After I had my 1987 Corvette for about 2 years I decided I wanted to join a car club. I started looking in my area which was San Jose. I was able to find Santa Clara Corvettes. I went to a meeting to check them out. I was impressed with the things the club did during the year. They had a social every month and a membership meeting once a month. And they had three major events during the year. This was in September and when I was at the meeting I got all the info I needed to join the club. There were things that had to be completed to become a member, things like filling out an application, go to a social event and some others. So after the meeting in September I decided I was going to join. At the meeting in October I took everything I needed to join and I became a member of the Santa Clara Corvettes car club.
Elections were coming up and they were taking nominations for offices and they were having trouble filling the office of Publication Director. Their Publications Director had the task of putting the club newsletter together. Also making membership cards, and makeing up the budget for the newsletter. At the November meeting they still did not have someone to be the Publications Director. Well I had a computer at home and I had a general idea how a newsletter was put together and with a computer and a publications program it would be easy. So at the November meeting I said I would run for Publications
Director. The members at the meeting were surprised and thankful that I had stepped forward and after the meeting many of the members came up and introduced themselves and thanked me and said hi. I have to admit that I sure was getting to know the members. It helps being on the board of directors. You have the directors meetings to go to and the board sat up in front of everyone during the general meetings so people in the club saw all the board members and learned who was who quickly.
The three events that The Santa Clara Corvettes put on are a car show, a rallye and autocross. The rallye that we put on was a gimmick rallye. A gimmick rallye is an event that is where you have a team of two people, one a driver and one is the navigator. The team is given a set of instructions that you are required to follow. Your instructions will be something like, turn left out of the parking lot. You almost always left from a parking lot where we had everything set up. And you may return there or somewhere else but it will be another parking lot. Then your instructions might say turn right at your first state street and that might be down the road you may come to a street named Colorado Ave.You are timed on your way out and clocked in when you get to the finish line. The time is in case there is a tie in points of the gimmick part and time is the tie breaker. The gimmick is part of the directions as your driving around and following the instructions you have questions to answer. Questions that might be like, The house at 2375 has what kind of animal on the roof? The answer maybe a horse and that is found out by observing a weather vain on the roof with a horse on the weather vain. Or another type of question might be, Where does the cat live? The answer has to have the number of the house where you find the cat. Now the cat would probably be some kind of artificial cat on the porch, door or in the window or somewhere else.
Another event for the year is an autocross. An autocross is basically a car race. But you only race the clock. A course is set up in a large parking lot using safety cones to lay out the course. You also need a set of timing lights at the start and finish. lines. We have spotters on the course so everything is done safely. Sometimes the course is large enough to have two cars on the course at the same time. This is accomplished by starting the second car after the first car has passed the half way point. This is why the spotters, their job is to wave a yellow flag in case one of the cars spins out and the other car can slow don and stop before coming close to the other car. We want to race our cars not wreck them.
Our last event for the year is our car show. It has always been called Corvette Spectacular. It was a two day event when I joined the club but later because of expense and location the club changed it to only one day.Corvette Spectacular was two shows, we had the car show and we had the concourse. The car show is a show were the judges can only look at the car and judge it with the point system. I don't remember now how the point system worked.. Now the concourse show is a lot different. In this show the judges are allowed to touch the car, in fact the judges are given white gloves to wear and also armed with a white towel, They are looking for dirt and they are allowed to put their fingers in a lot of little hoes and if they find dirt points are deducted. In both shows, cars with the highest points win. Both shows were also broken down into different classes by the years of Corvettes..
I was in the club for 8 or 9 years and 7 of those years I was the Publication Director. I also was President and of course member at large (that is the previous president). At the time I was in the Corvette club I was not dating anyone so I took my mom to all the club meetings and club socials and events. When we would go on outings we had friends that we always sat with and spent most of our time with. When I introduced my mother to any of the club members I would always say, "This is my mom Anna". So everyone in the club knew her name but most of them called her mom. In fact one of the coolest things happened to mom on one of the club soccials. We were having a bowling social and we were bowling and having a great time and about half way through thge second game they stopped everything and said they had a presentation to make. They caslled mom over and handed her a gift bag and when she opened it and reached in and found a club jacket in the bag. She was excited and surprised but when she opened it up to looked at the name on it she just started to cry. Those people had taken up donations and bought the jacket and had them put MOM on the jacket for her name. When I saw what she waws crying about I cried too. What happy tears.
More stories about the Corvette club to come.
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