31 Cord L29 Speedster

1931 Cord L-29 Phaeton

1936 Custom Beverly Supercharged

1936 Cord 810 Phaeton

36 Cord 810 Westchester 4-door Sedan

1937 Cord 812S Custom Berline

1937 Cord 812 Beverly Sedan

37 Cord 812 Beverly

1937 Cord Sportsman Convertible Coupe

BY MARK PHELAN • DETROIT FREE PRESS AUTO CRITIC • July 29, 2008

When he was 17, Gary Kaberle fell in love with a one-of-a-kind Italian sports car.

Thirteen years later, he fell in love with a 5-foot-4 blonde who sang in an all-girls group called the Honeybees.

In time, the BAT 9 coupe would repay his devotion, with its sale financing cancer treatments that extended his wife Deb's life. A six-month death sentence turned into four years together.

The tale continues this morning at the Meadow Brook Hall in Rochester Hills, when Kaberle, a Traverse City dentist, will stand next to the BAT 11, a new car that Italian craftsmen rushed to build for him as their company slid into bankruptcy earlier this year. He hopes to one day use the car to raise money to fight cancer.

The story begins in 1963, when Kaberle, who grew up in Evart [pop. 1738 in 2000], a village about 65 miles east of Ludington where his parents ran a café and gift shop, was visiting Greenville -- about 60 miles from Evart and as far from home as he'd ever been.

"My whole world was a 50-mile radius of Evart," said Kaberle, 62.

He saw the BAT 9 under a mercury vapor lamp in front of a used-car dealership.

The dealer got the car in a bankruptcy auction, apparently didn't know what a jewel he had and thought he had a live one in young Gary Kaberle. He set what seemed like a high price. Kaberle won't say exactly how much, but it was as much as a new car cost in 1963, when a brand-new Chevrolet Impala four-door sedan sold for $2,662.

Kaberle scraped together his savings from the $1.15 an hour he got working in the popcorn stand outside his parents' shop. "It was Evart. There wasn't much to spend money on," he said. He was still about $1,000 short; his grandmother made up the difference.

The BAT 9 was one of three unique sports cars built in the '50s by Italian car designer Nuccio Bertone -- creator of the Lamborghini Countach and other milestone designs.

Kaberle had no idea he owned a handmade masterpiece. He just loved the car. He drove it to work at the popcorn stand.

Kaberle's father and grandmother died of cancer not long after he bought the BAT. His mother became ill and spent a lot of time hospitalized in Traverse City. "A lot of people left my life, but the car was always there," he said.

He learned about its history -- a landmark creation by two Italian icons, the only one of its kind. He went to college, married, divorced and built his dental practice. The BAT 9 sat in his garage for years.

In 1976, he met Deb singing with the Honeybees at a Shanty Creek resort. They married in 1977 and raised three children -- one each from previous marriages and a daughter they shared.

"She said, 'Wow,' the first time she saw the BAT," Kaberle said. "She really liked riding in it. It wasn't like a car; it was a moving sculpture."

Admiration and pain

Kaberle met car buffs and auto executives who saw him driving the BAT 9 around Traverse City. One suggested he bring it to the Meadow Brook Concours d'Elegance in 1987 or '88. The car was a hit, though it didn't win any awards.

In 1989, the Concours d'Elegance in Pebble Beach, Calif., invited him to a show that would honor Bertone, the designer. Kaberle met the Italian legend, who hadn't seen the car in decades, when both went out to admire the car as the sun rose over it on a putting green at the golf course.

Later that day, the judges named the BAT 9 their favorite car at the show.

Shortly after that, Deb was diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer. Doctors said she had six months to live.

A doctor and car buff told Kaberle the National Institutes of Health were testing an experimental treatment. It might help, but insurance wouldn't cover it, and the cost was far beyond Kaberle's means.

Never before had Kaberle considered offers to sell the BAT 9, but now he did, for a combination of collectible cars and cash that he said added up to millions of dollars.

Deb got the experimental treatment and rallied, but they knew time was precious now. One of the cars included in the BAT sale, a Ferrari F40, came with a trip to Italy.

The BAT 9 was on display when the Kaberles visited Turin. Deb stood by the car, head bowed, as she thought about the extra time it had bought with her husband and children.

The cancer recurred in 1993. Deb was too weak to walk after her final chemotherapy treatment. Kaberle carried her up the steps to their house and laid her in bed.

She died in his arms a few hours later.

The BAT 9 was sold to help Deb Kaberle fight cancer.
(Gary Kaberle)

A way to honor all he lost

Years passed. Kaberle thought about the BAT 9 and all the people cancer had taken from him. Was there a way the car could draw greater attention to the disease, to honor Deb and help others?

