If you’d like to have your story told here in the Prieta POST as a member profile, please send me an email! I’d love to hear about you, what you do for fun, and what got you into these crazy cars we all love so much. Chris Dyer – dyerhaus@gmail.com
Member Profile: Chris Markham
written by Chris Markham
My introduction to cars began very young. I was a toddler and my Dad was amateur racing in the midwest. Eastern OK and northern TX. Usually someone else’s car, he was a humble grad student in the early sixties with a growing family. I’ve a picture of him in an RS-60, but it was likely a paddock pose. He did race the family Triumph TR3 on occasion, and his sister’s Austin Healey 3000 Mk III. We 3 kids used to ride standing up behind the seats of the Triumph, or crouching to get out of the wind. As a friend observed decades later, these days behavior like that would be considered child abuse. For me, it was great, bombing down country roads, wind in my hair, sharing my Dad’s point of view of the road.
In the mid-sixties the TR3 went for a station wagon and the midwest went for “The Valley of Heart’s Delight”, that later came to be known as “Silicon Valley”. Mom traded in her oval window VW for a new Mustang and Dad picked up an MGA 1500 twin-cam. He showed me the dark arts of Lucas electrics and the fine art of balancing twin Stromberg carbs. In the evenings I would sprawl on the living room carpet and read his Road & Track magazine and my eyes and mind were truly opened, traveling the world of sports cars. In those journeys one marque in particular kept coming to the fore. Porsche.
My best friend’s older brother had a 914, which was too cool, and his other older brother had a model of a 906, which I turned over and over, taking in the details. As an early teen I remember us walking downtown and parked streetside we saw the exotic but familiar profile of a 911. This one orange, with a “Carrera” script below the door, but also sporting a short spoiler jutting out the back. “That’s a ducktail”, my worldly friend declared. I started noticing Porsches in earnest–in Movies, on TV races that made it to broadcast. LeMans, IROC! And always in magazines.
My friend got a Baja VW, we tinkered on it, learning about German engineering and the beauty of the air-cooled motor. One afternoon his older brother tossed him the keys to the 914 and told us to drop it off at some guy named Jerry’s shop on McGlincy in Campbell. I rode shotgun and of course we took the long way there. When my buddy dove into the cloverleaf onto southbound Winchester from San Thomas I thought we were goners, sailing over the weeds and the fence beyond. But it didn’t happen, the little Porsche turned-in and stuck and took more throttle and I realized everything I had read and seen about Porsches was an understatement. That evening, while I drove my sister to her after school job at Macy’s in the family Buick, I dreamt of the day when I could get a Porsche.
I resonated with the Speedsters, the flat-four wasn’t too different from the VW motor I had already put my hands into. I would read about them in Road & Track–they would always come up as some standard measure of handling and lightness and build quality as club racers, but they were always three or four thousand dollars in the Mercury, the News, Chronicle, or the Examiner’s want ads, double my teenage budget and out of reach. They might as well have been three or four hundred thousand dollars.
I started reading Hot VWs Magazine as what I saw was an inexpensive avenue to DIY, hot-rodding and cool in a car that was at least a cousin to Porsche. In the margin ads there was advertised an Intermeccanica “Speedster C” kit with wide flares. That became a vague dream, sitting on an imagined fire-breathing VW motor. I also discovered Excellence magazine and a little backpage ad was a cartoon of a faceless man wearing a top hat and a cape, “The Maestro”, who sold engine services and a book called “The ABCs (and 912s) of Porsche Engines: or Porsche Engines and The Future of the Human Race”. Well, that sounded like my kind of book! My buddy and I having rebuilt his Baja motor in his driveway, I knew that this mechanical achievement was within my reach. And a shop that sold this book, “Automotion” was just up the street from where I was working. I grabbed a copy at my lunch hour and promptly lost myself in it, reading it as a novel. I devoured the history, the mechanical details and of course, The Maestro’s unique “stories”. As close as I got to a 356 motor though, was a ‘68 VW Fastback, “Wacky”, mildly breathed-on, and whose life ended ignominiously in a failed apartment bathtub lower-end rebuild (yeah, really, that’s how I cleaned-up from a leaky oil cooler). I had a dream of finding a broken 356 motor, rebuilding it with The Maestro’s tutelage, putting it in Wacky, and then getting the Speedster C kit and then….
