ODDBALLS ‘R’ US
A CAR COLLECTION RIGHT OUT OF WILLY WONKA’S WORLD
Jay Leno is excited to show off the latest obscure machine to grace his garage: a little-known 1948 Davis Divan belonging to the Petersen automotive museum.
“You’ll like this,” he says with a grin, pulling out an iPad to show off the video, figuring his audience will go bug-eyed at the sight of a three-wheeler straight out of The Jetsons.
“Oh,” says Myron Vernis’s wife, Kim, offhandedly, “we have one of those.”
Jay slides his iPad back into his briefcase.
Inside a long, squat, unassuming brick building on a side road near Akron, there is an Aladdin’s cave of automotive weirdness.
Outside, a couple of old Fiats rust away quietly, but apart from that there’s little to indicate that anything out of the usual is going on. The street is quiet. Dandelions fleck the lawn. It’s just an ordinary sunny day.
I’m waiting for Myron Vernis to arrive. An old Buick Century bobs past. Nope, not him. A battered Ford Super Duty is next. Then a pristine sky-blue Citroen CX Break hovers into view. Aha. Vernis steps out with a welcoming smile.
Tall, slender, wearing horn-rimmed glasses and a crisply pressed white shirt, he looks like he should be overseeing a crew of slide rule-wielding NASA engineers at the launch of one of the Apollo missions. But Vernis is all about a different kind of lunacy.
Up goes the bay door; down goes my jaw.
The stuff that’s in here isn’t just collectible, it’s madcap! Vernis might not look it, but he’s the Willy Wonka of the car world, and we’ve got the golden ticket to have a brief peek at his collection of automotive Oompa Loompas. Say, is that a Ghia 450SS? “The first of the 52 made,” Vernis says, beaming.
“It belonged to Wilt Chamberlain.”
First, though, we pop over to visit his friend Lyn Smith, the mechanic who keeps all these oddball autos running. Smith is a former dragracer, quick with a grin and a quip, but there’s nothing more interesting in his shop than an old Chevy Suburban with NHRA stickers. Wait, what’s under that sheet? “It’s period correct!” Smith says with a smile, whipping the sheet off an 800-horsepower hotrod with white-painted open headers.
“Tell him how much power it’ll make when you get the blower fitted,” Vernis nudges.
“Oh, about 2,000 horsepower,” Smith says modestly.
“In a 95-inch wheelbase!” Vernis says, laughing.
Then we pop back to another bay and wheel away one of two NSU Ro80s to get a look at a rare 1962 Deutsch-Bonnet Le Mans Spyder that’s been fitted with a 400-cubicinch V-8.
“It’s the most dangerous car in the collection,” Smith and Vernis agree, beaming with ill-disguised glee.
If Calvin and Hobbes were into cars, this is what their clubhouse would look like. There are automobile collections more historical, more valuable, more elegant. There are those who assemble racing thoroughbreds or rolling art. There are people who will spend years chasing the work of a single coach builder. Vernis, on the other hand, has parked an orange Porsche 914 pickup truck next to a Leata Cabalero.
“It won worst of show at Concours d’Lemons,” Vernis says of the latter, patting the horrific little brown lump fondly.
This assemblage of vehicles puts the “fun” in dysfunctional. It’s not just about the sense of humour aspect either; there are cars here that are historically significant and incredibly beautiful. The first thing you see when you walk into one of the garage bays is a gorgeous black Alfa Romeo Montreal, all glossy paint and louvered headlights.
The Montreal was Vernis’s dream car, but he’s cool on the driving experience. “Too civilized,” he says. I don’t think it’s mere rawness that he’s looking for. It’s a story.
Almost every machine in here has some sort of interesting thread that weaves in and out of automotive culture in some way.
Take the NSU Ro80s for instance: both rotary-powered sedans here are unique in their own right and tell a tale of financial failure wrought by mechanical incompetence.
The Ro80 was a disaster for NSU and led to the company eventually being paired with Auto Union to form what is modern-day Audi.
So that’s pretty neat, but one of Vernis’s Ro80s is the actual machine owned by the American Motors Company when they planned to stuff rotary engines under the hood of the Pacer as a performance option.
AMC would eventually go with GM-sourced engines, but think what might have been — terrible!
Everything in the Vernis collection is like this. His Davis Divan isn’t just weird, it’s the rarer version with the Nash-sourced six-cylinder engine. It’s parked next to a robust-looking Powell Sportwagon. Built in Compton, Calif., this proto-SUV is underpinned by the chassis of a 1941 Plymouth and has a fender-mounted hidden tube for carrying fishing poles.
Perhaps even more interesting is Vernis’s strangest machine, the car with an unknown story: a 1935 Hoffman X-8 painted in Packard blue.
Yes, that’s right, an X-8 — the engine configuration in this thing is effectively two V-4s on their side.
It’s a one-of-one car with a face like a melancholy Tatra.
While entirely custom made — from chassis to transmission case — Hoffman’s design appears to have been intended for production.
“And we know nothing about it, nothing!” Smith shakes his head in amazement. “They thought it was a flathead, but we discovered it was an overhead valve engine. It’s the strangest little engine.”
Vernis acquired his Hoffman from the Brooks Stevens collection.
Stevens was an industrial designer who is responsible for everything from kitchen appliances to HarleyDavidsons and the Jeep Wagoneer.
Vernis is a huge fan of Stevens’ designs and also owns a Paxton, aprototype-folding-hard-top convertible currently powered by Porsche 356 air-cooled running gear.
It was the cover car of the April 1957 issue of Road & Track. Recently, Vernis has become more interested in classic JDM (Japanese domestic market) cars: among other interesting stuff, he owns a gorgeous brightorange Mitsubishi Colt Galant GTO MR and a tiny Japanese copy of a Porsche tractor.
And remember that rare Honda Coupe 1300 we found in B.C. last year? Of the three known in North America, Vernis owned two.
He sold one recently, but kept the more-powerful Coupe 9 variant. “It’s a great little car,” he says. “The engine sounds like Formula One mixed with a lawn mower.”
Where does Vernis find all this stuff? It comes from all over and he’s always checking in on bringatrailer. com, an aggregator site that pulls odd classic listings from all over the Internet. He just bought a rotarypowered Suzuki RE-5 motorcycle he found there. I briefly consider what life would be like if I owned a space like this and had access to funds and the Internet. Far, far away, my wife shudders involuntarily.
The cars are packed cheek by jowl, but there’s time enough to take one for a quick spin around the block.
You couldn’t pick just one thing to represent such a widely varied collection, but a brown 1970s Toyota Crown wagon with three on the tree will do the trick. The Toyota’s straight-six purrs to life.
“Smoother than any Chevy six,” Smith says and we head out.
The Crown isn’t fast, but it’s nonetheless amazing.
The fender-mounted mirrors, the long brown hood, the whitewall tires and the slot mags — it’s just an endlessly fun car to drive.
“When I was a kid growing up in Greece,” Vernis says, “my father used to point out the cars below as we looked out of our balcony.”
That’s all it took to set the hook on a lifetime spent not just acquiring strange and interesting automobiles, but driving and enjoying them.