VR: It was recently announced that you have been chosen to be the chief judge for the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance starting with next year’s event. I would imagine that—in classic car world terms—this has to be somewhat similar to being selected from the dean of cardinals to be made pontiff!
CB: [laughs] I don’t think I’d go quite that far but I was really surprised and pleased. My first reaction was, “Oh, do I want to do this?” And then I thought, of course I want to do this.
VR: I guess, depending on your perspective, it coul be a dream or a nightmare.
CB: I’d say 99% dream. It’s a fabulous event.
VR: You’ve been with the concours for 50 years, you started in ’73?
CB: I’ve attended. This will be my 50th Pebble Beach Concours. I went when I was 18 years old in 1963, just as a spectator, and I’ve been every year since. Judged for many years and worked in various capacities, organizing the field crew, etc. I used to live in Pebble Beach so I did a lot of car receiving and parking and so forth.
VR: So you truly worked your way from the ground up. How did you get started with cars?
CB: The car that first caught my eye – I think its part of your DNA when you are into cars—the car that first caught my eye and peaked my curiosity, I saw when I was in the 5th or 6th grade, growing up in Berkeley. I was a traffic boy, I went down to the corner near the school and had a red semaphore and used to stop traffic when the little kids came along to go to school. The particular house that I stood in front of, on an intersection near my school, belonged to the Dean of Women at UC Berkeley and she had a 1941 Packard limousine. And, she had a driver and about the time that I would be down there in the morning doing my morning stint, her chauffer would get this car out of the garage and bring it around to the front of the house and park it so that the back door lined up to the front door walk of the house and he’d get ready for her to come out and be taken off, down to the university. I became fascinated with this car because he used to be able to sit in the front seat and make the back windows go up and down. I’d never seen a car with power windows. I finally struck up a conversation with the guy and got kind of fascinated with the car and learned about Packards and that sort of started the whole deal.
VR: And you’ve been very involved with Packards ever since, as I understand it.
CB: In fact, that’s what brought me to Pebble Beach the first time, I joined the Packard Club in 1962 and they had a little gathering that was going down to Pebble Beach with the ’63 show. So, I was part of that group, and off we went and the rest is history.
VR: In terms of your involvement with the marque, are you involved at the restoration level?[pullquote]
This will be my 50th Pebble Beach Concours. I went when I was 18 years old in 1963, just as a spectator, and I’ve been every year since.
[/pullquote]
CB: You know, I’ve owned a bunch of them. I restored—I don’t do restoration work personally, I’m not a mechanic—one car and kind of learned my lesson. I just bought and sold and maintained. I love the chase of finding cars that are hidden away and I’ve had some luck at that and some fun times doing that.
VR: Obviously, Packards are your passion but I would imagine, just by dint of your involvement with the Concours, that the scope of your taste must have broadened with time?
CB: Yeah. You know I’ve been active with the Classic Car Club since ’62 or ’63 and I’ve done a lot of touring with them. So I’ve gotten to know a lot of other marques. And I’ve owned a few of them, coveted a bunch of them, so yeah, my interest, essentially is in that era—’25 to ’48 along in there—and then I’ve owned a bunch of the Packards up until they went out of business. But you know I’ve been learning a lot more about sports cars, racing cars and so forth, which was not an area of great strength for me but being part of the Pebble Beach selection process, I’ve learned a lot. And working at the event I’ve learned a lot.
VR: We had a similar discussion with Leslie Kendall of the Petersen Museum last month. I think when you’re involved with an organization that covers such a broad swath of autotmotive history, its hard not to have your interests broaden as you become exposed to different types of automobiles.
CB: I think your tastes mature and grow. I don’t know how familiar you are with the selection process for Pebble Beach but there’s a committee of, I think, 15 of us who gather a couple times a year to review entries and we all sit around a table and we have slide presentations on each entry, with information the owners have submitted and so forth. And, the people come from all walks of the automotive spectrum. Just sitting there and listening to the histories of the cars and learning about the subtleties and the differences, it’s a fascinating process. It’s probably my most fun days of the year in terms of the car world except for the actual day of the Pebble Beach show.
