The Library Muse

Ahhhhhhhhh autumn. The best time of the year is arriving. The summer activities are winding down and the hecticness of the Holiday pre-season is not yet upon us. Warm days and cool nights. Perfect weather for top down MG driving, the fish are starting to put on the big bite, the smell of burning leaves (where not prohibited by law) and Packers football. Can it get any better? Yes, if you include the Wine, Cheese and Beer Tour. You may have seen sports car or Can-Am racing at Elkhart Lake, but until you see the pumpkin races in Cedarburg you ain’t seen nothing yet! This is one weekend that you don’t want to miss.

I Just Made The Tea
Tales from 30 years inside Formula 1
By Di Spires, 2012, 372 pages, soft bound

In the mid 70’s Di Spires and her husband started in F1. Not as mechanics, drivers or owners, but running the ‘hospitality’ for Team Surtees. At that time the food service was little more than grilled food off a small Weber type grill and sandwiches for the team, not today’s gourmet fare for sponsors, suppliers, and celebrities. Di was instrumental in a lot of the changes. But her stories of the personalities she met over the years is the core of this book. “Her spellbinding stories cover 30 years of hilarious antics and tragic events providing a unique perspective on Formula 1. Whether she was following James Hunt’s ‘naughty tour’ of Amsterdam or just supplying George Harrison favorite cakes, she did it with a smile on her face and a teapot at the ready.”

-- ~~ Bill Mennell

LITTLE KNOWN FACT!
contributed by Larry Eils

“The world’s largest collection of 1929 and 1930 Nash Motors automobiles exists not in a museum,” writes MLive Reporter, Garret Ellison, “but rather entombed in the frigid depths of Lake Michigan.” This intriguing article looks at the sinking of the Senator, which went down in 450 feet of water off the coast of Wisconsin in 1929.

Onboard were 268 brand-new Nash vehicles bound for dealerships in Michigan and across the Midwest. According to the handful of underwater explorers who have actually seen the wreck, reports Ellison, many of the cars are all very much preserved and still lined up “in neat little rows” inside the ship’s crumpled hold.

Editor’s note: originally printed in British Boots & Bonnets Chronicle, July 2016