Follow the Numbers (Post #97)

The Stone Age

If The Alfatross had a memory, what would it remember? Would it remember its first owner who bought it off the Rotondi Milano showroom floor exactly 60 years ago on November 29th, 1955? Would it remember being a flashy new red sports car and all the attention that comes with that? 

Now a Citroen garage, this is the Rotondi address in Milano
where The Alfatross met its first owner on November 29th,
 1955--exactly 60 years ago as I write this.  

Or the second owner, who seems to have been an American serviceman? Maybe it's memory would be like mine: selective. Maybe it would prefer to forget the voyage across the Atlantic, the surprise and humiliation of being abandoned on the dock in New York when the owner did not show up to claim it. Then the years of benign neglect and abuse passing through the hands of four more owners until it ended up with me in 1969. Then even more neglect coupled with a lot of travel until 2013. But cars can't talk, so we'll never know.

Or maybe they do, if you listen closely, and when they do, they say volumes. 
I know a little about those early years only because The Alfatross still proudly bore its long out-of-date Italian license plates when it came to me in 1969.

The front plate before restoration.  Note the heavy dents distorting the letters embossed into the thin aluminum plate.

Of course I wondered where it came from and where it had been during the 14 preceeding years, but there wasn't much to go on. Alfa Romeos were rare in the US, and Zagato bodies--well, they may as well have been UFOs! It took me a long time to realize that the Italian plates were more than just exotic curiosities. In actuality, they were the only link to the car's early history. 

The larger, heavier, steel rear plate  after stripping but before restoration.

The Enlightenment

In 2004 I wrote to the Automobile Club d'Italia requesting an ownership trace using the numbers and letters on the plates. In due course I received a letter with a photocopy of a document recording the sale of The Alfatross by its first owner, Alessandro Costantini Brancadoro, to its second owner, Carl Joseph Michels in 1957, and issuing the new plates.

The official Automobile Club d'Italia registration created when The Alfatross was sold to its second owner, who lists his residence as Jamaica, NY. He shipped it to the US, but something happened and he did not show up to claim it when it arrived.

The Dark Ages

I'm still working on sorting out what happened after that, but all I have are the reminiscences of The Alfatross' fifth owner, Pat Braden.  According to Pat, Will Henderson was the lucky guy who drove off the dock in The Alfatross that day, not Carl Michels. We traced Will to Flint, Michigan, but the trail went cold.  The same thing happened with the next owner, Paul Turner, whose name shows up on some of the tools in the tool kit.  He was a Chicagoan at the very time when the Alfa Romeo Owners' Club was formed there, but even with the Internet's powerful locator tools . . . "so many Paul Turners, so little time . . ."     

The Renaissance

Fast forward to 2015. I stop to get gas.  A pickup pulls up behind me with a nicely-restored Model A Ford on a flatbed trailer.  I look it over and notice that the period license plates look like new.  So I approach the driver and ask him who restored them?  Enthusiastically, he tells me that he's a member of a Model A club in Texas and all the members get their plates done by one or the other of two guys who live in the area, and he whips out a notebook and gives me the contact information for both. As he drove off, I realized I never even caught his name.

And that's how I ended up calling Mr. Sonny Lewis. Restoring old plates is such an unusual craft I couldn't help but ask how he learned it. "In Huntsville!" he cheerfully replied (Huntsville is an infamous Texas State Prison).  Then, after a pregnant pause, "Just kidding!"

I learned a lot about what it takes to restore a license plate in the next few minutes and sent him mine the next day. He goes down in my book as one of the best, most competent contractors The Alfatross has worked with.

The front aluminum plate after restoration by Sonny Lewis.

The rear steel plate after restoration by Sonny Lewis. The hole in the center allows access to the push-button rear trunk lock release.