(The Side Table at the AMO banquet last night. My Hoosier pals the Fougerousse’s are left, with Mayor Norm and the Harrington’s to his right.)

I woke in Indiana this morning, and there are several hundred miles between me and the Big Pink pool, so perforce, I will be brief before I commence to flogging the Panzer across the concrete-covered dark rich soil of the Hoosier State and Ohio and eventually deal with the mountains of the Keystone State and the long slide down into the capital.

Consequently, I can only note in passing how nice the people of this nation are. The real people. Not the ones on the radio. They believe in things passionately, they have great skills and compassion and a gentle kindness that one does not see in the Nation’s Capital, where True Belief , or feigning the same, is the admission cost to the mechanism of governance.

Not so out here. I was seated at the side table under the big screen next to the Mayor of Auburn, IN.

We shot the shit for quite a while. This was something quite unusual: a politician who is not only likable but you can trust. Mayor Norm Yoder has lived in Auburn most of his life. He graduated from Auburn High School and from Purdue University’s Engineering School with honors. He and his wife Peg have owned and operated several businesses, including Yoder & Yoder concrete and Joshua’s Restaurant over on Grandstaff Drive.
He started out with his brother, pouring slab for houses and worked his way up in scale and complexity, doing site prep all over Indiana, Ohio and Michigan. Realizing that concrete is a young man’s game, he quit that business when he was 50, and concentrated on the City Council, and moved up to run for mayor when it looked like the city needed energy in a chief executive.

I told him how much I enjoyed his town, and he seemed genuinely pleased to hear it. “I will recommend a trip to Auburn to any of my pals who like cars,” I said. “Or nice people and nice little towns.”

Norm actually beamed.

The big ballroom where the AMO- the American Motors Owners- banquet was held was once the showcase of the headquarters of the Cord and Auburn motor-car companies. They sold high-end luxury cars all over the world to the rich and famous. The designs are still fresh and world class, art deco moving on wheels.

When the company went bust after the war, the city could have given up, like other car towns did all over the motor belt of northern Indiana, Ohio and southern Michigan. Norm told me he traveled all over the region with his concrete business, and he could always tell when a town had given up by the way the downtown was treated. Cord shuttered the doors, but the town hitched up its britches and moved on.

I do not have to tell you that the downtown is pristine, and the former Headquarters of the elegant car company has been saved and preserved as a museum and conference center. It is, by the way, magnificent in detail, just like the cars that were built here.

Norm did his presentation and then I did mine, and then the post-banquet activity moved on to the staggering number of categories for awards- there were, after all, nearly three hundred classic cars to be honored. Most of them were after my Dad’s time, but they were built in the heart of the decade when I began to drive, and when the muscle car was king of Detroit- though of course, these classics were built in a little Wisconsin town called Kenosha.

The whole thing was pretty amazing. I wandered through the halls filled with the most elegant autos ever made, and eventually wound up back at the Holiday Inn Express.

I was standing out front when a jet-black ’70 AMX two-seater rumbled up past the entrance: blub blub blub went the 401 engine, throbbing with power. The driver was an old guy- probably my age, I thought, who grew up on high octane. He handled the Hurst shifter with the aplomb of decades of experience. He disappeared into the night.

What a trip. What nice people. Car people.

Which reminds me, I need to get into mine and get on down the road.

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com