An ode to PC Diegel, Part III

For a few years after their marriage Paul C and Virginia did what is common now, but I don’t think was as prevalent then:  they postponed kid-dom in lieu of continuing to gallivant unfettered around the Northwest skiing, hunting, hiking, and fishing. But eventually parenthood sounded pretty good, so Paul Jr. was born in 1959, and the truth is that it didn’t slow them down much; they just dragged him around, which was probably a good precursor for becoming the resilient and strong guy that he is today.   

They lived in the suburbs of the Portland, but –again, a bit unusual for the time, which sort of defined much of their lives – they wanted to move out to the country to be sort of hobby farmers.  At the time PC was a finance guy at an engineering firm downtown and barely knew the difference between grass and alfalfa, but there was a continued allure to the wide-open spaces and the romantic concept of a rebuilding-  and adding onto - a ramshackle old farmhouse, having fruit and nut trees, a barn full of hay, and 5 or so other outbuildings, all surrounded by fields where their beloved dogs could frolic about.  It was a big project, and while I’d like to say that it was done by the time I was born a couple of years later, the truth is that a rambling “ranch” like that is effectively a lifelong project, because about the time you finish shoring up a shed or digging a well or planting a huge garden another project looms large, for better or worse.  

a big ol' Royal Anne cherry tree in full bloom, and there are 5 apple trees and a walnut tree there too, with two pear trees, and three filbert (Oregon-speak for hazelnuts) in back. 

A big part of the deal were indeed the fields, and though “hobby farming” was alluring, PC was realistic enough to know that cultivating 20-odd acres of fields was not his bag, so they were able to rent the land to our neighbor who actually was a farmer and used our barn to store hay for his cows, until the barn became the home for the trampoline, basketball court, ping pong table, and Triumphs; some farmers we were!  But PC had an unlimited supply of projects that he could tinker with, and prided himself on his ability to improvise relatively effective solutions.  Paul Jr inherited both that desire and the ability to create effective solutions; I inherited the desire, but as Ash and Paul can attest, my solutions are almost always a junk show!  

I am not really sure how PC Diegel developed a yen for esoteric little British sports cars, though one could speculate that there's a possible relationship between those and esoteric and athletic British spaniels.  In any case, around 1963 he bought a used 1960 Triumph TR-3, and this purchase was in some ways a catalyst for much of the focus of the rest of his life.  Living a few miles outside the boundary of the ‘burbs and the rurality that extended a hundred miles to the coast there was a plethora of fun, winding, hilly roads to rage around in a sports car, and he used the TR-3 as his daily commuter. 

In the early 70’s he was introduced to “Autocross”, which is an event that typically takes place in big industrial-area parking lots that are empty on weekends and involves creating a pretty tight course outlined with orange traffic cones that drivers navigate one at a time against the clock, with the types of cars broken down into like classes.  I remember vividly the first one he did where he raged around the 2 minute course pushing his little car to its “max” (at no more than 30mph due to the tight course) and after crossing the line he leaped of the car and declared “that was the funnest thing I’ve ever done!”  And being a bit of an obsessive sort, he went big into autocrossing at the ripe young age of 50+. 

Autocross is typically a gateway drug into racing, and we started going to watch the local SCCA (Sports Car Club of America) races at the Portland International Raceway.  One day we were wandering around the pit area and came across a young guy covered in grime working hard on his…..1960 white TR-3.  Hardy Prentice was a young guy from San Francisco who towed his TR-3 race car:

up and down the coast with his E-type Jaguar:

The engine is gigantic, and ironically this car was probably faster than the race car it was towing!  But not a lot of room to store tools to rebuild a race car!  

which no doubt generated plenty of amused looks on Interstate 5.  Hardy was camped at the race track so of course PC invited him to stay at our house, and so began a long bromance between two TR-3 racing geeks. 

PC never went full-race, but he did do a couple of vintage car races (a crazy event where guys who freak out about paint scratches in their esoteric old cars put on a helmet and lose all sense of reason and race their beloved cars hard enough to crash them!) and was a stalwart member of the local Triumph owners association.  He eventually got even more stature in the community when he bought an esoteric-even-by-Triumph standards TR-250, and later also got the wild hair to buy a rusty, non-functional TR-3 and restored it to its former glory and then some, with his fire-engine red paint job. 

PC with his fleet:

Of course, the Triumph owners would have their little weekend tours, where they’d get together and do some scenic drive to a scenic overlook, where they’d all park together, open the hoods, and ignore the scenery to talk incessantly about their quirky little cars.  And there were shows; one of the biggest car shows in the country happened to be in nearby Forest Grove, and attending that was an annual event, and of course the British car owners had to have their own event as well.  One classic story from one of those shows is that a fairly loudmouth guy was pulling into the zone in his TR-4 and was backing into the spot adjacent to our dad’s spot, and PC said “hey, you’re getting pretty close!” and the guy said “yeah, I got it, no problem” and kept coming, my dad shouted again, and the guy bumped into our dad’s pride and joy.  Without a word my dad simply walked over to the driver’s window and popped the guy in the nose!  Point made. 

That said, dear old Dad was kind enough to let his sons drive his cars, and not just for genteel occasions like this:

But for also ragin’ about.  The roads near our house were not yet overwhelmed by suburbia (as they are now) and Paul Jr and I fancied ourselves as being near-race car drivers ourselves, a fact that our dad no doubt knew and of course feared the implications (not that we’d get killed, but that we’d wreck his cars!) but he loved that we loved it too. 

One weekend I came home from college for a visit and there happened to be an autocross.  By this time he was in his late-60’s but was still keen and was an icon in the community, and I said “hey, why don’t we both go do the autocross?”  He lit up.  He did his first lap and threw down a respectable time, and I jumped in and buckled down my helmet.  I raged around the course as hard as I could, and at one point as I was smoking the tires squealing out of a corner and sawing hard at the wheel to keep from knocking over the cones I caught a glimpse of my dad standing there watching me absolutely thrash his car…..with a grin that stretched ear to ear.  I blasted across the line and slowly rolled back to “the pits” and saw him walking towards me all slumped over in mock defeat; I’d beat him by something like 2-tenths of a second!  A fitting end to the end of his autocross career and the beginning AND end of mine. 

Hardy’s visits to Portland were always a highlight for PC (not as much for Ginny, who came to start using the summertime race car visits as another excuse to go on hiking, wildflower, or mushroom-hunting trips!) and were for me as well until I got to be about fourteen and realized that 4 or 5 guys traveling up and down the West Coast to race against each other in their quirky cars as if their lives depended on it and then watching them go round and round was pretty ridiculous.  But dad loved it, and Hardy was somehow eeking out a few more rpms out of that little engine and a little less drag on the body to the point where it was something like a 132mph car.  Every fall he would go out to the national championships in Atlanta and race the other dozen guys around the nation in the class who also took it way too seriously, and in 1992 my dad flew out to be the pit crew for Hardy (here’s a short video of Hardy at Nationals a few years later). 

As it turns out, that was a great year for our dad to go, because Hardy actually won!  Though our dad was highly accomplished himself, the vicarious Thrill Of Victory was a highlight of his later years: 

I've got a couple more fun tales and feel compelled to talk a little about not only what he did, but who he was, so I'll stop here and do one more post soon.