Blog

From the Archives #29, November 2024

This month, lacking any other good reason, I decided to select a year of our Region’s past for review by pure chance. I have a big jar of pennies (lots and lots of pennies) that I’ve collected for years that I could pick from. Now this jar could contain pennies from 1945 or so (after WWII ended) through the present. I decided that the first penny dated between 1973 and 1994 (the 21 years of printed Sandscript in the LVR archives) that I picked would be the year reviewed for the next couple of months.

Now, you ask, why is this process even mentioned in this column? Well, it’s because it took me 121 tries to get a penny in this year range; I finally got a 1990 coin. I have an MA in math and statistics from Johns Hopkins University, and I’ll tell you that taking this many tries to get a penny dated anywhere from 1974 through 1994 is pretty much statistically impossible.

So, the LV Region’s archives of the year 1990 could be considered with a grain of salt, or, at the least, viewed askance. So here we go…..

The Region President in 1990 was John Burrows, who is still active. The Region still had regular monthly meetings, which were held at the Vegas Café, a Mexican Restaurant located at Charleston and Arville (which, BTW, is now a large vacant lot).

The newsletter (Sandscript) was looking for more advertisers, as it had been for years. Any member coming up with a new advertiser was promised a free meal and drinks at the next meeting (a business-card sized ad had to be for a minimum of a year, which would have cost the advertiser $80).

The Zone 8 calendar for 1990 (as of February 1990, with a promise of more events to be added) showed 8 time trials, 3 slaloms, 6 rallies, and 8 concours, plus the Parade and the Presidents’ meeting. This seems much more ambitious than this year’s (I mean 2024) with a Zone membership roughly one-third of today’s. Ahh…. the reasons for buying a Porsche, and what the buyer plans to do with it, have changed, haven’t they?

And finally for this month’s Archives review: in very early April of 1990, the LVR held a pure autocross on the huge, newly paved parking lot at the new Las Vegas Motor Speedway. It was described as a “cone forest” by several competitors. The cones actually proscribed a 20-turn, 1.4 mile course. We had well over a hundred entries, including one from the Chesapeake Region!  Competitors got one practice lap and then a two-lap competition run (limited by the large number of entries). Porsches won about half of the classes, but the TTD (Top Time of Day) was the Chesapeake Region rep, one Bob Rand, driving a 1965 Lotus Elan. Bob edged (“edged” isn’t the right word, but Bob is an old friend, and I don’t want to make anyone mad at him) second fastest by over 16 seconds. 

Bob was asked afterwards what his secret was for such a fantastic run. He pointed to his license plate frame, which read “The secret to autocrossing is: don’t slow down for the turns.”