Welcome To The Virtual Garage Of The Comer Collection

“Find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life.”
― Mark Twain

Can you imagine if Mark Twain loved cars?

I’ve been crazy about cars since I figured out they existed. I bought my fist car, a smashed-up 1968 Mustang convertible for $450 when I was 13 years old. I was forced to quickly dispose of it fearing my Dad would figure out that the old clunker parked a few doors down from our house was his 7th grade son’s. Of course, unbeknownst to me, he had already figured it out. Truth be told, I wasn’t the smartest 7th grader.

However, within a short amount of time my Dad made me a deal that would change my life: If my grades were solid (i.e., vastly improve them) he’d match me dollar for dollar and help me get a car. The eventual car? A 1970 MGB/GT, purchased at night, from what I now know was a “flipper” of the first order who cleverly disguised (along with the darkness) the heaping pile of crap my new $900 MGB was. Over the next few years taught myself about rust repair, bodywork, mechanical repairs, and everything else it took to “restore” an MGB on a lawn mowing, snow shoveling and paperboy’s budget. And, quite fortuitously, there was a service garage on my paper route whose proprietor Jim took pity on me and gave me a job helping out around the garage. In return Jim let me use his body shop to spray on a gleaming coat of blue PPG Centari enamel.

I enjoyed that MGB until I test-drove a green Euro-spec 1969 Alfa Romeo GTV 1750 that stole my heart. Thanks to a bridge loan from my Dad to come up with the portion of the $2,450 purchase price I didn’t have (most of it, as I recall) the Alfa was mine and the MGB/GT was quickly sold to pay it of that note. The GTV was a magnificent (if also a sneaky rusty) car that I loved- until I crashed it into a cop car. But that’s a story for another time. Soon I found an Alfa GTV 2000 to replace it, a car which I still own today. Little did I know that at 16 years old, struggling to have just one cool old car, I had unofficially begun The Comer Collection.

Over the years I’ve continued to chase cars that spoke to me like that first Alfa GTV 1750. Quite simply I won’t buy a car I don’t love or won’t use. This collection is a working one: all of the road cars all get driven and all of the race cars get raced. Cars were never meant to be static works of art, so how can you truly understand what makes them great without experiencing their capabilities, or wonderful lack thereof?