How many of one type of car have you had? Can it be that obsession is a good thing? How did things get so far out of control? I can stop anytime I want to, right? Some questions are philosophical. All I can tell you is from a young age, I got hooked on 2 seater AMX’s, and it took 30 years and 59 cars before I finally let the last one go down the road, leaving me with some fun photos and a ton of leftover parts! But, you know, maybe car # 60 is out there somewhere ! What if I need those parts one last time?
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There’s Mom and I in 1975, with a ’68 AMX 390. Too young to drive yet! Dang!
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These 2 cars were Dad’s, back in ’75 and ’77 . He went through about 8 of them around then, buying them locally for $700 to $1,000 each, and turning them over for $1,200 to $1,500. Think about it, that was a 6 year old car at the time! As an impressionable kid, I thought they were great – lots of tire smoking horsepower, and great styling!
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There I am in 1980, with AMX # 1 – a beautiful ’69 390 Big Bad Orange with original leather interior, original paint, A/C, and working factory AM/8 track player for all those Zeppelin 8 tracks! This car sat on a local dirt lot with a for sale sign, and I ponied up $1,550 hard earned dollars to buy it. But, sadly, it had to be sold during my senior year of High School, when a series of accidents in other cars caused my need for cash to exceed the love of the car! Maybe that’s where the obsession started, the need to replace the car that had to be sold?
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How did we find ’em back in the pre-internet days? The RECYCLER ! Sellers could place a free ad, and they were printed every week, with various editions – San Fernando, OC, Mid-Cities, and San Diego – but in the beginning it was just the L. A. edition, and you had to DRIVE TO L.A. to buy ’em at a convenience store! And then find a pay phone and bring quarters to call the owners! Later they had an Orange County office, and you could buy all of the editions at 7 AM on Thursdays, and call on all those super bargains.
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AMX # 2, this ’69 390 / AC / Automatic car came from the Recycler in ’85, a nice black plate car that cleaned up nicely, and would fry the tires on command !
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The big used car advertising revolution of the early 80’s was the AUTO TRADER! This is my ad from ’85. It was widely distributed in California, and it was amazing to get phone calls from as far away as Bakersfield! Wow! And, unlike the Recycler, there was a PICTURE! The basic idea remained the same – buy a collectible car locally, and sell it to a wider audience.
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There’s Car # 2 in front of the Fraternity house at College. We viewed the epic film “Animal House” as not merely cinema, but a sort of blueprint, a guide for living! And if Mr. Blutarsky could park his car in front of Delta house, I could certainly put my fine 390 AMX in front of our manor!
In June of ’85, I sold the car to Colorado, and since I was just out of school and with a month off until my job started, I offered to deliver it to the buyer for expenses. The Navajo Nation Police in Arizona were none too amused with my speeding on the way to get that car to the new owner!
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Car # 3, a ’68 390 Automatic arrived in ‘ 88 as a shabby blue car that needed a bunch of work. Girlfriend at the time wouldn’t ride in it because it was not sharp enough. With that kind of attitude she got replaced! I got it all cleaned up, with parts from Doug at American Parts Depot, and drove it as an everyday car for a few years.
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Here’s car # 3 in about 1990, on the way to Las Vegas to be traded for an ’87 Mustang GT convertible. The prices were on the way up in the late 80’s.
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Car # 4 appeared at a Rick Cole auction in Newport Beach, CA, around 1991. A 1970 390 4 speed with Air, with original Lime Gold paint! $4,800 was paid to Rick Cole, in those wonderful auction days before they discovered the buyer fee! Another car used as a daily driver, sold it in 1994.
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Car #5, a ’69 390 auto, in Regatta Blue, with Platinum interior, a combination I liked very much, and a beautiful car. This was taken at the Riverside AMC club meet at Fairmont park in Riverside, early 90’s.
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Here it is, 1990, and we’re breaking the $10k mark for a nice example! The Blue/Silver car wound up going to Illinois in ’93 – I drove it there, and then rented a car and continued on to Hershey, PA for the big AACA swap meet.
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There it is on the road to Illinois – shown here in New Mexico on the original route 66. I-40 is off to the right in the photo.
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Car # 6, a Big Bad Orange 390 Automatic with Leather seats and AC. at the Kruse Scottsdale auction ’95, next to a fabulous Tiffany or something. I stood there and bid it to $6,200 , paid them and drove it 350 miles home. Now, this was as close as I was going to get to the high school forced sale car, and maybe I should have just declared victory and stopped here. Nope. the obsession kicked in, leading me to…………….
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the middle of the desert, to buy car #7! Recycler, curse you! I began a new phase of AMX ownership, called “There’s no such thing as a bad AMX”. The catch here was – it had to be a solid, rust free, or very nearly rust free California car. Almost every car I had wound up going to the mid-west or east coast, and the buyers would marvel at how solid the cars were.
