Collector Classics
Community’s first car club was originally sponsored by the local police department, which tended to keep members in line
West Vancouver is celebrating its 100th year anniversary, and Alyn Edwards reports from a car show that reflects that driven municipality.
Denny Bromley was the right enthusiast to plan the vintage car show to be part of the celebrations for West Vancouver’s 100th birthday party last weekend.
The affluent seaside community of 45,000 residents across from downtown Vancouver was incorporated in March 1912. Automobile and marine transportation played an important role in the community as it grew from a cluster of waterfront tents, shacks and cottages with logging as its only industry.
Bromley set the tone for the car show by driving his canary yellow modified 1923 Model T coupe and early 1950s Chevrolet pickup truck the few blocks from his West Vancouver home to the waterfront show. The vintage vehicles lined Argyle Street at Ambleside beside the restored building that was originally the waiting room and ticket office for the ferry to downtown Vancouver from the newly- incorporated West Vancouver.
Neighbours and friends in West Vancouver were invited to celebrate 100 years since the incorporation of their community by displaying their cars to represent the various eras of automobile transportation.
Architect and head of the Arthur Erickson Society Simon Scott, who lives just a few blocks from Ambleside, brought four cars, including his 1935 Morris 8 Tourer. He bought the restored Morris in Victoria in response to wonderful memories of a similar 1934 Morris roadster that he purchased in England at the age of 17. That car cost him 20 pounds and he sold it for the same amount three years later when he moved to Canada.
Lawrence Harrop, who also lives near Ambleside, brought his restored 1929 Whippet and four of the whippet dogs that he breeds, trains and races. His rare roadster was found in pieces in Prince George and given a complete restoration.
Whippet cars were built by the Willys- Overland Corporation in both Toledo, Ohio, and Toronto from 1926 to 1931 when the Depression caused an end to production.
Harrop’s seldom seen roadster is the desirable six- cylinder model.
This is the type of car that dashing young men dreamt of owning in West Vancouver before the Lion’s Gate Bridge was opened in 1938 to link Vancouver to the North Shore and West Vancouver. Before the easy bridge access that the Lion’s Gate brought, the only way to get cars to West Vancouver was by barge or drive over the original rickety Second Narrows Bridge into North Vancouver.
Bromley was the youngest member of West Vancouver’s first car club.
It was started in the mid1950s mainly by young hot rodders who were students at West Vancouver high school. He was 15 years old and didn’t have a driver’s licence. But he used his paper route money to buy a 1928 Model A Ford roadster stored in the garage of a home where he delivered the newspaper. The car cost $ 50.
A number of names were tried out for the fledgling hot rod club. But members had to settle on the non- controversial West Vancouver Automobile Association after getting sponsorship from the local police department.
“Four police officers were assigned to supervise the club’s activities and one would sit in our meetings held at the police station Sunday evenings,” Bromley recalls. “They regarded us as a service club and made sure we behaved ourselves on the roads and elsewhere.”
Bromley recalls taking his father for a ride in a homebuilt 1932 Ford hot rod and making a turn from Marine Drive onto 25th St. in Dundarave. “The passenger door flew open and I had forgotten that the seat hadn’t been bolted down,” he says. “My father was on his way out the door when I was able to grab his arm and save him.” That was his father’s last ride in a hot rod.
A feature display at the West Vancouver Centennial celebrations was a 100- year- old Detroit Electric ( see Driving ... Unplugged column on page G4 for more information on this remarkable car).
Many members of the North Shore Rod & Customs Car Club brought their rides to participate in the West Vancouver 100th birthday show. This thriving club has followed in the path of the long gone West Vancouver Automobile Association, the Road Lords, Knights and Ambassadors car clubs and other car enthusiast groups of the past to help keep local motoring history alive.