Fast forward 15 years through an unremarkable early life of school and jobs, I find myself with a family, 2 toddlers and two older kids from my wife’s first marriage. She came with horses as well, her lifetime hobby. Settling into my career in software I one day realized I’d better get a hobby, too, or all our money would end up being passed through the horses, with my seeing little of it but that left on the end of a manure rake.
So I rekindled my interest in Porsche–never really gone, but deferred. One day, shopping for a used wagon to ferry the kids to school, I spied a red 944 at the edge of the lot. I walked around it and found myself looking across the roof at the saleswoman. “You look good with this car. Let me get the keys.” Leaving my family behind, I took a test drive and was stunned at the handling. Still, several Porsches later, one of if not the best handling car I’ve ever driven. It left a deep imprint, but I didn’t keep the keys. We got a Daewoo instead. Meanwhile my friend with the Baja moved it out of his garage to make way for a ‘68L with a 3.0L transplant, triple Webers and a 934 body kit. A beast. I got another shot of Porsche fever riding in and working on that car. I knew I had to start figuring out how to get my Porsche. Even in the target-rich Bay Area available cars always seemed to be out of my view…I wasn’t plugged-in to any kind of network. Pawing through want ads, the back of R&T, the back of Excellence, Hemmings–anyplace to try to get more glimpses of Porsches for sale always fell short when it came to a 356. They had moved from merely “used cars” to being “classics”. It seemed they had all just disappeared from the market. The driver-level ones affordable to mere mortals, anyway.
There was this new thing though, that didn’t exist when I first started my search in earnest. It was the World Wide Web. One day I went to Alta Vista dot com and entered as a search term “Porsche 356”. I was directed to a site with a single page, “356registry.org”. The page was introduced by a picture of a white twin-grille B Cabriolet, a golden retriever behind the wheel. The entire copy of the site was just a single paragraph–what I later learned was the Registry’s standard blurb about why they existed. There was an address to join (you didn’t need to own a 356!) and an email address to a listserv, “356talk@356registry.org”. Well, I knew what that was from college, and I joined both the club and the talk list and introduced myself. I found a great group of folk. They still are. I located the owner of that B Cab from the website and he was Lt. Col. Robin Hansen (ret.) of Arizona. Later I found out Robin had been a WWII fighter pilot, a founding member of the Porsche Club of Great Britain, and had taken factory delivery of a 356 Coupe–stuffing 2 kids and luggage in the back then doing a 3 week summer tour of Europe. Robin’s the one who told me doing that to kids would today constitute child abuse.
Once I saw their great magazine, the content and the desire to expand the community and preserve the knowledge of these old cars (this was 1997–the last car was made 32 years earlier!), I knew the Internet had something to offer the club, and so could I. I’d learned at work a little something about this WWW HTML stuff and offered to maybe add a bit more to the club’s presence, easier to access than the listserv emails. Robin, the de facto webmaster, turned that mantle over to me, and for the next several years we (Robin, myself, Rick Dill–also in SJ, and a few other dedicated data collectors and historians) had the blessings of the Trustees to grow the site. Just before it was replaced by a Forum system and the old Talk email list retired, I stepped aside, with family and work not affording me the time to spend on it as I had done.
What I came away from that with, besides the great friendships and experiences, was my own 356. But one doesn’t just “get” a 356. Well, you didn’t before Randy Nonnenberg’s BaT, et al, which allows for searches and purchases which used to take years to happen in a scroll and a click. You had to network, get your ear to the ground, get to know the people who know the people. In this way I got my first 356 ride and drive. Turns out there were other 356-heads at my work, and when I surfaced in the 356Talk list they took me to lunch and then P. J. Zima offered to let me drive his 65 C Cabriolet back from Willow Glen to our downtown offices. Heaven on earth that was, even in that brief drive, and it cemented my desire. But open cars had already ticked up out of my immediate reach, so I knew I’d be getting a coupe. I just had to find the right one.
