By Connie Leinbach
In the way that a parade of beauties may attract attention, members of the Rolls Royce Owners Club in their vintage cars turned heads as they traveled through Ocracoke.
The 20 members of the club came through the island April 30 during their week-long trek from New Bern, to Emerald Isle, Beaufort, up through the Outer Banks and back to New Bern, said Mary White of Winston-Salem and organizer of the jaunt.
The group was limited to cars built before 1939, she said. Some of the cars are Bentleys, since Rolls Royce purchased Bentley during The Depression, said one of the drivers, Veasey Cullen.
Members of the club came from all over the country, some trailing their cars to the gathering point and others driving them.
“We know everyone,” White said. “So, it’s like a family reunion when we go on these tours.”
Don Wathne of Charleston said he purchased his car’s chassis 20 years ago and a friend then built the body for it.
His Silver Ghost takes regular gas but only gets about 10 miles to the gallon.
One car, a 1930 Rolls Royce Regent Springfield, turned 25,000 miles the day they rolled onto the island.
The vintages of the cars ran from 1914 to 1930, White said.
Cullen’s Silver Ghost was one of the longest running model series of any car ever built, he said. That series was built from 1906 to 1926.
Rolls Royces were made in both America and Great Britain.
Since Cullen’s car was built in Great Britain, his driver’s seat is on the right side along with the manual transmission.
As vintage cars, these don’t have the same design and safety innovations of today’s vehicles, particularly the brakes, he said, which are drum brakes, and they don’t react as fast as modern brakes.
“You have to drive these cars with an eagle eye because you gotta see what’s in front of you and spaghetti fingers with the transmission,” he said. The original 1924 cotton clutch is bathed in oil.
He said they travel on Interstate 95 and can go close to 70 mph.
“We travel around 50, 55,” he said, noting that “there is no speed limit. You have to understand, in America, the speed limit is the benchmark of opportunity.”
Cullen’s car has roll-up windows where Whatne’s car has side curtains, as it was in the early days of cars.
“They’re evolving from a touring car, which is open, to a modern car, which has roll-up windows,” he said.
Whatne doesn’t have a recourse if the weather turns bad during their journey.
“You gotta be tough – and a little crazy,” Cullen said, laughing.
Many of the cars in the club had well-known owners originally.
“This car was actually bullet proofed at one time,” he said, as it was once owned by Colonel McCormick, the publisher of the Chicago Tribune.
“He sold a lot of newspapers about Al Capone’s misadventures,” Cullen said. “And Al Capone shot one of his reporters within three blocks of what was called the Tribune Tower.”
So, McCormick took that as a warning sign from Al Capone.
“Which it was, so he had the car bulletproofed,” Cullen said, explaining that plates of saw steel (used to make saw blades), were inserted into the doors and around the inside of the canvas top.
“The glass was an inch and a quarter thick,” he said.
As for the price in the early part of the 20th century?
He said a Model A Ford cost a little shy of $500.
“This one cost $16,500,” he said about his own car.
As the group parked for the evening at the Pony Island Inn, Cullen told Manager Grayson Kirk that all the cars would leave a little pile of oil.
“The reason these cars survived is that they were all well lubricated,” Cullen said.
Nickel silver is what covers what would be the chrome in modern cars.
“You have to polish it,” he said.
He said that after one purchased the Rolls Royce chassis, the running part of the car, you’d go into the dealership, and they would customize the body for the purchaser.
“They had certain styles of bodies that you could select from and then they’d measure you and they’d put the pedals and the seat position for your size – custom fit leather, custom fit color, custom fit top,” he said.
Dealers encouraged purchasers to buy a winter body, with roll-up windows, and a summer body, which was an open touring car.
Six poles hold the body, which the owner could unhook, lift off and change.
Cullen, who is a dentist, who learned car mechanics with his dad, a civil engineer, does a lot of the work on his Rolls himself.
“I learned dentistry on this car,” he said. “Dentistry is very mechanical, very intuitive. It’s problem solving. So, this is where I started out my dental career.”
Legendary for their comfort, Cullen attested as such, pointing out a long spring from the middle of the car to the rear axle.
“It’s a very nice ride,” he said. “It’s a very cushiony ride but it also holds the road well.”
More information about the Rolls Royce Owners Club, headquartered in Mechanicsburg, Pa., can be found here.
