PHOTO: DAVID IMANAKA
AMERICA'S CAR
MUSEUM OPENS ITS DOORS
BY STEFAN LOMBARD THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST
COLLECTION PROMISES TO CONNECT WITH THE CAR LOVER IN US ALL
You don’t collect 3,000-plus cars without picking up a few stories along the way. Like the time the late Harold LeMay and a friend drove his double-decker London bus cross country, home to Tacoma, Washington, and they stopped in rural Kansas to buy five cars, plus the barn that housed them. That was Harold LeMay, hugely success-
ful in the refuse collection industry and a car guy to his core, with the resources and inclination to pursue the cars that interested him — often on a whim — simply because of their stories.
LeMay — America’s Car Museum opened its doors in June. The event was a long time coming — 14 years, if you’re keeping score. And in that time, countless volun- teers worked long and sometimes uncertain hours to build a fitting home — not just to hold the cars of Harold E. LeMay, but to pay tribute to him. But the realization of a $65 million facility fit to call itself “America’s Car Museum” is a far cry from just dreaming of it.
LeMay-ACM is an impressive structure, with an exterior of curved polished aluminum that is at once hard to define and also recogniz- ably automotive in its basic shape: an air scoop. You enter the building as air would the scoop and there you stand on the topmost of four floors. Oregon Spruce timbers curve floor to ceiling the length of the long, open room, and brilliant light floods the space from the far end, with downtown Tacoma and Com- mencement Bay just beyond. This is the Grand Gallery, home to a small selection of Harold LeMay’s cars.
In all, the museum houses nearly 350 cars, which come from Harold’s own collection, now culled to a more manageable 1,500, as well as those on loan from other collectors and museums, plus cars donated to LeMay-ACM by automotive good Samaritans. The cars of the Grand Gallery are connected only in the sense that Harold LeMay owned and appreciated them: a 1907
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HAGERTY.COM
PHOTO: DAVID IMANAKA
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