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Adapted and reprinted
from The Jag Mag (Feb/Mar 2011 issue), with
permission from the author.
I can't remember when
I first became aware of the E-Type Jaguar
except that it must have been sometime in
early 1961, when newspaper articles and
photos began to appear. On the other hand,
I will never forget the first time I actually
saw one in person.
I saw my first E-Type
one damp autumn night in the mid 1960s.
At the time I was a just young man living
in a tough fishing town in the North of
England. I worked night shifts at a local
chemical plant and I was on my way to work
on my Lambretta. I had stopped at a traffic
light, when a dark E-Type drew alongside.
I looked at it and
was stunned. It was automotive love at first
sight. I glanced at the driver; he looked
at me with a bit of a smirk. I blipped my
throttle; he tapped his accelerator. As
we stood there waiting for the light to
change, we both knew that we were going
to have our own little drag race. The light
turned amber and then green, and I was off
- but wait, he was next to me one moment
and then far ahead the next instant. I will
never forget the sight of his taillights
disappearing in the distance, nor the vapor
from his exhaust hanging in the night air,
that I would have to drive through. It was
at that moment that I vowed that I would
one day own an E-Type.
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Me and the E-Type
in New Jersey, just after the flat bed had
dropped it off at my house. It still has
Gordon's
original New York plates.
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At the time,
there was no conceivable way I could
afford an E-Type. Ours was a poor
town. I too was poor. So, I put it
on the list of things to do "one
day." Two or three years after
the encounter with the E-Type, I was
in the local public library and something
of a miracle happened. By chance,
I found myself in the mathematics
section and was drawn to a little
textbook with the title "Elementary
Analysis". I started studying
it on the nightshift that night and
in all my spare time afterwards. I
was hooked. This book was followed
by a series of increasingly more advanced
books. Within a year I had taken and
passed the entrance exams for university
and a few months later went up to
read for an honours degree in mathematics.
Everything was a
blur after that; meeting Julia at
university, our graduations, getting
married, years of actuarial study,
children, moving to America, a frenetic
life as an international consulting
actuary.
And yet during all
that time I never forgot that encounter
with the E-Type. Every so often I
would see one on the road, and would
be reminded of that promise all those
years ago.
By the late 1990's
I was beginning to think of retirement.
Julia had said that I shouldn't retire
unless I had a hobby. Then, quite
by chance, I heard of an E-Type for
sale. The niece of our then next-door
neighbors was visiting. She popped
her head over the garden fence one
day and, quite out of the blue, asked
me if I liked E-Type Jaguars! What
a coincidence!
She explained that
she knew of one for sale in New York.
It was owned by Gordon Parks whom
she had known since her childhood
because of her father who had produced
the original "Shaft" movie
in the early 1970s, which Gordon had
directed.
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A few days later, Julia
and I found ourselves at Gordon's east side
apartment in New York. He chatted with us
for over an hour about life and things in
general. Gordon was familiar with the UK
and was very curious as to how we had ended
up living in America. He told us about his
early childhood, growing up in Kansas, leaving
home at an early age, and his early struggles
against poverty and discrimination.
He told us how he
came to be a photographer in the 1930s.
At the time he worked as a Pullman car attendant
on the railways. A passenger had left a
copy of a photographic magazine on a seat.
As Gordon glanced through the magazine he
was struck with an urge to take photographs.
At the next main stop he bought a second
hand camera, a roll of film and shot his
first set of photos. Soon thereafter he
was able to convince the wife of a department
store owner to let him shoot some fashion
photographs. One thing led to another, eventually
leading him to fame as a photographer for
Life Magazine, as a movie director, an author,
poet and as a composer.
Eventually Gordon said,
"well, perhaps we should go look at
the beast." We walked across the street
to an underground garage where the car was
stored under a tarp. It was a dark green
coupe. The car looked quite grimy and in
need of work, but there was no rust that
I could see. Gordon asked to sit in the
car one last time. As he sat there, with
me in the passenger seat, he said that he
didn't think he could part with it after
all. He had owned this car for 37 years
from new and it clearly had many wonderful
memories for him. I told Gordon that it
needed to be brought back to life and driven,
that it was a shame to just let it sit there.