Safe to tell now that I had an inside man. While I was hustling the editorial side of the 356 Registry website, keeping content fresh for interested traffic, Robin ran the classifieds gateway, fielding requests by email and turning them over to me to add/remove them from our modest listings. He knew I was looking for a 356 while still learning about the myriad of details. C, B, A? Sunroof? Matching numbers? Needing restoration? If so…soon? A pile of parts? And, of course, there is always the competition for “the good ones.” Here today, sold tomorrow. Just missed it. Oh, if you had called earlier. Decided not to sell after all. And the dreaded, “P.O.R.” which I learned to mean, “If you have to ask….”
As it turned out, that was a quite exciting and fulfilling and not inexpensive weekend. From the horse show a quick side-tour into Vancouver, a meet-up and short test drive, then a handshake and deposit and I was the soon-to-be owner of a 1959 Porsche 356A Super. Not quite my “dream” flared fiberglass Speedster C, but it would do. It would do quite nicely. My wife also bought a horse that same weekend–for herself, not the kids–and so everyone was quite, quite happy. A week later my childhood best friend (whose 911L had given way to a wagon for his growing family) and I flew to SeaTac, collected the car, crossed the border with a declaration and the next morning drove 17 hours straight back to San Jose. The 356 performed wonderfully with only gas and a headlight adjustment needed to get us home, touching 90mph in a few places. We really stretched her legs on that trip, and that’s where her name, “Legs” came from and stuck. It was only the next day, checking on Legs sitting in my driveway and pinching myself that she was still there and actually mine that I noticed her Pirelli Cinturato P36es were about 20 years old. Gulp. Those Porsche Gods had to put in some overtime to get me home, but they did.
One day, in the summer of 1999, Robin called me at work. Unusual, as we almost always interacted online. “A car for sale just came into my inbox. I think you should call the fellow. I’ll hold onto the ad for a day or two while you do. I’ll forward you the ad, check your email.” I did, and it was indeed “a good one”, and better, at “a good price”. But my heart sank. Vancouver, BC. The logistics. Even getting away from family needs to look at it would be a challenge. And to spend a few hundred dollars to fly up and back on a “maybe”? It seemed unlikely. But I called anyway and had a nice conversation with a fellow enthusiast. I hung up more conflicted than when I called. The car sounded even better than the email description. The right kind of “used” for me. A driver. Well sorted, older restoration, swapped engine and needing a few things, but solid. And the price. When that ad hit the Registry newswire it would be gone, pronto. I was still weighing it when I pulled into the driveway. At dinner that night, I caught an unbelievable break. My wife had been searching for another pony for our growing daughters to ride ( a much more modest purchase than a Porsche) and her breed club was having a show in northern Washington. My ears perked up. “How north?” “Oh, up past Bellingham. Near the Canadian border.” It was as if one The Maestro’s “Porsche Gods” had given a Certain Unmistakable Sign that I was to go see this 356. I called back the owner and secured a promise not to sell the car until I could get up there, 3 days hence. He agreed, not even reluctantly. Another Certain Unmistakable Sign. A note to Robin to “hold” the ad through the weekend (the owner had promised, but no need to put undue pressure on the guy with a flood of other potential buyers, right?) and I just had to get through the rest of the work week.
It took some time to get my title and registration and new plates–probably due to the international transfer, and due to ordering Legs’ personalized plate: “356 A”. Yeah. It was available! How about that. You see, this was still the early days of the Internet. There were online DMV services–including ordering personalized plates–but they were crude and, ahem, not particularly secure. I was able to write a program that would “ask” the DMV website for all the plates that contained a certain pattern of letters/numbers. It would respond in a certain way if a combination wasn’t available as a new plate and would spit out a list of those unavailable. I ran my program, looked over the responses and was initially disappointed. All the combinations and variations best for my car, e.g., “356A 59”, “59 356A”, “356A TUB”, “59 PRSCH”, “KEWL TUB”, “PURSCHE” and even worse contortions, were already claimed. I suspected as much from club meets I had attended and club magazine pictures. People are clever with their plates. But looking carefully at my list I noticed there was one combination that wasn’t present. It couldn’t be, though!? I went back to the website and asked if I could register “356 A”. I could! So I did. Another C.U.Sign from the Porsche Gods.