The BAT 9 was gone, just another collector's trophy now, but could he create a new car, a BAT 11, to do that? (No BAT 10 was ever built.)

Kaberle worked on ideas, then designs, finally a clay model with friends in the auto industry he'd met through the BAT 9. In 2006, he visited the Bertone design studio just outside Turin.

Nuccio Bertone had died, and the company was in financial difficulty. Kaberle made his presentation to Bertone's widow, Lilli Bertone, and daughters, including a video his 14-year-old son shot of the young Bertone girls playing near the BAT 9 at Pebble Beach. The company said yes, and Kaberle sold more of the cars he got for the BAT 9.

The new BAT was scheduled to be the star of Bertone's display at the Geneva auto show in Switzerland in March.

Rebels for a cause

Kaberle got bad news from Turin early this year. The BAT 11 was coming along well, but the company was headed for bankruptcy, and the family was riven by strife. Just days before the car was to debut in Geneva, Lilli Bertone canceled the company's display at the show and said all work on the BAT 11 must cease.

Quietly, the designers rebelled. They finished work on the non-running car, snuck it out of the studio and shipped it to Geneva.

With no space at the auto show, they parked the car in an alley by the entrance to a nightclub hosting a reception for auto designers from around the world. The next morning, the BAT 11 was on the front page of Automotive News, dubbed "Geneva Eye Candy."

The BAT 11 makes what may be its only U.S. appearance at the Meadow Brook Concours d'Elegance this weekend.

The car has no engine or chassis. Building a running vehicle will cost $2 million or $3 million, far more money than Kaberle has left. He hopes corporations will help underwrite the car, which he wants to use to promote cancer prevention and research. He has talked with Microsoft and Bose, and Disney would like to see a script for a movie, he said.

A Disney love story. Kaberle went from small-town Evart "to seeing the world, and the car connected the dots in my life."

Logan McLaren, 42, of Royal Oak helps move the BAT 11 in West Bloomfield on Monday. The Italian-made concept will be on display at the Meadow Brook Concours d'Elegance this weekend. It may be the car's only U.S. appearance.
(ANDRE J. JACKSON/Detroit Free Press)

BAT 11

BAT 9

Local car shows, cruises

• Meadow Brook Concours d'Elegance, 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Saturday, Meadow Brook Hall and Grounds, Rochester Hills.

• Gratiot Cruise: noon-6 p.m. Sunday, Gratiot between 14 Mile and Wellington Crescent in Clinton Township. www.ctgratiotcruise.com

• Cool Cars on Parade: 9 a.m.-2 p.m. Aug. 9, Campus Martius, downtown Detroit. www.campusmartiuspark.org.

• Woodward Dream Cruise in Oakland County on Aug. 16.

First Jaguar D-Type fetches record £2.2m

By Daily Telegraph reporter

A vintage Jaguar racing car has been snapped up for a world record price of more than £2 million.

Vintage Jaguar D-Type first appeared on Britain's roads in 1955

The 3.4-litre car was the first Jaguar D-Type to roll off the production line in 1955.

The motor car with the chassis number XKD509, was sold for £2,201,500 following frantic bidding at the auction held at the Goodwood Festival of Speed in Chichester.

A British vintage car enthusiast bought the much sought after motor at the Bonhams sale.

The price beats the previous world record for a Jaguar car of £1,706,000 set in 1999.

The XKD509 was sold on behalf of the Littlewoods Football Pools family and was raced in America in the 1950s.

Hundreds of motor enthusiasts crammed in to the six-hour sale as more than 350 lots went under the hammer.

A Visionary’s Minivan Arrived Decades Too Soon

Michael Furman

1936 Stout Scarab

By Phil Patton

Published: January 6, 2008

THE 2008 Chrysler Town and Country minivan offers a removable table and second row seats that turn 180 degrees to face the rear, a feature that Chrysler calls Swivel ’n Go. But in 1936, William Bushnell Stout had already demonstrated such amenities in his eccentric Stout Scarab, an ancestor of the minivan.

“The interior of the car is extremely comfortable and roomy, with a table and movable chairs,” reported The Phillips Shield, a publication of the Phillips 66 petroleum company. “It gives the passenger the feeling of traveling in a hotel room.”

On a rainy day in 1936, Mr. Stout and his Scarab visited one of the new cottage-style Phillips gas stations, at Third Street and Keeler Avenue in Bartlesville, Okla., in the heart of the oil patch. A Phillips executive greeted him; in the background of a photo from that day, bystanders look skeptically at the vehicle shaped like a loaf of home-baked bread. The tall, mustachioed Mr. Stout is wearing an overcoat in the photo, and looks like a scientist from one of the “Thin Man” films of the era.

“Unsurpassed for easy riding qualities, the Scarab seems destined to mark a new milepost in motor design,” The Phillips Shield predicted.

