im McManus is a
car guy, the son of an Edsel dealer. He is the kind of man who, when you ask him how many cars he owns, has to stop and think. Twenty-three, he decides. McManus is pursuing number 24. An hour earlier he had been on the losing end of a bidding war over a 1957 Thun- derbird at the Barrett-Jackson collector- car auction. Now he sips a beer in a Scottsdale, Arizona, hotel bar, running the numbers on his life behind the wheel. A semiretired Denver industrial realtor, McManus, 66, has owned 77 cars—so far—and aches for more. A 1970 Pontiac Grand Prix. A mid-’60s Lincoln Continental convertible. His teenage dream was a 1963 Buick Riviera, con- sidered one of the all-time best-looking American cars. He was 17 when it ap- peared. “I swore to myself the day I first saw one that if I could ever afford to have that car, I would,” he says. And he did, of course. One is parked in his garage now. It has plenty of com- pany. A few weeks back, a close friend and fellow collector died, passing on his own cache of 19 vintage vehicles—most from 1957, each one black. This brush with mortality has left McManus with a fleet of monochromatic cars and a gnawing unease about what to do with them. His own children aren’t inter- ested. “I don’t want to burden my kids with my fantasies,” he says. Yet McManus is here, looking to fulfill one more fantasy. (Forget, for a moment, that he already owns a 1957 Thunderbird.) Explain this to me, I ask: How many old cars does one driver need? And what exactly do you find when you sit inside that ’ 63 Riv you lusted after at 17, and smell the leather seats, and listen to the ageless rumble of a Wildcat V8? What’s in there? He smiles indulgently. “Yesterday,” he says.
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