Last weekend we shot the first event for the 2012 TV season in Oroville, CA. It was appropriately named the Gold Rush Car Show since Oroville was a center of gold prospecting activities in northern California during the rush in the mid 1800’s. The town only has a population of about 14,000 but the show drew an impressive 900+ cars.

One of the stars of the show was Tim Kerrigan’s ’62 Impala SS 409; beautifully resto-modded and sporting a two-tone red & faint yellow paint scheme. Tim is the President of Red Line Oil and the particular red he used is a DuPont color called Redline Red. Go figure. The paint theme was carried thru in the interior with the gauge faces being the same faint yellow used on the exterior.

Another fav of mine was a ’54 Chevy custom. I thought the car was pretty slick, but I especially got a kick out of its owner. He was a real character who did a Rodney Dangerfield that was second only to Dangerfield himself. The car had a Shock Top draft pull for a gearshift knob, and he claimed that he had to drain an entire keg at a local watering hole to get it. I got together with him there after the show to help in case he might need another one.

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I know; most history books list Hawaii as the 50th state (at least until the Texas School Board gets a hold of them and then anything’s possible). But for MCC, Nebraska was the only state in these great United States that we had not shot in. That situation was finally remedied a few weeks ago when we shot The Last Fling till Spring in West Point, Nebraska. It took me 15 seasons to stumble onto this show altho it’s been going on for 21 years.

West Point is a town of about 3,600 people situated roughly midway between Omaha and Sioux Falls, SD but somehow they manage to pull in 700+ really nice cars to the brick streets of the downtown for this one day show.

One of the first vehicles to come rolling in on the morning of the show was a completely restored ’51 Oliver 77 tractor. (Hey, it’s Nebraska!) I ran out and flagged the guy down because this was the tractor I had grown up on. Ours was actually a ’53 Super 77, but they were virtually identical, except that ours never looked as good as this one. From a styling standpoint, these are really cool tractors (if you’re into tractors, that is). Strangely enough, the Oliver was followed by a ’47 John Deere B which was the other tractor we had on the farm. You can see that the woman driving the JD is operating the hand clutch with her right hand. Man did these take me back!

As for my gloves in this picture, I wasn’t doing my best Mickey Mouse impersonation; I was freezing! It was so cold that the cameraman was having trouble operating the camera so he ducked into a dollar store and scored a 3-pack of these goofy gloves. I took him up on it when he offered me a pair.

The weather got better as the day went on but not by much. I’m not sure it ever made it up to 50 degrees with overcast skies and a constant fine mist that you could barely see with your eye, but that was attracted to the camera lens as if it was a mist magnet. Considering the previous two days had been even worse tho with heavy rains, I wasn’t really complaining.

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