The National Automobile Museum, where about 220 cars from former Harrah’s Casino owner Bill Harrah’s once massive collection are stored, is staffed largely by volunteers. In general, they come in two varieties—automobile historians and engine-minded gearheads.
“Or you’re here reliving your youth,” said volunteer Terry Nielsen.
The volunteers are a largely silver-haired crowd—and many of them, Nielsen said, are drawn to the museum by a combination of factors.
“There’s just so much history,” he said. “It’s whatever piques our interest.”
Nielsen is a docent and leads tours of the museum. Other volunteers work in the museum store. Some help maintain and restore the cars in the collection. And many do archival research on the cars and the museum’s other artifacts, like license plates and gas pumps.
“Mr. Harrah, as he started collecting automobiles, wanted to make sure he knew exactly how cars should be restored—and so he started his own research library,” said volunteer and docent John Sell. “And that research library is not open to the public, but it’s still here in the museum—and it contains all sorts of good stuff.”
The library is where Sell went to research a 1922 Dodge Victoria in the collection, about which he gave a recent lecture. Documents concerning the Dodge include a registration card found in the car during restoration that revealed it had once belonged to the wife of American general Douglas MacArthur.
A lot of the cars in the museum were owned by famous people. Docents say that’s part of their appeal. On Oct. 11, Sell gave a lecture touching upon the Dodge Victoria’s famous previous owners, including MacArthur contemporaries like heiress and socialite Doris Duke and singer James Melton. Sell’s talk was for the museum’s Second Thursday Lecture series. For almost a year now it’s given volunteers the opportunity to share their research on passion projects with one another and museum visitors. Nielsen is up next and is currently putting his lecture together.
On Nov. 8, he’ll be talking about the museum’s multiple Model A Fords.
“We have six of them in the museum … and I realized that we have more Model A Fords than anything, but they made a lot,” Nielsen said. “So that’s why I chose the subject.”
According to Nielsen, 5 million Model A Fords were made between 1928 and 1931—so many that there’s somewhere near a half a million of them registered in the United States today, he said.
Nielsen will discuss the celebrity connections to some of the cars, but he also repects the fact that Ford’s were geared toward the average person.
“Ford wanted to make a car that the common man could fix himself and that would be durable, just like the other cars,” he said.
Over the years, Nielsen has owned eight Model A Fords—in part because they were always affordable.
“I paid 60 dollars for my first car. It was a lot different, a lot easier back then than it is now for the kids today.”
Nielsen said he meets a lot of young people, like his own nephew, who don’t even want a car—but hopes the museum and its lecture series might pique their interest enough to inspire a new generation of preservationists to keep old cars like the ones in the Harrah’s collection intact.