We were in Fort Worth a little over two years, and he asked me if I'd go to Europe and open up stores, which we called Tandy International Electronics stores. And so, in , we moved to Brussels. And we lived in Brussels for five and a half years.
I'd say that was the period when we really began to have the time to spend really going to see museums. And it was so wonderful, because we could get in a car and drive to any one of five countries and, you know, in an hour and a half—in fact, one day, [] we spent the entire day driving through all of the countries, did a loop, and went through France and Luxembourg and Germany and the Netherlands and back to Brussels. It has a wonderful sculpture garden there.
And probably the second-largest collection of van Gogh's work. And then the museums in Amsterdam, and, of course, all the museums in Paris.
And so it was great because when we'd do one of our, you know, getaway trips, we'd go to either of those two cities. Amsterdam was a special favorite of ours. And get a hotel room there, and, you know, we'd bring the kids along.
But they were pretty young, so we'd get someone to take them around and find things for them to go do, and then we'd go visit museums. So that was a period when, as I said, I think we had, you know, the ability to really absorb a lot of art. It was a great time. Because it seems like it was the first time you really had a chance to look again since the Hill School, and now you're in Belgium and exposed to a whole different range and kind of work. Were you still looking at contemporary things?
Were you getting more of a classical understanding? It was easy to look at in Paris, and we visited galleries and, you know, just sort of were absorbing. We couldn't really afford to buy anything. But there were also other, more contemporary things that we had. I don't recall really what they were. At the end of five and a half years, we went back to Fort Worth, Texas, and I took over their computer business at that point, which I ran for five years.
And my late wife Mary got very interested in art glass, doing flat glass, and she made a number of things, including a box I still have upstairs that's made of glass, with a hinged lid and everything, all done with leaded glass.
And so it was a really—it gave her something to do that was very enjoyable and allowed her—she tried painting for a while and decided she really didn't think she could paint. I still have a painting she did of sailboats in San Francisco Bay that I don't think is too bad.
But anyway, it's in our art storeroom. And when we, in , moved here and she discovered what the glass art world was, it was like, "Good grief. But she immediately started meeting people, and the next thing we know, we go to a Pilchuck auction, probably in '84—.
And probably—I'm sure—yeah, at that auction we bought a Dale Chihuly that's—. And the next thing I know, she'd met two or three more people, and she became a member of the Pilchuck board—the board of trustees of the Pilchuck Art School. And, you know, the art school is an interesting thing. It only runs during the summer. It doesn't during the winter unless there's someone who wants to go up there and use the facilities and take care of themselves, which one artist used to do. It just sits empty, and it lasts during the summer months.
But the board—it was a very hand-to-mouth kind of a thing, and the board lived on the auction that they had in Seattle. They'd get Chihuly and Bill Morris and all the really good artists to give things, and a number of the not-so-well-known artists to give things.
They'd have a silent auction, and they'd have a live auction. And I went with Mary to these, and I got kind of really critical of the way they were being run and the way they worked. And sometimes I can have a really big mouth, and so—. It's a retreat up at Pilchuck. I'm a guest and I said, "You know, I hate to be really critical, but your auction has about a dozen things wrong with it that you could really do a lot better.
But I said, "We have to wait until the year after the next auction. And I went to that auction and I took notes about the entire thing—and we changed the day, the venue, the auctioneer, the whole way the evening works. You know, not as much time to sit outside and drink too much and eat too much—especially not give them very much food before they went inside to eat, so that when the doors opened, they came inside right away to eat.
And when we read a little bit about it—anyway, we did it as co-chairs, and we had a lot of a lot of fun, and we about doubled the year before, and then the next year they got the really brilliant idea of bringing in groups from outside this area, because you can only sell so many Chihulys to the—you know, people were getting them too cheap. JON SHIRLEY: But the year we did it, I think that we achieved higher-than-estimate price on about 80 percent of the things in the auction, and the year before, it was, like, 45 percent of the things in the auction.
And none of the really expensive things went over, partly because they were doing it on a night that conflicted with other auctions. You can't conflict with the Boys and Girls Club auction, whatever it was. I don't even remember. And then later—[] probably a year or two later [laughs], they were talking about their need for money, and I realized the school had almost no endowment.
