[…] Tupelo, MS President’s Message from Susan Davis Greetings, all—it is an honor to represent you and this august body. Before proceeding, I must note with sadness our loss of Taylor Vinson. His towering, if quiet, presence at Hershey just this last month was typical. Taylor was always quietly available, from providing our spaces at Hershey to making friends of strangers to mentoring many of SAH’s leaders today. The Society and we fortunate to have known him have been graced by his acquaintance and friendship. Others who knew him far better than I will speak and write not only to our loss but also to his legacy, here and elsewhere. SAH has impressed me since my fi rst Annual Meeting Banquet at the Hershey Country Club c. 1994 as guest of Dave Brownell. I joined immediately. From that meeting to Motormail today, and everything in between—this SAH Journal, the Automotive History Review, the conferences, the steady fl ow of intellectual material that has raised the quality of automotive history—this Society gives a hobby and passion academic legitimacy. It is impressive. SAH’s resource value blazes through to me every time I talk to people about collector cars, whether it’s on the show fi eld at Hershey, at home or on the road. Inevitably someone has a question about cars, or their car, if you have any kind of automotive history credentials. At Hershey, the new owner of a 10 h.p. Stanley runabout sent to me by SAH member Jonathan Stein turned out to be the curator of a major collection in Pennsylvania. Judging by the questions he asked me about the Stanley, it was an easy leap to think he might need information about other cars in his collection. Was he a member of SAH? No? Then joining SAH was as important for him overall as my advice to buy the book, The Stanley Steamer by SAH member Kit Foster. Back at home, I serve as treasurer of the Board of Trustees of the Seal Cove Auto Museum, in Tremont on Mt. Desert Island here in Maine. Among vintage automotive cognoscenti, Seal Cove has been considered from time to time one of the ten best brass-era collections in the world. The museum owns nine cars; all others are owned by the Paine Trust. When Seal Cove’s founder Richard Paine died in 2007, the managing Trust selected about 40 of Richard’s 100-plus cars to go to auction in order to create an endowment, a portion of the income of which supports the museum that interprets our own and the remaining jewels. Since we think we kept the best ones, even with slightly over half of Paine’s collection, we still support the claim of being one of the world’s premier brass collections. At the recent October Seal Cove board meeting, documenting each of the Trust cars and the nine Museum cars was an agenda item. We will be hiring a recognized expert to write up the extensive material. Although the expert mentioned is himself an SAH member, it turns out that neither the museum nor the Trust is a member. As you might expect, I am working to correct that. Curiously, that’s a harder sell than you might think in my present position. I worry about appearing self-serving. We are passionate about SAH and what it has to offer to produce accurate automotive history. Naturally we believe everyone else interested in old cars should be a member. And without being too pushy about it, we are, after all, the best ambassadors of spreading the word. If each of us does this for just one person or museum or collection, imagine the expanded impact, and benefi t, of this truly […]