Small World

The

By Dave Pratt

Back around the beginning of August, we received a message via the club website's Contact page from a guy offering his set of ancient Velocissima newsletters from 1986-1994. I was the Velocissima editor from 1999 through 2009 when we went strictly digital, and have copies of all of those issues. I wondered if the club might be interested in having his set of newsletters for its "museum" (I'd offer my set too), so I ran it by the club Directors to see what they thought.

Director Frank Anigbo stepped up and said that he'd volunteer to be the keeper of the club's collection of vintage Velocissima newsletters, so I got back to the guy who was offering them. Turned out that he lives in NYC but was planning to be in MA on the following Tuesday and Wednesday, and maybe one of the Directors could arrange to meet him and do the hand-off. So I asked what his itinerary was and he said he'd be in Cambridge on Tuesday and Walpole on Wednesday.

Now I'm thinking, "How did I get into this?", but told him that he'd be going through Dedham (where I live) to get from Cambridge to Walpole, so we could meet somewhere along the way or he could stop at Casa Pratt. We decided on the latter and he and his wife showed up here mid-afternoon on Tuesday. They're very nice people and I asked if they'd like to come up to the house and set a spell, but they were on their way to visit friends with melting ice cream, so our visit was short.

He handed over a sackful of newsletters and told me that they had been given to him by the seller of the one Alfa he'd ever owned — an '84 GTV6 that he'd bought in 1996 and drove for seven years. I mentioned that Vivian (Vi) and I had bought an '84 GTV6 brand new to be Vi's car (I was driving my '74 Spider) but that she'd hated it, somewhat reasonably: It threw its fan belt within the first week; the door locks froze when it was cold and she had to tie the doors closed with a piece of rope; the wide tires and unassisted steering required muscle at lower speeds; the clutch had a very abrupt engagement point; and it would sometimes backfire when starting, blowing the intake plenum off, screwing up the mixture and rendering the car unstartable.

Anyway, sometime after they left, I flipped through a few of the newsletters. They had lots of pictures of people I still know, and many other good memories. (Examples from the issue at the top of the stack: Jim Scutti holding his two-year-old son; a recipe by Frank Rapisardi for Nannini Panini, which he'd brought to an AONE gathering at the home of Tom Ducibella and Angela Nannini, to which Paul Glynn had driven George Fogg's '62 Giulietta Zagato.) I checked the mailing labels to see if I might know the person the guy with the newsletters had bought the GTV6 from, and ... it was my brother John!

John had liked our GTV6 despite its deficiencies, so when it was a year old we sold it to him at a deep discount (and Vi got an RX7). John kept the GTV6 and went on to drive it for ten years, before selling it to ...

The guy with the newsletters! I emailed him immediately on Tuesday to see if he was pulling my leg and knew what he'd done, but he was still away and didn't return to NYC until a few days later. At which time he replied that he hadn't looked at the newsletter mailing labels, hadn't recalled the name of the seller of the GTV6 he'd bought, and was just as surprised as I was!

I pinged brother John and he didn't recall the name of the buyer either, but he did dig up this photo of the subject GTV6 parked near his house in Medfield:

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Here's one of the Velocissima mailing labels:

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So that's my "small world" Alfa story. Pretty neat that I was standing in the driveway that Tuesday with no clue that I was talking with the guy who'd owned and driven the GTV6 that we'd bought new 41 years ago, until I looked at the newsletters after he'd left!

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