During an April visit to the Gilmore Car Museum, Bob Barr met with SAH member John Hansen, who is the Executive Director of the Classic Car Club of America Museum on the Gilmore campus. John generously gave Bob a tour of the Noel Thompson Library and Lassiter Research Center that is part of the CCCA Museum. The library contains some 3,000 volumes, of which about 1,250 were the personal library of the late Beverly Rae Kimes. In one corner of the library is Kimes’ personal desk, preserved in the library with her book collection and two of her display cases.
See 2009 SAH Journal #239, pages 1, 6 & 7, for the story of Kimes’ bequests of her research material and book collection. Since then, the SAH handed over the ownership of Kimes’ research material to the Auburn Cord Duesenberg Automobile Museum.
The CCCA Museum website is a treasure trove of digitized CCCA and period historical material, much of which is open public access on the museum website, under the “Collections & Archives” tab. The museum has digitized their Coachbuilder Archive, some 65 years of CCCA publications, photos of the museum Mascot Collection, etc. (bb)
Photo: Beverly Rae Kimes’ desk, at which she no doubt did some editing of the Automobile Quarterly and her auto history books. Courtesy of Bob Barr.