And again, I'm a guest at the—[they laugh] I said, "Look, why don't you run a real capital campaign? And through that, I met a lot of interesting people in the Seattle area, some of the really interesting philanthropists here, one of whom was a great man named Sam Stroum.
And he told me, "You should live your life with the goal of having given away every cent that you have by the time you die. He talked philosophy with me for a while and then gave us a reasonably nice gift.
And so that was sort of our introduction into the local art world. And we collected glass. We collected a lot of glass art from everywhere, not just from here, but we had works from many European countries.
We had works from Australia. And we would actually—we went to Australia. There are a couple of artists down there that were very well known, and we bought their works down there and brought them back with us. We had works from the U. And I would say that we really stopped collecting glass probably around—[] excluding the goblets—probably around '92 or—'92, something like that. But when we built this—let me think a minute.
Yeah, because we really started to collect—the collection that you see now, the first work would have been that Calder, Squarish , that I showed you. We bought that in So from '83 to '90 I was president of Microsoft, and during that period of time I did not have time to go to New York and go on art trips.
And that was the beginning of this whole collection, really, was at that point. Microsoft went public and I could afford to buy things like that. I didn't have much time to spend on it, but at least I could do it. You know, you just can't do this without resources. We now had resources, and so we started off very, very slowly in the beginning.
It was a very young company. The joke was when I was hired, I was to bring adult supervision to the kids. I mean, Bill wasn't that old then. And it was very intense and very hard work. The way the business was transitioning from retail to selling to corporations, I thought it would be a good transition—that wasn't something I really knew how to do. And so I stayed on the board; I was a board member for 25 years.
I was still very involved with the company, but it was sort of this opportunity to do other things, and there were other things that I really wanted to do. And so, in the middle of , I stopped working full-time. And we really then started to go to New York and to do some collecting. We bought another Calder—in , we bought a Calder. In , we contacted Pace, and at that point I think the man we were dealing with was Renato Danese [], who now has his own gallery.
And Mary really loved Lucas II. She took that little brochure, cut out the cover, and put it onto the refrigerator and said, "This is"—[laughs]. So, I got a hold of Danese, and he said Chuck decided he didn't want to sell that piece; he wanted to keep it.
But he will sell— Janet Fish is available. It was a big auction to raise money for the arts and—oh, no, for a variety of things, almost United Way-ish in its outreach. And they had all kinds of things that auctions have that the same people go to every year; the same people give things, so you get a ride on your friend's boat for 12, with a dinner included, or—you know.
Well, there was an offer—it was a combination of American Airlines and Sotheby's to go to New York and to attend an auction. And so we bought it, and in , we went to visit Sotheby's in New York, having never been to an auction, an art auction, in our lives. We'd been to auctions, but nothing in New York [].
And the person who met us was Anthony Grant, and Anthony—you know, we could have been anybody. And Anthony couldn't Google us, not in those days, so I don't know how he figured it out, because he had with him an assistant, and I figured we'd be turned over to the assistant in five minutes.
Instead, the assistant was asked to leave, and Anthony stayed with us, took us through all of Sotheby's, all the back rooms, and all the things, and they had an auction the next day that was the auction we attended, and we bought an Andy Warhol.
Now, this, you have to realize, this is This was after the art market had crashed. I mean, that auction had five wonderful German paintings—Richter, Baselitz, and one other—and one of the Richters was the one of the fighter planes that ended up in Paul Allen's collection later and was sold at auction last year. Those five things sold on the phone instantly, and then nothing sold at all.
And we bought the Warhol for about 40 percent of low estimate. I mean, it was a Mao. It was a nice, pretty painting; I don't have it anymore. And we met Tobias Meyer, and it just—the relationship with Anthony Grant has continued on to this day, through Anthony being at Sotheby's and then going to Pace, which was the first gallery that we'd done business with, and then his own gallery, and then back to Sotheby's, and now he's—he was here last week for the dinner that we had.
We used to have him; he'd come to Vail and ski with us, when we had a place in Vail for several years. It was—. There was a building there that used to have a lot of galleries in it. There are almost none left there now.
But it was really a gallery building. And we went there, and—when we look it up—the gallery owner is an expert on Pollock, and I think he has some family relationship.
And in the back room was the Pollock that you saw there. And we bought that. And the other thing that happened that year was someone at Pace told Chuck Close that the people who bought Janet lived in Seattle, and he didn't—he always liked to know who owned his work.
