"something of an extraordinary nature will turn up..."

Mr. Micawber in Dickens' David Copperfield

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AUTOMOTIVE SERENDIPITY ON THE WEB

CarPort
March 30th, 2011

Frank McMullen has been fascinated with Model A Fords since he was five years old. He built most of the Hubley diecast kits, and religiously watched The Waltons on television, drawn by the distinctive exhaust note of the Model As on the show. Somehow, though, real Model As always eluded him, the available ones being….
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March 23rd, 2011

Veteran CarPorters know I’m fond of Gravely tractors. In fact, my first post about Gravelys back in 2005 generated the most comments of any since the beginning of the CarPort. It’s no surprise, then, that when I learned the Gravely Tractor Club of America was holding its annual show in Connecticut I made plans to….
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March 16th, 2011

In 1922, the Maxwell Motor Company began an advertising campaign touting “The Good Maxwell.” Does that mean that prior Maxwells were bad? Unfortunately, some of them were. It had not always been so. Jonathan Maxwell was a pal of Benjamin Briscoe, and Briscoe convinced J.P. Morgan to invest in their new car company. The jaunty….
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March 9th, 2011

In April 1979, General Motors introduced a new line of compact cars. Designated “X-bodies,” an early use of a corporate code name in automotive marketing (the predecessor X-body, the Chevrolet Nova and corporate siblings, had not used the X-word in public), the line included the Chevrolet Citation, Pontiac Phoenix, Oldsmobile Omega and Buick Skylark. The….
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March 2nd, 2011

Nicholas Elgin Vernam Foster was born in the wee hours of the morning, 34 years ago today. The firstborn of his parents, he was much loved and doted upon. It wasn’t long before he was eager to drive a tractor. When he was about two he got his first Tonka, a dump truck in the….
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Serendipity: n. An aptitude for making desirable discoveries by accident.
“They were always making discoveries, by accident and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.”
Horace Walpole, The Three Princes of Serendip
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