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Car # 8 was a ’70 Shadowmask 390 Automatic, which I got at the Pomona swap meet sometime in the 90’s. You have to be open minded sometimes, and I was willing to overlook the non-factory extra gas tank – quick release filler visible in the photo below the quarter window – to get an otherwise desirable car! The former owner liked to go to Las Vegas, and didn’t like stopping for gas in Barstow, so he added another tank in the rear floor area. I removed this safe and sane accessory before the car left me!
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In the movie “Casino” Ace Rothstein says ” Whadaya think we’re doin’ out here in the middle of the desert, anyway? It’s all this cash!” Ok, I guess in my case it’s all those AMX’s! At this point I’ve lost track of the car count, this one came from just north of Edwards Air Force Base, and I had the idea I could make it run and drive it home. I did get it to run, but the radiator was full of desert sand, and it wouldn’t run for long without overheating, so back it came on the flatbed.
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Another Pomona Find, a beautiful 70 390 4 speed. That was a nice one!
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This was a ’68 390 Automatic, with sidepipes! This car and the black ’70 above it came from the same people at Pomona – a dad and son, – the son had done something dumb and dad was making him sell both of the cars! Although I could sympathize, it didn’t stop me from buying them both!
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This ’68 390 4 speed in Hialeah yellow came from – you guessed it – the Recycler, up in the Valley. It came with the ownership card, it turned out the promoter of the original Long Beach Grand Prix bought this car new! So when I got it restored, I called him up to see if he wanted it back, but no dice! He told me his ex wife got the car when they split, so it wasn’t a good reminder for him!
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Big bad Green 390 Car, – rough, but you just can’t pass up a BBG. By this time, late 1990’s, the Recycler was trying to adjust to the internet, and they offered a deal where you could pay a few bucks a week, and they would email you ads tied to your keywords – but the fantastic part was they sent these emails AS THE ADS CAME IN – before the print ads came out on Thursday!! That was like fishing with dynamite! I could be the first – and usually the only – caller on the AMX’s. I had to be fast, because there were a couple of other guys up in the San Fernando valley who would go after AMX’s too. I think they probably had more of ’em than I ever did. Same with Eddie Stakes in Houston, I’m sure his car count was way higher than mine – his dad was an actual AMC dealer, as I understand it.
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This Bittersweet Orange ’69 4 speed now lives on in Big Bad Blue not too far away.
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Here’s a Big Bad Green 390 Auto on the way home from Victorville. This car came from walking the show field at a route 66 cruise show in San Bernardino.
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Tire Smoke! Smells like Victory! This one came from the Valley, and I had to take the roll cage out of it, and rebuild the engine in order to get this picture!
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by the 2000’s, I was doing the car business full time, and ran an awful lot of AMX’s through. The Petersen museum contacted me for their Musclecar exhibit, and wanted an AMX. I was in the process of working on this car, so had to get it done for the exhibit. The paint was still drying as I rolled it onto their nice polished floor!
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Here’s the lineup at the old Vault Classic Cars location – 3 1970’s and a ’69.
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This 360 automatic came along in around 2009, from Craigslist. It was filled with NOS 1970 trim parts! Craigslist had strangled the Recycler, and it made it at once easier to find the cars – just get on the computer – and harder, because now a car like this would pop up and the owners would start getting phone calls from all over the place! This one had 2 different people selling it on Craigslist, which made me a bit concerned, but I went there, looked at it and paid for it in person, and had it hauled home right then and there. Sometimes you have to put your boots on the ground to take the territory!
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this was a ’69 343 Car – I had sniffed it out before, but it was rough and had the smaller motor so I didn’t initially pursue it. Then, much later, it wound up in a blog or post or something written by David Freiburger of Hot Rod Magazine, about how this great musclecar was languishing at a component repair place! So of course I had to go there and just buy it, you can see the price on the windows. I recall actually getting it to run once it got back to the shop.
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This Frost white 390 4 speed turned out nice, it arrived from Lakewood, CA dead, and I pulled my usual Dr. Frankenstein and made it live! It’s alive! Along with painting it and generally restoring it. As you can see from the background car, a 1909 Cadillac, I was starting to branch out and handle other cars.
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This 68 390 4 speed came in from North Hollywood, running but running poorly. I thought it needed carburetor work, so to save time I took the top off the Carter carburetor while on the car. The time savings evaporated when the float bowl needle dropped into the intake manifold and into the engine! It ran great after I pulled the cylinder head and found the missing carburetor needle!
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This Black ’68 390 4 speed was the last car out the door – it came from one of my valley competitors in partially finished form, and it took more work than I really wanted to do to get it this nice. It really set up nice with the red stripe! By this time, around 2010, the supply of AMX’s had sort of dried up, I think between me and the other guys we had pulled out most of the un-discovered gems and sent them off to new homes far away. And I was spending more and more time on older Classics. When I first started on AMX’s, in 1980, the peak of the smog era, they were faster than any new car you could buy, and cheap enough that a high school or college kid could buy them. By 2010, technology had given us new cars that were extremely fast – Corvette, Cadillac CTS-V, and all the foreign stuff like Porsche and BMW M series, which made it a challenge to win those stoplight drag races!