I promised that I would restore his car
to the way it looked when he first took
delivery all those years ago and that I
would treat it with care and love. It was
on this basis that he agreed to sell the
car to me.
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Gordon very
graciously let me take this photo of him
in
his apartment, on the day I bought his
E-Type
My restored E-type on the day I collected
it
from Terry Lippincott
The restored
engine. Note the “pumpkin head”,
which is a feature of the early E-Types
This picture
of my ‘61 E-Type was taken by a neighbor
at
his house a few years back. We had met
at a car show
when he had been admiring my car. He had
always loved
E-Types and had been a passenger in one
several years
earlier for a drive from NYC to the Hamptons
to attend
his friend’s wedding. We soon discovered
he had been in
my car! The car was very run down when
he first rode in
it, and he was amazed at the change. We
took it for a
spin: first I drove it then he did; he
was thrilled!
At the Black Bear
Inn, Vermont for
the British Invasion
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| I had planned
to restore the car myself as a hobby when
I retired in a year or two. But then a major
client gave me a huge assignment that I knew
would keep me busy for at least a year, and
so I decided to have the restoration done
professionally. A friend had had his car (a
"1-1/2" E-Type ) restored by a terrific
Jaguar restoration shop out in Sinking Spring,
Pennsylvania, and gave me an introduction
to the owner, Terry Lippincott. So, a few
weeks later I had the car flat-bedded out
to Lippincott's Garage to begin the process
of restoring Gordon's car to the way it looked
when he first bought it all those years ago. |
I was very lucky to
have found Terry to do the restoration work.
He has been working on and restoring E-Types
almost since they first came out. He knows
them inside out. He immediately recognized
the car as an early flat-floor, welded-louver
model and told me that I had managed to snag
a wonderful car. He and I agreed that he would
give it a full frame-off restoration as a
really nice driver to the original color and
specs in the heritage certificate. The car
would be opalescent dark green with a suede
green interior. I had in mind a car that would
look as if I had just bought it from new all
those years ago -not one of those incredibly
overly perfected trailer queens. I intended
to drive this car!
We decided to replace
the Moss box, which I didn't like, with
the later all-synchro gearbox; Terry also
suggested upgrading the front brakes, which
was done.
Apart from this, the car is pretty much
as it was when new. The car had barely over
40,000 miles years when I bought it and
had almost no rust of any kind, so we were
able to re-use all of the original parts.
I took delivery of the restored car early
the next year. It was everything that Terry
promised it would be, and I am very happy
indeed with the wonderful job he did in
bringing the car back to life.
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Gordon never got to see his restored car.
I knew that he was very busy working on a
documentary for HBO about his life, and he
had a new book coming out and so I thought
it would be indelicate to bother him. He passed
away in New York City in 2006 at the age of
93. Anderson Cooper, the television journalist,
wrote a moving tribute to Gordon on his blog.
He had known Gordon since childhood through
his mother, Gloria Vanderbilt. He said that
he loved it when Gordon visited, especially
since Gordon would arrive in an incredibly
beautiful sports car and had promised he would
give it to him when he died. It seems Gordon
had made the same promise to several other
people who had fallen in love with his car! |
Julia and I have had the car for over a dozen
years now. And yet each drive for me is still
as fresh and exhilarating as the first time
I test drove it after restoration at Terry’s
shop. Each time I drive it, I am transported
back to that damp night all those long years
ago when I saw my first E-Type as a poor young
man and made a promise to one day own such
a car. I look back at the vagaries of chance
and how I would find my calling in life after
a glancing at a book in a library. And I sometimes
think of Gordon, and I wonder
if he also used to look back at his life as
he sat in the drivers seat and remembered
his chance finding of that magazine and how
it would change his life. I like to think
that Gordon did, and that for him, as for
me, the car was more than just a work of art
or means of transport, but was also a symbol
of how far he had traveled on the road of
life.
--Ray Sharp |
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| Note:
if you would like to see some more photos
of my ’61coupe go to www.xkedata.com
and type in 885154 in the search box.
As far as I know, this site has the
largest database of surviving E-Types
in the world with information on over
13 thousand cars and almost 100 thousand
photos. It is well worth the visit if
you love E-types! |
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Gordon
Parks was an incredible human being.
You may
find many write-ups about his life,
on the Web. Here is a
Wikipedia piece about him for starters:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Parks |
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