Quote:
Originally Posted by ethereal_reality
The blue car caught my eye as well, Fnarf. How'd you come about owning a Minx?
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Stupidity.
I dunno, I saw it and coveted it. To be honest, it was the chrome "Minx" in a sexy sixties script on the flank that did it. It was in nearly perfect working order, a San Francisco car with hardly any miles on it. It was a Series III with the rare Easidrive automatic transmission, which improbably worked by applying an electrical charge to iron filings to clump them around the chosen gear, a system which, well, let's just say it didn't catch on. But mine still worked. None of the Rootes nerds in my local club had ever seen one before.
Shortly after I bought the car virtually every rubber component crumbled into dust, as did most of the braking system and the starter. Not being mechanically inclined, I paid a guy a ton of money to replace it all, but it never really worked right after that, and then the entire wiring system, by Lucas (the "Prince of Darkness", they call him in car and motorcycle circles), so I sold it. It was hilariously fun for the few months I was able to drive it.
This experience is apparently quite typical for owners of 60s and 70s British cars.
I did learn a lot about the Rootes Group, once one of Britain's biggest motoring concerns, but which in the end was sold to Chrysler for a dollar. Their most famous output was the Sunbeam Tiger, which was created by Carroll Shelby by dropping a huge modified Ford V8 into a normally more sedate Sunbeam Alpine, and is still coveted by sporty-car aficionados.
To bring this story back around to Los Angeles, there was in the mid-60s a "Los Angeles Tiger" branch of the company that performed the necessary upgrades, located at 9830 West Pico Boulevard near Beverly Hills. The building most recently was a Chase branch but appears to be empty now. I don't know if it was just Tigers, or if it was a dealer for other Rootes models -- Hillman, Humber, and Sunbeam were all sold in the US, and presumably L.A., though I don't believe Commer or Talbot, while Singer might have been, but not by the 60s.
There's no "Hillman" or "Rootes" car dealer in the one reverse directory I looked at for 1961, but it's much more likely that they were sold in a dealer devoted to a variety of imports, or even in a small corner of a larger American-model dealer with an import sideline. I might have to find an actual newspaper ad for that info. There's a California Association of Tiger Owners in Irvine that might possibly know more.
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