at staying perfectly neutral in a conversation, neither quickly rising to the defense or being contrathetical when whatever thesis is under discussion is aired, but skillfully remaining perfectly non-committal. This can be quite frustrating to someone like me, who typically wears his heart prominently displayed on his jacket sleeve, right under the SCCA and PCA patches. Visual or verbal feedback is always welcome, given the wide range of my often-conjectural biases and arguable contentions.

The more I rose in defense of the 914, the more neutral he remained, and eventually I gave up trying to ‘milk’ him for an opinion one way or another and we got on with the business of looking over the helmets. Still, I was filled with a niggling annoyance over his constrained response to my expostulations, since from what I knew of him (via my neighbor), as well as from his affect, he was indeed QUITE knowledgeable about classic sportscars of the 50s, 60s and 70s.

Case in point, and in my perhaps overly eager defense of Volkwagen’s and Porsche ‘bastard child’ offspring, I observed that the 914, despite its complex heritage, was closer to Dr. Porsche’s early designs (as a mid-engine concept) than the original production stars of the Porsche stable (the 356 and 911). Now, this is admittedly a topic that can be hotly contested by any semi-knowledgeable Porsche history fan, since the matter of on whose watch the cars were designed and produced is nuanced and somewhat effusive.

When Dr. Porsche was working on his earlier concepts in the 30s, he worked under the aegis (more or less) of Auto Union, since the emergence of both Volkswagen And Porsche as a discrete, unique design house marques occurred after Porsche’s stint with Auto Union. Today, people sometimes point to the mid-engined VW Typ 64 and the Auto Union Typ P52 as the more important Porsche precursors, although Porsche AG began as a distinctively separate, and exclusively proprietary marque in 1948, with its first cars (the 356) being A/C rear-engined types. It’s an argument that has many nuanced contentions implicit and at any Porsche gathering (social or competitive), after a little ETOH a discussion of this sort becomes near-impossible to argue either way successfully.

Be all this as it may (or may not) be, there’s little argument that (as the early Porsche 550 so brilliantly illustrated) the mid-engine configuration, when carefully engineered and road-calibrated, is superior to the tail-heavy rear-engine design…something that almost all of the early sportscar competitions (professional and amateur) demonstrated superbly. Rear-engined Porsches figured so substantially on the race-circuit (high-quality German technical engineering and design support notwithstanding) largely due to the superlative skills of their drivers, who quickly learned to master and employ the so-called 356/911 ‘drifting’ characteristic so well as to use it masterfully (a skill that required the best talents of any rear-engined driver) to win races.

Naturally enough, as a huge fan of both the mid-engine concept AND my little 914, the shared qualities of the ‘serious’ Porsche competition cars and the 914 are far more than just a dismissible coincidence. And if VW and Porsche had been able to overcome the curse of mixed parentage (as well as survive economic tectonics of the 70s) and give the car the support it cried out for, the 914 would today be fully exonerated in the eyes of even the most ETOH-sodden Porscheophiles and long-since welcomed into the ranks of Porsche greatness, instead of forever consigned to the 9th circle of Porsche Conditional Hell.

I look to the example of the, in my opinion, absolutely stunning, beauty and superb mechanical execution of the contemporary Porsche Typ 718 Cayman, which is such a masterfully appealing exercise in styling and configuration (despite its Dihydrogen Monoxide cooling) that it threatens to overtake and replace the long-in-the-tooth 911 progeny on the Porsche buyer food-chain. [I can hear some of you out there gasping, clutching your throats and uttering soft ‘horrors!’, ‘blasphemy!...’”]

Admittedly, certain aspects of any mid-engined design, such as cooling and weight management, require near-anal retentive perfection in both design and execution in order to justify fully the expectations. This naturally enough requires huge amounts of R&D (which translates directly into huge investment capital expenditures) and although today’s breathtakingly outrageous purchase prices for all things Porsche now provide the required financial incentive to invest heavily in requisite R&D investments, this is now and the 914 was ‘back then.’

Porsche appears to have learned this lesson quite well with the Typ 718 Cayman (and its sexed-up, gutsy Boxter sibs) but had this sort of ‘Spidey-sense’ (better expressed ‘Spyder-sense’, perhaps?) been extant in the late 60s, things might have turned out differently. VERY differently.

