If you were anywhere near Beverly Hills on Father’s Day morning, the chances are you heard about or hopefully even saw the Tour d’Elegance, a gaggle (about fifty) of the motoring world’s best and brightest from the past 109 years parading by. From Urban Hirsch’s 1912 Ford Model T (which looked like the Beverly Hillbillies reincarnated) to Phillip Sarofim’s 1970 Lancia Stratos Zero (a Jetsons-like wedge-shaped futuristic car), to Tom Price’s 1962 Ferrari GTO (a race car like none other, which Tom still races often) to Bruce Meyer’s 1929 Bentley 4.5 liter (which Bruce takes on extended Bentley tours), there truly was something for everyone at this event. Cars that even I – born and raised in Los Angeles and with many decades’ worth of gearheaddom – had not yet seen though I had heard about them. The crowd favorite? Really, all of them elicited a response – from people who remember that car from their high-school parking lot, their grandparents’ garage, a poster on their bedroom wall or otherwise. Perhaps the restored Beverly Hills Fire Truck was right up near the top; the 1929 Ahrens-Fox Fire Engine (piloted by our own Beverly Hills Fire Department), this is the vehicle which was a working fire truck for the BHFD way back when (just after water was invented, I am told), which was restored in the early 1990s by a group of supporters who raised the money by staging the inaugural Beverly Hills Concours d’Elegance on Rodeo Drive.
The Tour brought many smiles per mile all along the course, as these amazing machines wended their way north of Wilshire, through residential sections, and then back into town, along several streets (including Rodeo Drive, of course) and finally stopping at City Hall.