VR: It must be like a kid in a candy store, having a difficult time deciding what to choose?
CB: And, you know, no matter what kind of a car is offered, somebody in that room knows a whole lot about it and the history of the marque and what’s correct and what’s not correct and racing history with a lot of the cars and production history on some of the more unusual stuff.
Photo: Pebble Beach Concours
VR: This brings up an interesting question, in that I’ve never really been clear on how the Pebble entry process works. Is it by invitation only or do people actually submit entries for consideration?
CB: No, it’s kind of a popular myth that you have to be invited to Pebble Beach and it’s not the case. Anyone can enter and offer any car to the concours and it will receive due consideration. So we probably get three times the number of entries that we end up actually accepting. We try and keep the show at 200 cars just from a space standpoint. It’s not unusual to get 500 or 600 entries submitted. Stuff that we’ve never heard of comes out of the woodwork. The event has such a standing in the hobby that people want to be there.
VR: I think that much to the event’s credit, Pebble’s been fairly progressive about trying different things like the Preservation class and some of the other things which, I think, have added some interest and variety to it.
CB: Oh, I think so and I think Preservation is one of the most interesting parts of the whole collecting arena because so many cars that should have been left alone, weren’t in the ’60s and ’70s and beautiful original cars that really tell the history have been lost to people who have painted them red and didn’t necessarily do sympathetic and correct restoration work.
VR: Do you think the Preservation class will have a limited lifespan as time goes on? Won’t it become harder and harder to field a full class?
CB: Well, of course, simply the age of the cars at Pebble Beach keeps moving forward and when you went to the Concours in 1963 and there was a 1933 car there, it was 30 years old. Now, that car is 80 years old and so stuff from the early ’50s, unique European stuff that’s beautiful, keeps popping up. People are paying attention to leaving them alone now.
VR: I imagine the temptation has to be hard, especially when some of these cars are on their fifth or sixth restoration.
CB: Well, yeah, once they’ve been down that road the originality of the car is a loss but it’s no longer a kind of history lesson. There are some amazingly preserved automobiles and those cars are the cars that need to be preserved, need to be used as benchmarks.
Photo: Barrett-Jackson
VR: Another area that Pebble has helped pioneer is the idea of having participants take part in a rally before the event so that they are not just trailer queens that get pushed out onto the lawn.
CB: That was a wonderful stroke of genius on the part of Jules Henmann and Lorin Tryon, because a lot of criticism came toward the event that the cars were just trailer queens, they roll out of the box and onto the field and they really aren’t functioning automobiles. And so we put the 60 to 70-mile tour in place and made it a tiebreaker in judging. The cars are on the road now.
VR: Is that the extent of consideration, that it’s a tiebreaker?
CB: Yes. In other words, if you’re judging a particular class, and you have two cars that are really virtually at a tie, say for best in class, if one did the tour and other did not that’s the deciding tiebreaker. So, it’s important. I have seen cars eliminated over that.
VR: I guess that also introduces the specter now of raising the stakes even further in terms of having to have an entire team in place to frantically work through the night to prep your car to get it to that same level and standard for the lawn?
CB: We say that evidence of usage, and especially anything that happens on the tour, you know occasionally something will happen to a car on the tour, cannot be considered in judging. That said, evidence of usage, you know, if your car sprung an oil leak on the tour, you sort of have to clean it up. But the tour’s on Thursday and the show’s on Sunday so there’s plenty of time for that.
VR: Plenty of time to tear the entire car apart and put it back together in two or three days?!
CB: I’ve seen some pretty amazing things done. But, I think it’s a wonderful thing and the owners love it. It’s really a fun drive. Beautiful area. We go down the coast to Big Sur and back and get some of the most amazing photography.
