You Can't Make This Stuff Up!

[Lee Stewart]

[Lee Stewart]

[Lee Stewart]

[Lee Stewart]

[Lee Stewart]

Detroit: City Of Hot Rods & Muscle Cars, a documentary by Keith Famie, will be on PBS on June 23rd

[Lee Stewart]

1906 Tourist Model K Touring

https://www.mecum.com/lots/1090718/1...del-k-touring/

The Tourist may be a relatively unknown marque today, but for a brief period before World War I, this was California’s most popular automobile. The Auto Vehicle Company of Los Angeles was founded in 1902 and experienced rapid growth, followed by an equally rapid decline. Annual production steadily grew from just 17 cars the first year, to more than 500 by 1906, and yet by 1910, it was all over.

The original price was $2500. That would be $84,479.72 today. BTW . . . the average wage earned by men in 1906 was $11.16 per week.

[Lee Stewart]

[Lee Stewart]

Titanium procurement during the Cold War was so vital to the US’ goal of defeating the Soviet Union that it had to secretly buy the metal from the very country it sought to vanquish.

It was 1960 and Washington needed spy planes that could avoid detection in Soviet airspace by flying at extremely high altitudes.

To make what would become the vaunted SR-71 Blackbird, Lockheed knew it had to build a light plane, but one that was strong enough to hold extra fuel to give it expansive range. The only metal that would do the job was titanium. The only place to get titanium in the needed quantities was the Soviet Union.

The US worked through Third World countries and fake companies and finally was able to ship the rutile ore to the US to build the SR-71.

One of the bogus operations mentioned titanium because they needed it for pizza ovens. And Russians easily believed that the US needed titanium for thousands of pizza ovens.

[Lee Stewart]

Thats Frank Beard in the middle.

[Lee Stewart]