<VV> Survivor cars: Researching, documenting, and preserving them -- What's the priority to YOU, personally?

Kent Sullivan kentsu at corvairkid.com
Thu Nov 7 11:50:29 EST 2019


Greetings,

The follow letter to the editor is in the newest CORSA Communique. I am
reposting it here to ensure a broad audience sees it and has a chance to
respond. The Stock Corvair Group officers who are also Virtual Vairs members
will follow any discussion here but also feel free to send email directly to
us using the email address below.

The SCG needs a significant increase in people doing tasks and contributing
or it's not going to continue for much longer. This letter is an attempt to
understand whether the SCG is one of those things where the typical response
is "Well, I'm glad someone is doing it, but I don't have the time..." The
hard truth is we all have the same amount of time -- it's about assigning
value and prioritizing.

There are only so many survivor cars out there, and over time they continue
to dwindle. Are we as an organization going to make a significant effort to
learn from them while they still exist? At this point, the SCG officers are
done trying to convince people to participate. Either there will be a
critical mass of people to get things done or there won't and we will all
need to accept the consequences.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

For nearly 15 years, SCG, the Stock Corvair Group, a chartered special
interest group of CORSA, has been pursuing its mission to "encourage
interest in and aid in the research, preservation, restoration and operation
of Stock Corvair automobiles, trucks and related vehicles." We've conducted
educational Stock Corvair Events at most of the CORSA international
conventions since 2006 and have slowly been building knowledge about Corvair
originality, as documented via the cars that have participated in these
events.  Additionally, several of us have conducted independent and group
research projects, resulting in several articles published in the Communique
and on-line.
 
Recently, the SCG officers (Bill Hubbell, myself, Mark Corbin, Stan East,
and Ken Schifftner) have been discussing the future of this effort. Those
discussions really boil down to one question: What value and priority should
CORSA, in the form of its membership, put on documenting, preserving, and
celebrating original "survivor" Corvair cars and trucks? This is truly an
open question, with the intent of inviting the members, committee chairs,
and officers to reflect on how important this is to the organization and its
members. Car clubs can be many things, and not every car club has stock
preservation as one of its priorities; but if it is one of ours, perhaps it
is time to change the way we go about it.
 
The core SCG folks care a lot about stock preservation but it's clear now
that many more people need to be involved in a significant way if this work
is going to get done while survivor cars are still around in reasonable
numbers. Our small group does not have the time or energy to do all of these
tasks: find vehicles and owners to participate, conduct the evaluations,
compile the results, work with owners to make changes they'd like to make to
their vehicles, and do administrative tasks; let alone pursue longer-term
goals like create repositories of stock information and chart the course of
the group's future activities.
 
Regarding the last item above, we have received feedback from past
participants in educational Stock Corvair Events that they would rather have
a judged event, with the focus on degree of originality (as opposed to the
focus in Concours on condition). That's a great idea but it will take a lot
of people to make something like this happen. Are enough CORSA members
willing to actually sign up to help create this sort of event and make it
happen, on a yearly basis?
 
We would love to hear your thoughts and ideas. You can email us at
"scg_officers at corvair.org".
 
Thanks,
 
Kent Sullivan
Vice President
Stock Corvair Group



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