Italian Quarter, Gloucester
1912
Oil on canvas: 24 1/8 in. × 29 1/16in.
Photo by A.L. “Whitey” Schafer, 1941
“Stroke of Nightwater Blue”
acrylic on canvas, 2020
20 in. x 20 in.
Detail
—Montgomery Clift
Portrait of Bia de’ Medici
Date: between 1542 and 1545
oil on panel
Height: 63.3 cm (24.9 in) Width: 48 cm (18.8 in)
Uffizi Museum
Le Génie de la Bastille Paris, 1955
c.1530
oil on panel
H 55.9 x W 39 cm
~ Myrna Loy
All-night cinema after last film, Ikebukuro, Tokyo, 1977
The 300SL was one of the fastest vehicles of the 1950s. Its performance and futuristic “gullwing” doors were responsible for the success of the vehicle.
Engine Type: OHC
Cylinders: 6
Horsepower: 215
Manufacturer and Coachbuilder: Mercedes-Benz (Stuttgart, Germany)
Price When New: $7,295
Nethercutt Collection
Atlantic City, 2019 Not only is Rick a great photographer but he is also a splendid writer. He has a monthly column in this Canadian paper where his musings on Covid, the quarantine, and life in general, are finely illuminating.
Beautiful car.
Beautiful women.
I like the watch — the green face with only the even numerals.
Myrna Loy may not have been the perfect wife (as if there were a perfect “person”), but she was a brilliant actress and very easy on the eyes.
I know his works are ordinary scenes, but I never get tired of Hopper’s paintings.
Have a wonderful weekend, Robert. I hope you get to spend Father’s Day with you daughters and grandchildren.
Mike AFAIK it did have a differential but the Gullwing had a swing axle rear suspension that could get kind of tricky.
Still imagine a car that off the showroom in 1954 could go 160 miles an hour.
James May of Top Gear said that it was the first super car and he might be right
A lot of the deficiencies of the coupe were corrected in the roadster in 1957.
Different rear suspension, conventional doors and after 1957, disc brakes.
Incidentally another bit of trivia: the drum brakes in the gullwing were a magnificent design.
The drum was a laminate of aluminum and steel with fins for cooling
Just for fun price one of those drums today.
Anyway jaguar had patented the disc brakes and the story I heard is it Daimler-Benz did not want to pay them a royalty so the gull wing had drum brakes.
Into the early 70s one could be had for $4000.
We have a club member who has a roadster bought during that time and he says these days when they change hands they are “mounted and stuffed””
Placed in a climate controlled garage and rarely driven.
Of course that’s the problem with cars like that. You can’t really drive them
Had a friend who had wanted a gull wing since a boy and he found one 20 years ago in a shed across town that was a stable.
The widow wanted $125,000 for this rolling wreck, and then he wrote checks to a restorer for over $300,000. .
But it got so the insurance company would dictate how you store it and how you drive it.
It was sold at a Monterey auction a couple of years ago
I did get to ride in it and it was a strange experience. You go through intersections and people at the red light would have one or two reactions.
They would just stare head as if it was a Hyundai or Kia, or they would look, turn away and then look again.
It’s still a car that even though designed almost 70 years ago draws attention.
In 1963, when the pagoda SL came out, believe it or not these roadster’s were languishing on dealer’s lots.
There is quite a story to the 300SL. The short version: Manhattan auto dealer and distributor Max Hoffman (who had a Frank Lloyd Wright designed showroom on Park Ave (since razed!) – for which Hoffman paid him with a 300SL and a 300Sc Coupe (even rarer)…anyway he convinced Daimler-Benz that he would personally buy X number of them (I have heard various numbers but 2,000 is in the ballpark) if they would build one for hte street. It was a purpose built race car that won in Le mans.
Anyway the civilian version was even more advanced than the competition with Bosch mechanical fuel injection. The engineers hated the gull wing doors but they were necessary because of the tubular frame.
I wrote more on it here – the roadster, with a modified frame, came out 3 years later due to the demands of the So Cal market.
https://thelexicans.wordpress.com/2014/10/06/a-visit-to-the-300sl-museum/
Interesting about Greta Garbo. She would have been shot, of course, but how different history would have been!
Bill, I’m sure you know more about this than I do but I remember hearing that the gull wing did not have a differential. Anyway, they were popular when I was in college and I knew several people who owned them. My next door neighbor in a rooming house at SC had the roadster and told me he got stopped several times by highway patrol who told him they just wanted to see it. Simpler times.
I might add that a friend who was getting divorced in 1973 offered to sell me his restored 300 SL for $19,000 and I didn’t do it.
We’ve all got those stories, Michael.
My favorite is in 1972, turning down a 1962 Porsche 356B for $1200 and buying a new…..Ford Pinto.
The Porsche was a faded red with a spot of surface rust on the rear fender, about the size of a quarter. Turnoffs for me. Funny thing an identical restored car showed up near my house a few months ago and I talked to the owner. He said it was worth about $200,000.
But no matter.
3 months later I was in the Army.