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Porsche Club of America
The Northeast Region

By Tom Tate
NOR'EASTER Online - August 2002

It's amazing how we connect memories with smells from years ago. When I was little, my family lived in California and we drove back to Missouri (Columbia) each Christmas for the holidays. In those days nearly every house was heated by coal. There was the smell of burned coal throughout the town that began in the fall each year. I guess it was something that the residents just got used to and never thought about. As a kid from LA we never burned anything in the winter so the coal smell was something that I always associated with ice and snow. Those holiday visits were the only time I ever saw snow or smelled the coal fires that kept the houses warm in winter. One year we drove back in the late fall, long before the snows had come. As we approached Jefferson City, I remember telling my father that I knew that it was going to snow soon because I could smell it. With the frost on the pumpkins all the furnaces were stoked up and the smell of coal was in the air. He spent a while trying to explain that snow didn't have an odor. But I was sure that I could smell the snow and he wasn't going to convince me otherwise.

The very first 356 I bought was owned by a US Army officer that was being transferred to Europe. The white coupe had a leather interior, the first I'd ever seen. The car was four years old when I bought it and had been very well taken care of by the young Captain. I thought that the deep rich smell of my new car was the unusual leather interior. There were other owners in the Potomac Region that had leather interiors but they didn't seem the same as mine.It wasn't until many years later that I at I figured out the it was Prince Albert not the fine German leather that left the pleasant odor. The owner smoked a pipe and while he didn't smoke in the car, the smoke trapped in his clothes left a trail in the 356. To this day when I smell a pipe smoker nearby I can close my eyes and see that white coupe.

When I was 16 and driving a '58 VW, the local dealer in Orlando was also the Porsche dealer. Since it wasn't far from my house I was in the dealership a lot. Of course when you're young, gas is 32 cents a gallon, you have your own car, and it gets 30 miles per gallon, nothing is very far away. Every visit allowed me to walk through the showroom on the way to the parts department. After a few months I convinced a salesman to unlock the door of a '59 356 so that I could sit in the car.

Every car built has it's own smell which is made up from the materials used in it's construction. The combination of glues, plastics, carpeting, and paint combine to produce an odor that tends to be the same for each manufacturer. Cars from a particular era all tend to smell alike. We all know that Austin Healey’s always smell moldy and early Fords smell like a dog's bed. It would be difficult to describe the smell in a 356 A from 43 years ago but I think that I can. A while back I was asked to take a look at a '57 coupe that had a reported 14k miles on the odometer to give my opinion as to the chance that it was accurate. The car had been in dry storage for all its life and had probably seen less sun than a current GT-3. As I walked up to the car I could see the bright red dash pad through the front windshield. It was so bright that I was sure that it was a replacement. As I opened the door I could see that the sides of the pad were still under the door molding and had never been touched. An original dash covering that was still as bright as the day it was installed. The seats matched the rest of the interior trim with the same bright color. But the most amazing aspect of the entire car for me was not the condition, not the options, not the color but the smell of that interior.

Suddenly I was 16 years old again sitting in a brand new car on a dealers showroom in 1959. In the time it took to take a deep breath I could suddenly picture the inside of that VW showroom with it's shiny new Beetles parked on the tile floor. There were flower vases on the flat dashboards and big black mudflaps under each fender. The most amazing part of the whole experience was my ability to reach back into that long forgotten pigeonhole and pull out the images that matched up with that odor, all in an instant. Images, that if I were asked earlier, I would have said that I could not recall.

After the jolt of that experience I have thought about those pigeonholes in the brain and what's been undisturbed all these years.

I was able to come up with quite a few;

The smell of burning rubber at one of the flat airport turns of Sebring in '59.
The pine tree odor at a Boy Scout Camp in California
The smell of Clearasil on an 8th grade dance date.
The smell of fresh baked bread on my uncles Missouri farm.
The odor of cow pies on the same farm.
The sour milk odor that came out of the heater vents of my '58 VW for a year, after a gallon of milk broke open on a hard left turn

There are a few that I can recognize but can't complete the picture:

Heavy gear oil – a bad smell but can't remember where it's from.
A very expensive leather coat but it wasn't mine.
Fresh mowed grass on a hot summer day, very dry, long ago.
Salt water smell on a beach blanket.
The smell of lilies but it was not at a funeral.
A burning clutch plate, the kind with asbestos in it.
Fresh paint on an old car, painted on really thick.
Oil coming out the exhaust. (the first six cars I owned?)

I'm sure that you all have those same pigeonholes stored away some where. They probably have even more interesting things in them. This summer when you have a few minutes, take a close look. See what you find. You'll be surprised.

Porsche Club of America The Northeast Region

Porsche Club of America
The Northeast Region