Old Blue Eyes II
Back in 2007, I wrote a piece for The Star, ”Reviving Old Blue Eyes.” It was about a barn-find 1960 300SL that had turned up in Princeton, New Jersey.
You see, back when Eisenhower was in the White House, a pretty college coed received a mighty Mercedes roadster, an extravagant gift from her doting parents. Young Miss Marthe Tribble truly loved her China Blue Benz and named it “Old Blue Eyes.”
Miss Tribble drove that car well into her own middle years and then, unaccountably, parked it in the far corner of the family garage. There it languished, untouched, for nearly a quarter century. Classic-car aficionado Jim Utaski purchased Old Blue Eyes as found, with chalky paint, moldy interior, crud-encrusted mechanicals, and four flat tires. Although the car was in a substantially dilapidated state, it was, nonetheless, complete in virtually every respect.
Miraculously, when all the fluids were drained and replaced, and a new wiring harness and plugs were installed, the 46-year-old slant-six roared to life. The ancient bias-ply rubber even held air. After replacing the bushings for the transmission linkage, this veteran was actually capable of being driven down the road. Jim exhibited the unrestored 300SL for appreciative MBCA audiences at the 2007 June Jamboree, Pittsburgh StarTrack, and the Falkenhorst picnic.
Jump cut to the summer of 2010. Carmel Canyon is a stream-cut arroyo that starts in the foothills of California’s central coastal range between the Santa Cruz and Los Padres mountains. As the canyon approaches the rolling Pacific breakers just south of the Monterey Peninsula, it widens and forms a green alluvial plain. The climate and fertile soil attracted Spanish settlers, then American farmers, and now golfers from all over the world. In August, the cool mist clings to the valley floor until mid-morning, when the sun burns it off from east to west, exposing an azure, cloudless sky.
It was there on the green at Quail Lodge that I saw Old Blue Eyes once again. This car and I go back a long way. When I was a kid growing up in Princeton during the 1960s, I vividly remember seeing the China Blue 300SL roadster on Nassau Street. When the car emerged from its decades-long hibernation, I was one of the first people to whom Jim showed his newfound treasure. Now I was privileged to see Old Blue Eyes’ concours d’elegance debut. “The Quail: A Motorsports Gathering,” one of the crown jewels of that special weekend, entices automobile aficionados from all around the world to assemble for a veritable automotive bacchanalia. Jim’s 1960 roadster was one of the invited guests of honor at The Quail.
This classic Mercedes has now been meticulously restored by Jon Clerk and his colleagues at Steel Wings, Ltd., located in Hopewell, New Jersey. Every original part has been painstakingly returned to factory-fresh condition.
Old Blue Eyes is the handsomest 300SL extant, bar none, and a strong candidate for the title of finest car in the world. Move over Ferrari Barchetta, Blower Bentley, and Alfa Romeo Disco Volante. The restoration of this Mercedes is flawless, completely true to the original. This vehicle sits squarely at the intersection of historical authenticity and objective beauty, placing it at the pinnacle of the concours peak. It must be a heady sensation indeed to be Jim Utaski and to be the custodian of this very special motorcar.
But there is a bittersweet element to every restoration project. The dumpster behind the Steel Wings workshop in Hopewell is a repository of memories and dreams. A ticket stub for the Columbia-Yale game back when Grayson Kirk and Kingman Brewster headed up those august institutions might have been lodged under the passenger seat. A candy wrapper from Schraft’s and a Lucky Strike cigarette butt could be petrified under the ashtray in the dash. A crumpled old program from the Metropolitan Opera dating from Pavarotti’s debut season could have been jammed into the spare-tire well. There are 8 million stories to be found in the naked chassis.
I personally could not be a plastic surgeon, cutting healthy flesh to render someone subjectively more attractive. From my perspective, the individual character of a face or body, whether formed by genetic combination or by time and experience, is sacred.
So too I would find it difficult to be employed by an automotive coachwork atelier faced with the project of restoring Old Blue Eyes. It would pain me to sand off the nitrous lacquer paint that originally had been applied at Sindelfingen by careful craftsmen back in 1960. It is almost unbearable for me to contemplate flaying the upholstery hides that had cosseted Miss Tribble’s well-formed bottom when she had been a student at Vassar College. Removing the oil-change stickers dating back to the ’60s from the doorpost seems nearly sacrilegious.
It’s tough being a romanticist. There’s nothing like an unmolested automotive time capsule. On the other hand, a flawless restoration is a work of art. I am in love with both the original “Old Blue Eyes” and the restored “Old Blue Eyes II.” To paraphrase New Jersey’s great romantic poet, Joyce Kilmer:
Articles are written by fools like me,
But only Jim Utaski could decide
which way it would be.