Charles Thompson of Novato, California and yours truly had the only ’49 Cadillacs entered at the CLC’s June 17-20 Grand National and the August 12-16 National Driving Tour, respectively. Though chapter member Ed Cholakian played a major role in organizing the former event and his all-original ’50 Cad won a prize, and member Herman Desser, attending car-less, said “the GN was very well organized and the banquet food was actually very good”, only Charles’ ’49 Cad was actually there. To record these events Charles’ wrote an article on the GN which begins further down on this page, and in the next paragraph I relate my adventures traveling to and participating in the driving tour.
The CLC National Driving Tour’s host hotel at Dulles Airport in a Virginia suburb of Washington is 640 miles from my Georgia home. My 6107 has a manual transmission and within an hour after leaving home Monday, August 10, I noticed my clutch was slipping at low speeds. Realizing the route I had planned to take on Interstate 81 to I-66 was replete with hills, if not mountains, discretion dictated that I adopt Plan B and travel via a relatively flat route on I-85 to just south of Richmond VA and then I-95 to Dulles. This temporarily resolved the clutch problem, since it did not slip at higher speeds, but made for a hotter than anticipated 1½ day drive. (Wife Elaine wisely went by air.) Nonetheless, the driving tour was a success. Some 40+ cars and their owners visited many of the great monuments in Washington, toured surrounding areas, including one of my favorite places, Harper’s Ferry WV and finally spent a memorable day at George Washington’s home at Mt. Vernon. Since no other tour car had any problem whatsoever, mine won the “Hard Luck” award by default. I made it home OK and am now busy fixing what’s wrong.