VR: So, you’ll be taking the reigns over for the judging at the end of this year. What do you see as being some of the challenges or future issues that you’ll either want to tackle or will have to tackle?
CB: Well, you know, I think the thing we always have to keep in mind is the system of judging which was put in place years ago. Lorin and Jules specifically, devised the plan, and it is a wonderful system. However, the constant challenge is that we’re all growing older and if we don’t bring along some younger judges, and educate them to the event and to the cars, that’s a problem. I would love to see us get into some sort of a more active program of shadowing judging teams with younger judges. Also, get younger people interested in the hobby. We were lucky last year we had a couple of students from McPherson University who were at the event and that were recipients of scholarships done by the Pebble Beach Concours. And, they were able to shadow our judging teams and I think that was a real educational process for them. So that’s an area I’d like to put some effort into. I think it was one of the Keno brothers who judged preservation at Pebble who made the comment last year that there were an awful lot of grey heads in that room during our judges’ meeting! And it’s true, so we need to constantly look to bring in the newer younger people in the hobby.
VR: It does seem like there are younger people taking an interest in the hobby now.
Photo: Pebble Beach Concours
CB: There was a time, I can recall, in the ’70s when the brass cars were weak in the marketplace and I think it was a generation change going on and people were saying, “Oh you know nobody’s interested in the really early cars anymore. They’re all interested in the newer classics or something like that.” And look at brass cars now. They are one of the strongest segments of the hobby. There’s a whole new generation of enthusiasts that recognize those. And the interest in vintage racing has just gone crazy. And there’s a lot of young people in that segment of the hobby. So, I think we are alive and well, we just need to be constantly vigilant and keep getting new blood. As our more senior judges retire or expire, we need to make sure we have qualified people ready to step in.
VR: Do you see anything on the horizon in terms of a broadening of the categories? I know in recent times you have embraced hot rods and Bonneville cars and things like that. Is there other territory you’d like to see explored at some point in time in the future?
CB: I think its fun to reach out. We do hot rods, I think, every other year and we have done Woodies a couple of times. We did mini cars and micro cars one year and I think we’re seeing more and more emphasis on the interesting post-war stuff. There’s a big discussion always going on, will there ever be a post-war best of show at Pebble Beach? The answer’s probably yes. Who knows when? And, of course, that has shifted the focus because so many of the exotic cars of the post-war were built in Europe. So the American cars are not much featured post-war. There aren’t that many unique ones.
VR: Do you think some of that’s also a function of the judges, in terms of their age and the era that they are locked into?
CB: You know, yes. I got my education judging at Pebble Beach when we used to have some of the great coachbuilders from the ’30s. Dietrich and Darren and Brunn and so forth as judges there. Those people are all gone now and now we see more of the current stylists, many of whom are European, some are Japanese, who are taking part in the judging. It’s a constant flow. There’s standards, there will always be antique classics, there’ll always be classic, Euro classes, Rolls Royce, Duesenberg and Ferrari and some of the standard bearers of the automotive world. It’s constantly in motion.
VR: Now, for the really hard question…if a genie were to pop up out of a bottle and grant you any car your heart desired—money being no object—what would you choose?
CB: It would be an Isotta Fraschini. And that’s based probably on my ultimate automotive frustration. I had a chance to buy one in 1965…
VR: A Tipo 8?
CB: Yeah, an 8A Landaulet. Beautiful car. The guy wanted $4,000 for it and I only had $2,000 and I made him that offer and he said, “No, I really can’t do that.” So, that was as close as I ever got to an Isotta Fraschini but I was fascinated by the cars. They are just overbuilt and beautiful. That’s the one that got away so maybe someday there’ll be one in my garage.
VR: I’m surprised you didn’t go for a Packard?
CB: Well, that would be nice, as well! But in reaching for the stars, it’ll be an Isotta Fraschini.