He said, "Oh, wow. I'd like to meet them. I'm from Washington. You should have told me right away. No, that's not the right street. Anyway, we go in—Bond Street—and we go in, and he's very shy, and he looks at us and said, "Would you like a drink? I think I have some wine. Grab one of those. Scotch," you know, "give me some. And I think it was really that same conversation that same day he said, "I know you guys wanted Lucas II. But there's conditions. I said, "Fine, what are the conditions?
And that was it, and I said, "Sure. It was a handshake. There was never any writing, as much as you can shake hands with Chuck. It was never in writing, and it has been loaned every time he's asked it to be loaned. And [laughs] in the course of dealing with Chuck and acquiring so many works, I've always asked him where he wanted things to go one day, because I don't think everything should be in the Seattle Art Museum.
And the funny thing is [laughs] that he decided that he really wanted Lucas II to end up [in] the National Gallery. So there are a lot of other things going to the Seattle, and Lucas II is going there, where that great, enormous painting that he did of his mother-in-law, the finger-painting—that's one of the greatest things he ever did—is located.
So by this time, we were visiting other galleries. We bought a Calder from a resale—well, you know, secondary—small secondary-market gallery, and we started to form relationships []. By this time, of course, Arne Glimcher was interested in knowing who these people were, so of course, we met Arne. Let me think when this would have been. I think in '92—I think it was ' Anthony Grant took us through the house that is now the gallery on 78th Street.
And when he decided to retire and start an art gallery, he called me up and told me that he was doing this, you know, which I thought was really a very—I knew he had a great collection of art; he also had art up in his house in Connecticut.
That's where the big Rothkos and things were. But he called me up and said, "I'm starting this gallery, and I have a piece you should own. And it's really, really, really, really great, and it's one of a series that I own.
Get one of them, and don't ever do that again. But that was the start of a really great relationship, and there's a number of really good things we've gotten from Bob; there's a number we've gotten from Arne; and then there are numbers of things that we did—we were opportunistic auction buyers at that point—so we started going back, and we'd go to Christie's and Sotheby's, and we'd see what they had.
The Richter came from an auction at Christie's. There's a second Richter that came from an auction in—that Christie's had in London that we bid on the phone and were written up in the paper in London as some crazy Americans who paid an absolutely ridiculous overprice to get this Richter. And we also—I don't remember what year. Let me think. Well, there were a number of pieces that came to us during this period of time through the '90s. The David Smith was auctioned in And the under-bidder on that, it turned out, we learned much later, was—has his own museum [].
The Broad, Eli Broad. One of the nice things that happens when you are collecting works of a single artist—it certainly happened with Calder—was that people learn that there's this person out there collecting Calder. Lucy Mitchell Innes, on a trade, got Bougainvillier. And she didn't handle—that's not what she does. She handles earlier work. She didn't know what to do with the Calder, and she called me up, and she said, "I hear you're buying Calders.
And she said, "I have this piece," and I said, "Please send me an image. I'd be very interested. This is astonishing. So there was this whole period of time when we were really deeply involved, going back to New York on a fairly regular basis, but also, we were doing a fair amount of world traveling. One of the things that we always did was go to museums, and because of my love of sculpture, we'd go to sculpture parks.
We'd been to Hakone, in Japan, for example, is one, and—just anyplace we found ourselves. The next major thing that we got from Mnuchin—in early '96, he sent us a transparency of that beautiful Rothko, the big one that's Green over Blue. And a transparency of that piece looks like mud—and we told Bob that.
And he said, "Well, when are you coming to New York? And he said, "Look, I'll pack it up and send it to you, and if you like it, keep it. If you don't, have your packers repack it, put it back in the box, ship it back to me. No expense. We'd already bought that Rothko you saw in—that's the light-colored one, and the gray-on-white one. But getting this one was just so special. And Rothko—you said I can move off on a tangent; let me go off on a little—. Not all of the things that we own were artists whose work appealed to us when we started out.
We started out buying the ones that we really did love. Like Richter—I took an immediate liking to Richter upon really getting exposed to his work. Rothko was not something that had come to me—either one of us, I think—right away.
