Just before the world changed, way back in February, Malcolm Pearson and I went to see the Nethercutt Museum & Collection which is the official name of an outstanding collection of cars in Southern California. The collection has all kinds of cars with an emphasis on luxury sedans of the late 1920s into the 1930s, and oh boy! what a great time that was for cars. And yet I didn’t like The Collection or The Museum that much and I am still working out why. Because of that, I didn’t blog about it right away, and then living under Covid 19 sucked up most of my bandwidth. In spite of that, it was too good a trip and too many exceptional cars to not say something. I think that too many exceptional cars may be the crux of the problem, both The Collection and The Museum were overwhelming, I felt like the car lover equivalent of a Strasburg Goose. One stunning car after another jammed together in an order that was not discernable to me.

The Museum and the Collection are across the street from each other in the nondescript Sylmar neighborhood of Los Angeles or, as the Museum puts it, in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, and are the legacy of Dorothy and J.B. Nethercutt. The Nethercutts made their fortune with Merle Norman Cosmetics which J.B. took over from his aunt, Merle Nethercutt Norman, and built into a hyper-successful cosmetic company. Dorothy and J.B. used much of the resultant fortune to buy cars and other mechanical memorabilia. Spectacular cars and – I’m sure but I have no basis to judge – spectacular memorabilia. After years of collecting, they took this extraordinary and idiosyncratic collection public in 1971.

Both The Museum and The Collection are free but, to see The Collection requires a reservation on a scheduled tour for which, fortunately, Malcolm had already made reservations. We met our tour group outside The Collection Building and then walked into the building down a driveway and into a basement garage filled with an astounding group of cars, all licensed and ready to roll up the driveway and into the world. It was overwhelming, and full of fellow tourists so I had a hard time getting a photo-rhythm going. A couple of cars that caught my eye were a very early electric car and its charger which was both fascinating and completely un-understandable to me and a pre-General Motors Chevrolet.

After the garage, the tour went upstairs to the Grand Salon, an imagined thirties through fifties showroom done in marble. The room is spectacular and architecturally, in my humble opinion, doesn’t work. We entered the showroom from sort of a backdoor and there is no sense of a Grand Entry. Bernard Maybeck designed two similar showrooms on Van Ness in San Francisco and they are all about the entry into a world of luxury. Here we sort of sneak in through the basement like we are interlopers. That aside, the cars are even better than spectacular – whatever better than spectacular is – but it is a large tour and there are people everywhere making it difficult to see the cars at our own pace and make getting a good picture almost impossible (for me, Malcolm got some excellent shots).

Over in the corner, looking very neglected, was one of my favorite cars, the Cord 512, and I was surprised at how small and unimposing it looked. I have seen, probably, twenty of these Cord 810-812s – or two of them tens times each, I’m not sure as they do all look distinctively the same – and what a look, what a gutsy statement. The designer was Gordon Buehrig and he also designed the iconic 1956 Continental Mark II, and the car I would have taken home if I had won the door prize, a 1933 Duesenberg Model SJ Arlington Torpedo Sedan with which I took a selfie (sort of). The Duesenberg Brothers were successful racecar designers – they were the first American car to win a European Grand Prix, among other records, when they won the French Grand Prix in 1921 (the next American win was Dan Gurney’s American Eagle which won the Belgium Grand Prix in 1976) – who became unsuccessful luxury car builders. Unsuccessful meaning non-profitable in this case, the cars were terrific, very American, World-Class good, and very expensive (the Duesenberg in The Collection cost $20,000 when new which is about $397,100 now, that is a lot of money for a car without any of what we would call necessary amenities like power steering although it did have four-wheel hydraulic brakes).

Above the simulated main showroom, so to speak, are two more floors of mechanical wonders, mechanical dolls and lots of hood ornaments on the third floor – as I remember – and player pianos type mechanical instruments expanded to almost orchestra size on the top floor.

Looking at the pictures of these suburb cars, the assorted paraphernalia, and the mechanical oddities, I am reminded of the old Harrah’s Museum before it became the The National Automobile Museum or the Schlumpf Brothers Museum before the French nationalized and rationalized it as Cité de l’Automobile, Musée Nationale. All three museums started out as personal collections of car nuts – is nuts too strong, would aficionado be better? – with nothing in common except their pathological passion for collecting, collecting, and more collecting. In Harrah’s case, he had about 1450 seemingly random cars including a not so random whole building that had at least one of every car Packard ever built, displayed chronologically. When Harrah died, the Holiday Inn who had bought Harrah’s casinos, got the collection and sold off most of it. The best 175 cars were used to form the backbone of a new Museum, The National Automobile Museum (while the Schlumpf Brothers had about 575 cars of which 427 were completely restored and in working order).

The Nethercutt Museum & Collection, together, is only about 250 cars, all licensed and street ready. The overall quality is much better than either Harrah’s collection or the original Schlumpf brother’s collection – overall being the operative word, here – but it still has that personal idiosyncrasy of a private collection.

Across the street from The Collection is The Museum with even more cars. This is a collection of cars and car memorabilia that is impossible to see in one trip and I’m anxious to go back.