We had 22 members and 3 visitors in attendance. Our visitors were Boyd Fox, Dick Lunsford, and Linda Lee Atkinson-Page (now our newest member).

Randall Thomas, our drive chairman, has planned some drives through parts of West Virginia for the new year. If you have any ideas for your favorite drive, please contact Randall.

The program for our first meeting was a video of the 1988 LeMans race featuring the Groupe 44 Jaguar racing team.

We now have the new club “Tee” shirts for sale and the club sweat shirts are also available.

The next club meeting will be February 14, 2002. Please plan to be with us.

Your newsletter editor is floundering and will soon go under if not rescued by you, the ABCS members. Contrary to popular belief, there is not a river of interesting articles about British cars flowing in front of my house. Oh sure, I can fill space each month with funny stories received on the Internet but you would soon get bored with such trivia.

Send me pictures, upcoming events, tech articles, anything you would like to see in print and I will gladly credit you with the information in the next edition. The newsletter is published on the 1st of each month, so your submittal deadline is the 25th. You can use e- mail or snail mail, whichever is most convenient. Just use something!!!

The 3rd annual Colonial Vintage Car Show & Antique Fair is on the green at beautiful Walsingham Academy in historic Williamsburg, VA, Saturday, March 16, 2002.

This is a popular vote car show with judging and balloting conducted by the registrants. Registration fee is $15 and is due soon.

For more information, contact Rob Mann at 757-872-7227, manns@mindspring.com
or Doug Wilson at 757-565-4668, midoridew311@cs.com.

I told you about my first Big Healey that I bought as a 29th birthday present for myself and then the keys fell through the floorboards in front of the Barter Theatre. Well, there’s more.

At the same time, I bought a 2nd Healey 3000 that also had promise. I purchased both cars from a preacher who lived between Blountville, TN and Johnson City. We spent the better part of an afternoon rounding up the various parts of both cars from all over the countryside. This car was wrecked. I mean really wrecked. The right front corner was smashed very badly. Even to my untrained eye, the damage extended beyond the fender into that part of the car behind the front fender. I later learned that this part was called a “front shroud”. No problem; you just buy another front shroud.

NO ONE HAD SHROUDS.

None listed for sale in the Healey Club Newsletter, none were available anywhere. But I had an ace yet to play. On the way to Galax, VA., at Hillsville, I had found a gold mine. There was a house there where Healeys of all shapes and sizes abounded. All I had to do was to talk that guy out of a shroud and we were in business.

I went there and found Mr. Woodrow Worrell at home. Mr. Worrell listened to my sad tale of woe and then politely told me that he didn’t have any shrouds for sale, either. As I pleaded with him to sell me a shroud from one of the many derelict Healeys that festooned the fields around his home, he appeared to ‘nod off’ and would stay that way for a while. He would come to and appear to have heard what I was saying, but he wouldn’t budge at all. “I just couldn’t sell a part from one of them cars”, he would say. vDamn. Stuck again!

So, I tried the only other approach I could think of. Out of desperation, I offered to sell Mr. Worrell this car of mine for $500. He asked about its condition and I told him frankly that it was wrecked and badly in need of fender and shroud. Undaunted by that news, Mr. Worrell inquired of the general state of the car other than that. I explained that it had a good title and was a very low mileage late model Healey 3000 with a good interior and relatively unused top. Mr. Worrell stated that he wanted to see the car, but thought he might buy it and that I would be hearing from him. I returned home and continued my agricultural pursuits, part of what I did in that bicentennial year of 1976.

Lo and behold, out of the blue one Saturday morning, my Mother phoned to tell me that some strange man was there at her house to look at my car. It was, of course, none other than Mr. Worrell.

When I eventually arrived at my Mother’s house, Mr. Worrell was there and asleep. Mr. Worrell suffered from narcolepsy, a fairly rare disease, that would put him to sleep in the midst of a conversation, only to have him wake up 30 minutes later and pick up right where he had left off as though he had just blinked his eyes! That was particularly hard on the other person, because what do you do for that twenty or forty-five minute lapse when you know he’s going to come back around and expect you to be right there where he left you. I never knew what else to do except just sit and wait, thinking he might find out he was sick if I wasn’t there!

I showed Mr. Worrell the car and I could see that he appreciated it. Even for a wrecked car, this one still had plenty of class. I suppose it was the fact that it had obviously new tires and a new convertible top and a well-maintained air about it. Plus, it was red and many of us are suckers still for red sports cars. Mr. Worrell had his sights set on both of the Healeys and on my Grandmother’s Murphy bed. It was a little hard to get him refocused solely on that wrecked Healey, especially as it all had to be done between naps.

Mr. Worrell thought it over for a while, then pulled out a wad of bills that could have choked a horse from his trousers pocket and offered me $250. I told him that if the car wasn’t worth the $500 I was asking for it, then I could always keep it until it was worth that much. He then extracted the other $250 and handed me that. After I signed the title and gave it to him, he said that “the boys would be along in a couple of days to pick it up”.

Sure enough, on Wednesday of the following week, Mr. Worrell’s two sons and another man showed up in a huge pickup truck with a towing dolly attached to retrieve the Healey. We collected the various parts for the car, rolled it out of Mother’s basement, hooked it up and it disappeared, literally.

Passing through Hillsville a couple of years after that, I didn’t find Mr. Worrell at home. I stopped at the Worrell carpet Company in nearby Galax and inquired after Mr. Worrell. He was there and asleep, of course. I talked with him and one of his sons (who had picked up the car) for some time. Healey people do like to talk about their cars!

The car was in a body shop undergoing restoration just when Ol’ Bud had time to work on it. Ten years later, Mr. Worrell had passed on, but the same son had the same story to tell: “Ol’ Bud still wasn’t through with it”! I never found out what became of that car but would love to know. The car was a ’66 model, serial no. HBJ8L34393. If you hear from it, let me know!

Webpage: Herren Floyd, 423-239-5455, herrenfloyd@chartertn.net