Bomstead's collection is motor-vated by a driving passion for 'automobilia'

Originally published Saturday, September 5, 1998

By JON HAHN  
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST

Carl Bomstead has some pretty pricey classic cars that you don't see every day, but folks around Lake Stevens see them all the time.

"That's the whole fun of it! Why have a neat old car if you're not going to drive it?!" he said, patting the fender of his 1932 Auburn.

His wife, Chris, prefers their black '47 Cadillac convertible with rolled leather upholstery and fat whitewall tires. But she learned to drive on Mercer Island in her father's '46 Lincoln Continental. "In the summers, one or another of our cars gets driven every week," Carl said.

Chris accommodates Carl's passion for old cars to the point of occasionally going along on a 1,000-mile caravan of classic cars. "But she pretty much has me confined to this one small area of the house," said the family's bona fide car nut. "And the garage, of course . . ."

On the brink of a move to Redmond -- so Chris can be closer to work at Microsoft -- Carl has been boxing up his extensive collection of museum-quality automotive collectibles . . . what he calls automobilia. And after storing hundreds of items, he hasn't made a dent.

Even before he down-shifted into what he calls "semi-retirement," Carl was into old cars and "car stuff" real serious like. He writes a monthly automotive collectibles column and runs Collector Auto Appraisal Co.

As a boy growing up in Seattle, Carl built model cars. "When I was 15, I bought my first car. . . . It was a '46 Plymouth, light blue. I added '53 Buick taillights and all sorts of custom work, but my dad wouldn't let me take it out of the driveway until I was 16 and had my license," he said.

After that, there was a '49 Ford with a Carson top and a big engine, and then a whole string of "practical cars" as he went from Roosevelt High to and through the University of Washington and into the working world of electronics and computer sales and marketing.

"For a while in the early '80s, we lived in Houston and we didn't know anybody, so we started going to car shows," Carl said. "Chris' father, Phil Schwarz, had always been involved with old cars. He helped launch the first Mercer Island classic car concourse in the early '60s."

About the time they had a chance to move back to Puget Sound, Carl got bitten by the old car bug. He bought a 1941 Packard touring limo built for the Fisher (Flour Co.) family.

Carl explained that his passion started with collecting old-car literature. "First you get the original new-car brochure, then the owner's manual and the sales brochure. Then you've just gotta have the hood ornament or the radiator badge . . . and then the floodgates open!"

Which is Carl's way of explaining not only the Auburn and the Caddy and the '39 Packard V-12 Cabriolet and the '63 Thunderbird sports roadster and the purple-and-gold Huskymobile van with a full bar, running water and dish antenna, but also several dozen Lalique crystal hood ornaments and hundreds of other items in his automobilia collection.

In one of his many antique display cases, there are hood ornaments a cut above the twinky little plastic things you get today. They include, but go well beyond, the classic chrome art nouveau nudes and various Indian chief heads (which had nothing at all to do with Pontiacs). You might prefer a chrome whirlygig sort of hood ornament on which car movement turns a propeller that makes two men pump up and down. Or you might like the statuesque ice skater in chrome that used to grace the hood of Sonja Henie's personal Packard.

If there's a motive in the automotive curating, it certainly goes beyond any firm financial footing. If you collect, instead of buying and selling, you're investing in stuff that only other collectors might want.

Of course, that's not always bad. One man wanted that '41 Packard limo so bad that "he actually showed up with a suitcase full of cash and even offered me more than I was asking," Carl recalled. (It already had been sold).

As for the somewhat smaller automobilia -- everything from a full can of Gilmore Oil to a brochure on Veltex gasoline additive -- there's always someone buying or selling. "And a lot of reproductions or outright fakes!" Carl warned. "Everyone, especially newer collectors, is very susceptible to fakes. I've been burned before, and I don't think there's a collector who hasn't been."

And then there are those 1,000-mile caravans with other classic car buffs. "We've gone on about 10 of them," Carl said.

Or the automobilia shows. "There's the big car show every year in Hershey (Penn.); I've gone there with the same group for the last 13 years; been to 20 of them. And there's the Pebble Beach Concourse, the Gas & Oil Collectibles show in Iowa, the Portland auto swap meet and another big gas & oil collectibles show in California."

This is serious, big-time collecting. But the real fun still comes in those weekend car shows or the 1,000-mile caravans. And the occasional high from driving your classic car into town for shopping.