The Secluded Treasures of a Driven Passion
A secluded treasure of downtown Los Angeles is to be dispersed before the bankers, brokers and cops on the beat even knew it was there.
It’s the Thomas Collection, a coven of 100 Cadillacs formed by one man’s passion into a general chronology of the marque and an echo of America’s belle epoque .
For 25 years the museum has been hidden on the sixth floor of the venerable Thomas Cadillac building on West 7th Street at Bixel. The historic cars overlook a Harbor Freeway choking on flimsier successors from Japan and Korea.
It’s a collection that also has seen the death of an elegant area, its fine hotels and grand buildings--and showrooms of a time when heavy metal meant a front fender and the downtown car business was indeed a carriage trade.
Now Thomas Cadillac is to go. Concerned that retail business is being lost by changing downtown conditions, the company has sold its eight-story building and some surrounding acres. For $57 million. Later this year, the landmark structure will be demolished to open space for a sign of today: another high-rise office tower.
‘In a State of Flux’
Thomas Cadillac, says La Rue Thomas, a surviving founder of the firm, will transfer to a more pleasant place. Its car collection must be moved, he said, and will be divided between warehouses. Its reappearance or disappearance is undecided.
“I’d like to think it is going to stay the way it is,” Thomas said. He is 78 and maintains an office at Thomas Cadillac while a son, Gerald Thomas, presides over the family business. “We’re in a state of flux and really haven’t given it (disposal) serious thought.
“There has been . . . effort to place some (cars) at the Spruce Goose exhibit. I’ve wondered if the city would be interested in having the collection. It will definitely be moved into two warehouses . . . but beyond that, well, we’ve been procrastinating more than anything else.”
Gerald Thomas acknowledges there exist “hundreds and hundreds of possibilities” for resettling the classic cars. But will the collection be broken up and sold? “I don’t know. My heart tells me it should stay together. My head tells me several other things.”
The certainty, however, is that downtown days are numbered for one of the nation’s finest private automobile museums--one open only to those who belonged to the right car club, who knew a Thomas, or who were privy to the knowledge that the collection was quietly open to inquiring customers and Friday morning drop-ins.
Although once the 1921 headquarters of the Don Lee Broadcasting System and infant KHJ radio, the Thomas Cadillac building, architecturally and historically, is barely worth mourning.
It’s a structure with none of the grande dame status of its Roaring ‘20s neighbors--the Mayfair Hotel, the Commodore, and, two blocks distant, the very first Young’s Market that once stood as elegant as Fortnum & Mason.
Yet within those walls lives a history as significant as the oldest members of the collection--a 1901 Curved Dash Oldsmobile, the world’s first mass-production automobile, and a 1903 Model A Cadillac, the very first to carry the company’s somewhat prescient slogan: “The Standard of the World.”
It all began in 1949. Cecil Thomas and La Rue Thomas had progressed from father-son auto mechanics in San Pedro to Studebaker dealers in Long Beach to sellers of Oldsmobiles and Cadillacs in Harbor City. There, an employee introduced La Rue to a relative with an antique Oldsmobile to sell.
“I paid $650 for it,” he remembered. “It rekindled my love for old cars, something that began when I was in high school and junior college and used to buy cars, fix ‘em up and sell ‘em.”
His second treasure was a 1939 La Salle, a shorter, lighter, less expensive cousin to the Cadillac. It cost $1,200 new. That’s exactly what Thomas paid for it almost three decades later.
Still Visits Daily
And the collection grew by model and year. It moved to Los Angeles when Thomas Cadillac relocated to 7th Street in 1965. It became Thomas’ hobby and a touchstone he still visits daily.
“I enjoy the nostalgia of it, being able to look at what our forefathers did and to better appreciate their contribution to all our lives,” he continued. “There’s even a mystic something about it. It’s a love. It’s a bug. And when it bites. . . .”
In La Rue’s case, his bug has bitten off everything any car lover ever wanted to chew. The general theme of his collection is the evolution of the Cadillac from sputtering Model A with a one-cylinder engine mounted beneath the floor, to the brazen, 8.2 liter barge that was the 1976 Cadillac Eldorado, the last of the big convertibles.
In truth, Thomas has stockpiled three Eldorado convertibles. One is the yellow demonstrator he drove for 13,000 miles. Two are brand new.
“When I learned that these would be the last production convertibles made by Cadillac, we took ‘em out of the third (showroom) floor and took ‘em straight to the sixth (museum) floor,” he said. “They haven’t been driven one mile and still have their original stickers.”
But if ever sold, expect to pay a little more than that original sticker price of $13,246.
A Few Years Missing
Thomas is missing a few production years. But all the milestones are there. He has a 1960 Cadillac designed in Italy and weighing in at 6,000 pounds, the precise weight limit of the showroom elevator. A Cadillac limousine of the ‘60s carried the chief executive officer of Coca-Cola. A convertible of the ‘50s carries the bumper lumps that Vance Packard, author of “Hidden Persuaders,” saw as a subliminal marketing tool appealing to man’s sexual desires.
And if several of the cars are familiar, that’s because many--from the V-12 town cars to the V-16 sport phaetons of the ‘30s--have been regular loaners to California museums, automobile shows, state functions--and Hiram Walker whiskey ads.
To Thomas it’s a full parade of “the majesty of the size, the grandeur of what some people called big old boats . . . when you look at a 1903 Cadillac, a 1910, a 1920 and a 1930 you clearly see what has happened to the car and its image.”
Not that the Thomas Collection is all-Cadillac.
It’s also a log of Thomas’ motoring years that includes all cars.
“There’s the 1922 Studebaker that’s a carbon copy of the car my father owned and the one I first learned to drive,” he said. On this day, Thomas has made his daily stop at the fifth floor and spoken with longtime restoration chief, Lee Titus. Now he’s on the sixth floor examining antiques best regarded as one man’s mechanical scrapbook. “Here’s a 1929 Chrysler coupe, the car my wife and I eloped to Reno in. This is a 1923 Ford Roadster, a copy of a car I drove for some time when I was buying and selling these old cars in school.”
He has a hill climb car, one he built and raced to records.
All of which casts Thomas as a warm, fine, stubborn romantic.
None of his really cherished cars are for sale--not even to the man who recently offered $750,000 for just three.
“But I’d probably sell some of the later model cars, Cadillacs that are of no particular sentimental or historical value,” he said.
Thomas genuinely has no idea how many millions his collection is worth--and insists that he doesn’t want to know.
“That’s like putting a price on your wife or your children,” he says. “Their value isn’t measured by money.” He also is rooted in yesterday and the solidity of its values. Some employees of Thomas Cadillac have been with the company for 40 years. His own secretary, Peg Weller, joined the firm in 1943. Her bookkeeping entries are still made in a general ledger.
There are antiques on the sales floors, oak settles, wingback waiting chairs, a Stone player piano--and as a centerpiece in wonderful contrast to 1989 models, stands the very last vehicle of Cadillac’s 1913 run.
Proud Accomplishments
La Rue Thomas is proud of many things.
Of the part he played in building a company on $1,000 borrowed from his grandmother. Of the customer who has bought 40 cars from Thomas Cadillac since 1940. Of remaining a diehard, hands-on mechanic who can still grind valves and set timing with the best of the dinosaurs.
His devotion and appreciation of yesterday’s automotive dreamers is total. That’s why the movement of his collection, its dispersal and possible dissolution, will be one of his saddest experiences.
And what if it all has to go?
Supposing he gets to keep only one car of his collection?
“Then let it be the Chrysler,” he said. “The one that took Glennie and me to get married in Reno in 1934.”
