He loved cars – he even once owned a gas station in California – so after best-selling author Clive Cussler hit it big with his 1976 book “Raise the Titanic,” he bought a beat-up 1946 Ford Club Coupe and restored the vehicle to its postwar splendor.
The maroon coupe has sat in an Arvada warehouse for decades, but now it’s on display, along with more than 35 other rare vehicles.
His family has turned the warehouse into Cussler Museum. Ever see a 1938 baby-blue Bugatti? A 1955 Rolls Royce Silver Dawn? A lavender 1936 Avions Voison?
Unless you’ve been one of the many car-club members who has visited the museum over the years, chances are you haven’t.
Cussler’s cars are rare. He doesn’t have an especially large collection – one car-crazed gentleman in Elizabeth owns more than 500 vehicles – but his is an especially selective assortment of automobiles.
“It’s eclectic,” says Kenneth Tisdale, a past president of the Colorado Association of Tiger Owners. A Tiger is a British car, and local collectors of the car, as a group, visit Cussler’s museum about once a year. “He has some stuff that’s just bizarre, stuff you’d never see anywhere.”
Cussler grew up in California and raised his children in Colorado. He now lives outside Phoenix and has stopped amassing cars. His kids will run the museum while he writes in the desert, but he was in the warehouse last week looking over his gleaming collection.
“Some people are drawn to a van Gogh or a Rembrandt,” says the white-goateed, sharp-featured author, whose soft laugh comes out as something like a gurgle. “Some are attracted to exotic guns. Coins. Stamps. I am attracted to cars.”
Cussler, 73, knows about his cars. Pass a bulbous and finned coffee-colored 1947 Czechoslovakian vehicle called a Tatra, and Cussler talks about the designer of the car, and how the man sued
Volkswagen for stealing his automobile designs. Pass a car called a Cord, and Cussler recounts the story of how a phone call from his sister in Minnesota led him to the extremely rare 1930 auto – one of only six ever made – rotting in a barn.
A healthy portion of Cussler’s collection, like the Cord, is “town cars,” stretched vehicles where a chauffeur sat in the open, separated from his monied employers in the cab behind.
This town-car interest, Cussler says, stems from an early-childhood image that entered his memory and never left: playing in front of his modest home and seeing a chauffeured town car pass by. The display of wealth and elegance wowed the author.
These and other American and European cars for plutocrats occupy the exhibit space, but a next-door warehouse of Cussler’s holds another 50 or so cars, most of them from the 1950s and American. One thing most of them have in common? Extravagant fins.
The Cussler family intends to turn the other warehouse into museum space too.
The entire collection, Cussler says, showcases “masterpieces of the mechanical arts.”
Many of the cars in Cussler’s collection, like the Cord, were in bad shape when the author bought them. Cussler himself used to muck around in the iron and grease and restore the cars, he says, but most of the work for the past 22 years has been done by Keith Lowden, a mechanic who works full time on Cussler’s collection.
Lowden has the bearing of a proud patriarch amid a swarm of grandchildren when he stalks the museum’s rows of elaborate hood ornaments and fat, smooth curves.
“My grandpa was a mechanic,” he says. “It was always my dream to be a mechanic.”
Does he have a favorite car?
“Every one of them.”
Staff writer Douglas Brown can be reached at 303-820-1395 or djbrown@denverpost.com.
The Cussler Museum, 14959 W. 69th Ave. in Arvada, is open 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Mondays and Tuesdays. Call 303-420-2795 or visit cusslermuseum.com.
