GARAGE ENVY

The Historical Society of Berks County http://www.berkshistory.org/histsoc.html houses a small, but very nice museum at its home in Reading, PA.  Tucked among its numerous Berks County centric items is but a single car, a 1902 Duryea.  The Duryea is commonly known as the “first gasoline powered commercial American car”.  Quite a mouthful, but suffice to say this is a classic American car.

My interest, though, is less for the car and more for the Hill.  Charles Duryea built his cars in Reading, PA for a time and he used a steep and winding road that climbed Mt. Penn to test his cars.  In his honor, the road was renamed Duryea Drive.  To this day cars, and drivers are tested on this hill in the Duryea Hillclimb.  I got to know this hill, its turns and straightaways in my college years as a form of relaxation, recreation, and adventure.

At the time I owned an Austin Healey 100/6 and it was ideally suited for that hill.  It had plenty of low end torque and enough gears (with overdrive) to easily top 100mph.  Duryea Drive became my nighttime hangout.  Nighttime was best because one could see approaching cars by the cast of their headlights on the trees; so the entire road could be used when blasting to the top.  Police were also not a problem since if you met one on the hill, you were long gone before they turned around to give chase.  (I never thought about radioing ahead back then).

I probably learned more about car control on that hill than all my other driving combined.  Skinny street tires probably did not make for terrific times, but it was great fun broad sliding and then recovering around the numerous hairpin turns and feeling the wind in my hair (I had some then) at top speeds across the top of Skyline drive from the Pagoda to the old Fire Tower.

Luck more than skill contributed to an accident free driving record on the hill.  I can’t say as much for my parking record.  One night while parked with a companion at an overlook on Duryea Drive I accidentally depressed the clutch when distracted by other activities and rolled into a stone wall.  But that is a story for another time.

Duryea Hillclimb - 1960's

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 23rd, 2008 at 3:50 pm and is filed under Driving, Personalities. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.