My first activity as a new owner was to join the Porsche Club of America and I got my membership card in the spring of 2000. I was assigned to GGR but immediately transferred to LPR. I celebrated my 20th anniversary with the LPR this past April. That same summer I attended my first Parade, in Sacramento. Over the years I’ve generally participated in the club by autocrossing Legs–for some years. I did the same more recently, but less frequently in my 997S Cab “Hans”, and then my 987S “Franz”. Legs and I took a class win in 2007, the one year I was able to show up enough times to eke out a season victory against the excellent Anne Roth and her very quick 912. Legs and the family were at an LPR meet-up for a 2003 Memorial Day parade in my local town of Felton, a real treat. I’ve also been fortunate enough to be able to donate to LPR several editions of Adobe creation and publishing software (in the days before “subscriptions” to everything) to assist in the publication of the POST, thereby giving back to the LPR and PCA in some small way, in the same way I was able to give (more of my time, then) to the 356 Registry.
Another Porsche publication I was able to help with was Harry Pellow’s “ABCs” book. In the Northridge earthquake of ‘94, the press where the paste-ups of Harry’s galleys were stored suffered water damage and the originals were lost, making any more reprints impossible. Harry had long since retired the original computer system he had used to make the book. The original publication was in the early 80s, well before the days when “word processing” was commonplace. Harry’s recourse was to take a copy of his printed book and feed it into an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) system to make a new computer file of it. Technology of the day was far from perfect and the resulting floppy disk file (which he did sell to some intrepid souls) bore little resemblance to the book. Having acquired my 356, I wanted another copy of “The ABCs” and with great hubris thought I’d just “reformat” the OCR floppy version into a modern desktop publishing program, et voila!
That started me on an 18 month journey to accomplish that goal. Along the way I got Harry’s blessing, was allowed to inject a Colophony, he wrote a new intro to the “rev 3.56.www” version. He loaned me all the original photographs which survived the quake and I was able to re-introduce them to the book. I published it all in PDF on a CD-ROM and gave Harry a stack that he could sell and Keep The Faith going. I did it for myself, and so others could have The Book without having to go pay hundreds on eBay (still the case), but Harry gave me a gift I’ll treasure in thanks. I brought Legs to HCP Enterprises and after a gratis laying on of hands and subsequent smoother idle and rev, I noticed he had installed one of his signature 24k gold-plated ignition coil straps onto Leg’s motor, without mentioning it A C.U.Sign for sure.
Sadly, Harry passed unexpectedly and the republishing project came to a halt. I don’t even know how many copies of the CD-ROM are out there or if someone is duping them and “bootlegging” them–or if the PDF is posted on the internet somewhere. I’ve threatened to give the same treatment to “Secrets of the Inner Circle” some day, but what the community really deserves is a new 356 engine book, with modern sources. There are new body restoration books coming out, but we should tap the knowledge of the first-generation 356/912 engine rebuilders before they all hang up their spurs. That said, with the amazing stuff coming out of garages like John Willhoit’s and Jeff Gamroth’s Rotthsport Racing, and Jake Raby, I’m sure we’re in good hands for decades to come. But I digress. Significantly.
A highlight in my 20 years of Porsche ownership was at Rennsport Reunion V when, during the PCA parade laps, my father joined me as my co-pilot. Having him with me on a race track, even at mostly pedaling speeds, brought my experience with sports cars and with him full circle. My newer Porsches have allowed me to experience the joys of these excellent cars at more modern speeds, capabilities, and luxuries and as open cars with the wind in my hair. In the same way and evoking the same feelings that I first experienced standing behind my dad as he introduced me to top-down sports cars and the joys of backroads driving. I’m looking forward to my next 20 years of Porsche ownership and caretaking. With the changes in life that time brings, I hope to participate more and create new memories and experiences with my LPR community.