And the Rothko discovery was so interesting because it happened in a place, at a time—we were in the Phillips, and we went to the room with the bench in the middle, and there are four Rothkos, one on each wall, and you can look at any one at a time.
We get in there, and we worked our way around the room [laughs] a couple of times, and I said, "You know, I really get it. I just really love what this man did. And it was that, you know, having the time to really go look and go to galleries and shows and museums, really be able to spend time looking at things.
It broadens, you know, completely broadens your outlook and what you like. And it also allows you to continue to say, I still don't really get the art of this person, so I don't think I'm going to buy any of that. And then there are things that you come to sort of too late, you know, like Ryman came a little too late. We should have picked up on Ryman earlier. That was a mistake. So the outdoor sculpture was fairly easy, but [] the house that was here was very chopped up, and we were obviously outgrowing it, and that led to the creation of this house.
We continued to buy art, even during the period of time when we were in the temporary house, and if we wanted anything large, we had an arrangement with the Seattle Art Museum that they would store it, but they could put it up whenever they wanted to.
So the large Jasper Johns and the Green over Blue and things like that that would not fit in the house that we were in stayed at the museum, but luckily, the grounds of the house we went to had room for some sculptures. So as we added things, some of the outdoor sculpture could be there, and the others were left here surrounded by tapes, you know, that said, "Stay away from"—. There are pieces that we bought from Dorothy Goldeen when she had her gallery in Santa Monica—the Fletcher Benton, Charles Ginnever—those pieces outdate these other things.
They're probably, well, '87—'86, even—in that time frame. When we first moved here, we lived up on a hill above Bellevue.
But it was a funny place to live because [laughs] it actually was high enough that it snowed—. And we just loved the water, so stayed there a few years, packed up, and moved to the house that was here.
I think I should—maybe we should go back and talk about some of the—I talked about some of the galleries that influenced us. One of the people that helped us a lot in the early days was Patterson Sims. Patterson was curator here at Seattle Art Museum. We didn't have anything really to do with the museum at that time, but we visited. And someone introduced us to Patterson, and that was really wonderful because he had such an amazing—he was a great curator, but he had more outreach—more interest in talking to people and getting them involved and answering questions for them, really, than any curator I've known.
Michael Darling was a lot like that, too, you know; went to Chicago and became chief curator at the contemporary art museum there. Patterson was wonderful, and he helped us in a number of ways. When I really fell in love with David Smith's work, it was obvious to me that I wanted a stainless-steel piece, that I just thought that was—I mean, everything he did was wonderful, but I thought that was really what I would like to own.
We'd looked at some of the ones that aren't in the Cubi series you know. I think it's called Fifteen Planes or something like that. And none of them really appealed to us. It's on a patio in her condo in Washington, D. And one of these days she's going to sell it, and it's going to go to auction, and it'll be either Sotheby's or Christie's. I'll wait. We were in, like, the fifth row.
And by that time, of course, we knew Tobias Meyer, and I bid on this thing by waving my pen at Tobias, and there was someone behind me—several people behind me bid, and then they all dropped out except for one, and that was the person who was bidding for Eli Broad.
And it kept going up to prices that I just had not been willing to pay, and Mary kept going [demonstrates poking him in the ribs] like this. And it was very funny, because there was nothing else were interested in, so we got up and walked out. And on the way out, two or three people asked, "Who are you? And The Wall Street Journal figured it out. Because even in '94 things were still—auction catalogues were not very thick—and auctions didn't have a lot of action.
But that all came from Patterson. There's a lovely Sam Francis work on paper that you passed going into that gallery, and that was another piece that we were offered, about five of those.
We wanted to find one, and this one was somewhat more expensive than the others, and Patterson said, "That's clearly the best one" [laughs]. He never talked about prices. I guess good curators don't do that unless it's for the museum. But he helped a lot on that piece, and just generally sort of helping steer us, you know, sort of read what we were liking, and that's what gradually led to getting involved with the Seattle Art Museum.
I was not—my involvement at that time would have only been with Patterson. And, too, Patterson—even though we didn't want him to be our social director; we met probably Jinny first. And Jinny is such an outgoing, wonderful person.
If you meet Jinny, and you're interested in the arts, next thing you know, you meet everybody. And we may want to return to that——to the whole museum thing. That's going to take a while, so—. You seem to be on a roll, so I'm just letting you run with that. I've got plenty of questions for later. One of the other things that happened during this period in the '90s was that there was a man named Bill Bartman, and Bartman had a thing he called A.