Mr. Stout, a pioneering aircraft designer, was a tireless promoter of the Scarab — no more than a dozen were built — stopping in places like Bartlesville to show off the car. He liked to place a glass of water on the table to show how smoothly it rode on its four-wheel independent suspension, unusually advanced for the time.

The eccentric Scarab may have been a milepost, but it was on a road not taken. “A challenge and a prophecy” was the phrase used in Mr. Stout’s advertisements. His car was a contemporary of creations like Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion car.

The design remains a crowd-pleaser. Last November, a Scarab restored by Tim Lingerfelt of Davidson, N.C., won the People’s Choice award at the Hilton Head Concours d’Élégance and Motoring Festival in Hilton Head, S.C..

The Scarab’s layout is worth a second look for designers working to pack maximum utility into modern vehicles. It can be seen as the forerunner of the Volkswagen Microbus, the Renault Espace and other one-box designs.

Mr. Stout was born in 1880, the son of an itinerant Iowa preacher. He showed an early aptitude for mechanical things, and later helped to pay his tuition at the University of Minnesota by writing for engineering publications. He also learned to promote his own ideas for new types of airplanes and automobiles. By 1920 The Detroit Free Press was explaining Mr. Stout’s notion of a better airplane under the headline, “Batwing 11, Giant Monoplane of the Future.”

He pushed his ideas for metal aircraft. Mr. Lingerfelt, the Scarab owner, said in a telephone interview that Mr. Stout was clever in generating his enthusiasm for his projects. In the 1920s, he wrote to 100 well-off businessmen, soliciting $1,000 from each to start an aircraft company. In his appeal, Mr. Stout noted the readers’ wealth — and that each could afford to lose money on a scheme that was such fun.

He got 60 responses, and $118,000, to start the Stout Metal Airplane Company. He built 15 of his eight-passenger airplanes before selling out to Henry Ford, one of the men who had received the original letter.

Mr. Stout’s design, which used a corrugated metal skin, was the basis for the Ford Tri-Motor, a pioneer American airliner. He set up his own airline, Stout Air Lines, which served Cleveland, Chicago, Detroit and Grand Rapids, Mich., and is credited by some with being the first to serve in-flight meals and to employ attendants, whom Mr. Stout called “air stewards.”

By 1935 he was publicizing the Scarab, which took its name from the beetle held sacred by ancient Egyptians. Its layout was like that of the VW Beetle, however greatly stretched: engine in rear (a Ford V-8), housed under a vast curve of complex grillwork. Mr. Stout praised the car’s aluminum construction and hoped to build 100 a year. He courted Philip Wrigley, of the chewing gum empire; the tire magnate Harvey Firestone; and Willard Dow, of Dow Chemical.

Despite or because of its odd look, the car caught public and press attention. The Scarab was to sell for about $5,000, a huge sum in a day when many Cadillacs and Packards went for $3,500, and even more than the price Mr. Stout proposed for a small airplane he hoped to mass-produce. In September 1939, Time magazine reported that Mr. Stout said he was ready to produce the small plane, “already mocked up in his faded yellow Stout Engineering Laboratories” in Dearborn.

Mr. Stout’s dreams, like so many other dreams, could be said to have been casualties of World War II.

By 1942, he had given up on the Scarab, later selling out to Consolidated Vultee Aviation Aircraft. After the war he tried to build one more Scarablike car, this time with a fiberglass body.

In 1943 he was working with Consolidated Vultee on the Aerocar, a combination of an airplane and a car, a “roadable” airplane as he called it. The postwar era, he imagined, would see the arrival of mass market airplanes, much as the post-World War I era had seen the growth of the private automobile.

Only five of the original Scarabs are thought to survive. Legends surrounding one example hold that it was first bought by a French publisher, then served Gen. Dwight Eisenhower in North Africa during World War II before being given to Gen. Charles DeGaulle. A circus used it to house monkeys before the French auto designer Philippe Charbonneaux bought it for his auto museum. Larry Smith, chairman of the Meadow Brook Concours d’Élégance in Michigan, now owns the car.

Mr. Stout, dead for half a century, is still remembered in Dearborn, his memory preserved in part by reminders like the William Bushnell Stout Middle School (“Home of the Falcons”). Astute students of history will recall the motto on his workshop wall. Whether he invented or adopted it, engineers have been quoting it ever since: “Simplicate and add lightness.”

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Brochure Collection of Steve Hayes

Scarab foretold modern minivans with folding table, movable seats.

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Conocophillips Corporate Archive

William Stout, left, with a Scarab.

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Brochure Collection of Steve Hayes

“The interior of the car is extremely comfortable and roomy, with a table and movable chairs,” reported The Phillips Shield, a publication of the Phillips 66 petroleum company.