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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Last weekend I was in McKinney, TX as the special guest at a party being thrown by a friend of mine, Don Clark. He and his wife, Paulette, had just finished a three-year build on their Tuscan-themed retirement home, and they were having some of their car friends over to celebrate.

I have known Don for a number of years and actually first met him when we were producing the TNN series, Popular Hot Rodding Television. The second season of that show was shot in a studio in Dallas and Don supplied us with a car to have on the set for one of the episodes.

I learned that this car was just one of several really amazing cars in his collection, and this led to me shooting with him for an episode of My Classic Car in 2002. It was hard to decide what to focus on, but I ended up going with his COPO Camaro and his ’69 Yenko Camaro. Really, how can you go wrong with that pair?

Don is a real car guy and at that time he was hosting an annual party at his place just for friends and fellow car enthusiasts. People could tour his collection and since they all brought their own toys, there was also quite a car show going on outside too.

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