Collector just loves Austin Healey
Saturday, October 25, 2008 By Peter C. T. Elsworth,
Some collectors collect cars for their collection.
Others collect cars to drive.
So it is with Randy Hicks who owns three Austin Healeys and earlier this year, along with his wife, Jeanne, took “Lucile,” his white 1966 Austin Healey 3000 Mark III BJ8 convertible for a 6,123-mile tour, much of it with a number of other Healey owners.
They started in Los Angeles (where they had shipped the car), drove up the West Coast to Vancouver, across to Banff National Park (Canada), then down to Glacier National Park, Mont., Yellowstone National Park, Wy., Mount Rushmore National Park, S.D., and then home via Bass Harbor, Maine.
The Austin Healey tour ended at Mount Rushmore and the Hicks then headed home across the country, with the overall trip taking almost exactly four weeks, from early July to early August.
The 1965 Healey is not the pride of Hicks’ collection. Rather, “Ruby,” a restored black-and-white 1956 factory-built Le Mans Austin Healey 100M BN2 takes pride of place in his garage.
“It’s one of 640 built and of 149 known to exist,” he said, noting that at 2,000 pounds and 140 horsepower, it is the fastest of his three cars.
Hicks said he got into Healeys in the early 1970s.
“I had two to keep one running,” he said, noting the special sound a Healey makes.
“Then three kids came along and the Healeys went,” he said, noting that they were somewhat replaced by Siberian Huskies that Jeanne raised and trained for many years. “But I always followed vintage car magazines.”
Hicks, 61, worked as the creative director for a specialized work clothing catalog company, often photographing men and women dressed in company clothes. Two large prints of his photographs adorn the walls of his three-car garage, one of a worker 1,600 feet up a microwave tower and the other of a group of Mexican miners 1,000 feet down and a mile into a mountain.
Another large photo shows him driving his 1956 Healey at the Summit Point Raceway in West Virginia in 2003.
Hicks’ house is 900 feet down a winding driveway. He and Jeanne bought the property and built their house in 1983 partly because the land included a Hicks (no known relation) family cemetery dating back to the mid-1700s.
But as his children grew up (they have three grandchildren) and began to leave home, Hicks said he began to pursue Healeys and finally got to visit Austin Healey restorer Tom Kovacs’ company Fourintune in Cedarburg, Wi. “Tom had a 100M he had just finished for a guy in California,” Hicks said. “And I fell in love with it.”
He said Kovacs helped him locate his 100M outside Seattle through auto dealer Rocky Santiago of Santiago Classic Cars in Oklahoma City.
“I bought it sight unseen,” he said, adding that it was not running but had only 80,000 miles on it and had never been restored.”
Hicks had the car shipped to Kovacs’ shop for restoration. That was in October 1999 and went out himself the following February to watch it being torn apart.
“I left there after four days wondering what I’d done,” he said.
He said Kovacs had the car ready right on schedule at the end of October 2000 and the bill was “right to the penny.”Since then, he estimates he has put some 30,000 miles on it.
“The first few years, we drove it a lot,” he said, including attending the 50th anniversary of the marque in Lake Tahoe, Calif., in 2002.
Following the show, he and Jeanne fell in with a bunch of Healey fans who used to go touring for a week or so after the show. It was the beginning of a new hobby for the couple, and the beginning of a bunch of new friendships.
“Touring is what I love,” said Jeanne, noting how close she and Randy have gotten to some of the other Healey owners over the years. “It’s enriched our lives.
”Randy said the tours involve regular stops for food, sightseeing and shopping. “He’s get up and go and I’m drive and eat,” said Jeanne, a fourth-grade teacher. However, following one tour through the Texas Hill Country when it rained 10 days out of two weeks and the side curtains leaked so much that at one point “there was a couple of inches of water sloshing about in the car,” Hicks said Jeanne suggested he get a Healey with roll-up windows.
And that was how he came to buy his 1966 Healey BJ8. Again he contacted Rocky in Oklahoma, and did not hear from him for three or four months. Then in December 2005, Rocky called and asked him to send him a check.
“What am I buying?” he asked as he wrote out the check.
Turned out the car had been bought new by a doctor who had put 22,100 miles on it. When he passed away in 2001, a dentist bought it from the estate but had only put a further 900 miles on it.
“The car had never been driven, and that’s a mixed blessing,” he said, noting that cars fare better when they are driven despite the wear and tear.
Hicks, however, bought the car with its inline 6, 150-horse engine to drive and worked on it, including replacing gaskets and inserting insulation around under the cockpit to keep the heat at bay.
He reckons to have put 40,000 miles on it, including the big trip he and Jeanne took out west this summer. And he only had one flat tire and some minor problems with fuel pumps, which he blamed himself for.
That trip involved as many as 14 Healeys, although only four cars made the tour from L. A. to Mount Rushmore. Hicks and his wife organized the day-to-day logistics, and showed a thick file with maps and detailed instructions regarding hotels and dinner reservations every night.
Then there is “Esther,” the third Healey in his garage, a white 1962 3000 Mark II BN7 that Hicks said he “just fell into” two years ago.
He said it was described as “a time-warp car” with only 58,000 miles on the clock, a two-seater hardtop with triple carbs and center shift. One owner, never restored.
Turned out the owner was 86 years old and lived in Kansas City. He wanted to sell because he could no longer drive it and Hicks said he “just got him at the right time.”
Hicks said the tour this summer was “the trip of a lifetime,” and a summary he put together quickly runs out of superlatives in trying to describe some of the most spectacular scenery in North America.
As he summed it up:
“6,122.5 miles in 4 weeks in a 43-year old British car. Perfect!”