In fact, in some one of the estimated zillions of possible Quantum-Universes theoretical physicists estimate may exist, the 914 probably did make that particular quantum-leap and is regarded considerably differently there than it is here! That’s assuming, naturally, that as some rogue physicists insist, we actually do not live in a quantum computer simulation, an artificially created pseudo-reality that exists (MATRIX-style) possibly as a quaint lab experiment in some ethereally alien being’s test laboratory…

But Porsche appears to have indeed taken substantial note of the wisdom of splurging on the Cayman concept, since in my humble opinion, it’s one of the best and most pleasing appearing designs to come out of the Porsche shops since its illustrious 60s-era, famously beautiful 904.

Meanwhile, Jezibel, my humble little yellow firecracker (albeit not an M-80 class pyrotechnic) continues to sniffle and sob quietly in its corner of my garage at the ignominy it and all its little 70s-period buddies suffer from, due to the cruel vicissitudes of fickle fate and the vagaries of economic fortune.

Change has never been a welcome dynamic to human beings at any point (theoretically, at least) in our brief tenure as the world’s highest evolved sentient beings, since the ‘ultimate’ change we ignore at our mortal peril is the continual degradation of our minds and bodies from alert, energetic young pups into excessively fatigued, dispirited and disillusioned old dogs. Unfortunately, it isn’t a resolvable conundrum and we’re all headed in the same direction…towards some sort of exit-only transformation that we not only do not understand at all but spend considerable energy worrying about.

In that spirit, it is human nature to fervently desire to cling to whatever rock presents itself in the raging torrent that is life and hold on for dear life! My own personal ‘rock’ right now is my little 914 and no matter how disappointing a day turns out to be, Jezibel waits uncomplaining (albeit with a few quite sobs and sniffles, now and then) in the stable, unquestioning, uncritical and something that I can, in the manner of the ancient Hawai’ians, invest with a certain amount of spiritual ‘mana’ that is comforting to avail.

Given the increasingly insane socio-political goings-on in America these days, as our local weather becomes progressively hot, humid and frequently sultry, I find it ever so cathartic to pop the hanger (excuse me, make that “garage”) door in the evening, pull up a cheap ‘made-in-China’ wooden chair, and sit in its shade next to my own personal little yellow bastard ward, Jez).

Speaking of little bastards, very recently I undertook an intensive, in-depth look back at the circumstances of teen matinee idol, 24-year-old James Byran Dean and his fatal accident in a Porsche 550 (-055) Spyder, near Cholame (CA), at the juncture of California Route 41 & 466, on 30 September 1955.

When this event occurred, I was still a very young elementary school student in nearby Wasco (CA), so it didn’t register at all in my awarenesses at that time (although I seems to recall having seen several of his movies, a bit later). The small agricultural podunk of Wasco lies a mere 58 miles from Cholame and that route was a common one to reach Paso Robles and points west, back then…a drive made all the more memorable by the thousands of acres of empty desert near (aptly named) ‘Lost Hills’ that were punctuated solely by countless oil pumping rigs. By the time the 60s had arrived I was in high school (about 5 years subsequent to Dean’s accident).

As an inland surfer (read teenaged ‘wannabe’ proto-Beach Boy), dressed in the obligatory Madaras shirt, blue ‘surfing tennies’ (US Keds boat shoes), and equipped from day 1 with blonde hair, I and a select group of my buddies would regularly traverse that route from Wasco to Cholame (and over to the coastal beaches of Avila, Pismo and Shell) with our rented longboards, in my decrepit 1940 Chevrolet Master Deluxe Coupe.

Passing right through Cholame, where State Route 41 descends out of the nearby hills to intersect with 466 (since renamed State Route 46), it was easy to fail to note anything remarkable about dry, dusty Cholame, since the memorial to Dean that exists there today was built by a Japanese businessman who was a huge James Dean fanatic, nearly 22 years later. In fact, there was nothing at all to distinguish Cholame except an old café, gas station and bar when one passed through it.

My old Chev had a leaky radiator that required a refill every 16 miles, so we carried 10 one-gallon jugs of H20 with us, but would stop at whatever gas station popped up in a time of need (i.e. Cholame), but we had nary a clue that Dean had met his end nearby.

That old Chev was my very first car (acquired for $50, a scandalous price for it, back then in 1961). By the time I was in the US Air Farce (mid-60s), I had grown much more worldly-wise and my 2nd car was a 1964 VW Beetle convertible (which served me faithfully and uncomplainingly through several sub-zero C. North Dakota winters, I might add), but I didn’t acquire my first Porsche (what else but a 70s vintage 914-4?) until somewhat later.

The subject of Dean and his beautiful (if deadly in the wrong hands) Typ 550 is fascinating, of course, but must wait till a further iteration of the ‘Trials of Jez”, et al, since Jez, as a kindred mid-engine Poor-she design has great regard for its Type 550 foster-grandpa…