He did books that were donated to schools. He did art books, generally small, but he wanted to do something different, something really special. What he wanted to do was a book of interviews between Chuck Close and the people that he painted. And the book was called The Portrait Speaks. And we financed that book. Mary and I financed the book, and it was so much fun, and Bill was such an amazing—I mean, Bill was—poor guy.
I think he was diabetic; he had AIDS; he was, you know, just—he had things cut off. I mean, the poor guy was just a wreck, but he was so enthusiastic and exciting and just, you know, it's too bad that, you know, drugs he needed came along too late to save him []. We have a Chuck Close photograph of Bill, a daguerreotype. So, you know, the sweater he's wearing reads backwards, because it's just like looking in the mirror. So, yeah, if you could explain how that came about.
I didn't know if it came about through Chuck Close and a request of his, but now it sounds like it came about a different way. We got this call from this crazy guy, and he said, "Look, the next time you're in Los Angeles, you've got to see me. I'll never forget it. We had no idea what he was like, and he was just so outgoing and so enthusiastic. He'd already done some level of interviews—and he said, "I can't afford to publish this thing without backing.
And we need to get it finished. And so we talked about a budget and came up with a budget, and we financed it. I have some copies of it left; it's quite thick.
It's fascinating, and [laughs] the people really opened up and talked to him, and when it was published only one person got mad. Richard Serra was furious. He said, "I never said that stuff! That isn't some—that's a transcription of what you said.
And [for] the Chuck Close retrospective at MoMA in , they attempted to get everybody that he'd painted to come to the reception. And it was fabulous; it was at Sette MoMA, and we were at a table that had Cindy Sherman []—oh, and sitting next to me was Charlie Rose, and all he wanted to talk about was an interview he was going to do with Bill Gates.
And it was amazing. Afterwards, in the hallway outside, they got all of these people together, with Chuck sitting there in his wheelchair, and took of a photograph of them.
I mean, there's Janet Fish. That's actually in the——that painting—that's in the book. All of the people—. It was just—it was so much fun. And the book—he wanted to finish the rest of the people, because we didn't have everybody in there, and so there are some other interviews that never got published that were done, because Bill succumbed to his many illnesses.
He had a place in Chelsea where they actually—up on the third or fourth floor—where A. Press was located, and there were some people who worked for him there. And afterwards, we tried to see if that part of the project could continue on, but there was really nobody there who was interested in pursuing it for some reason. And I don't even know what happened to—.
What inspired you to get excited about it? Was it the overall interest in Close, and then Bill's, just, enthusiasm, and as far as he'd taken the project? JON SHIRLEY: Well, and we read some of those interviews, and, you know—you listen to an artist—it's what you're doing when you go and visit with the artist, listen to them really talk about what they were doing. And they all had interaction with Chuck, because he only painted people he knew [], you know, and knew pretty well.
And so just the interplay was so fascinating because it wasn't like you interviewing them. It's like this old friend interviewing them, with Bill sort of just sitting on the sides as a little bit of a moderator but usually not interjecting very much. And so the conversations are great. There's illustrations of the paintings he did of each person and an example of what each person did, their own paintings, in the book, or whatever they did. I mean, one of the—I think one of the conversations is with—oh, my ability to remember names is terrible.
I think one of the conversations—either one of the ones that was published, or we saw that didn't get published, was with Philip Glass. So it was whoever he painted. I mean, these were people he went to school—they were in Yale together. Janet Fish. So he decided he'd like it to go there.
Yeah, and it was just kind of this magical moment, and it wasn't a terribly expensive thing to do, although we ended up having to do multiple gifts to fund the thing to get it all finished. Yeah, I've seen that book. It looks like it's about a thousand pages [laughs] []. And what happened with Chuck was so great.
You know, Arne doled——and still doles Chuck's works out. You know, no one's supposed to have more than two. The profile portrait and the head-on portrait. And we wanted them both, but they'd only sell us the head-on portrait, so we bought that, and we reached a point at that point where getting another one through Arne required Chuck—Chuck would say, "I want the Shirleys to be offered this," and we'd get a call from Arne or whoever—Mark or someone.
And they'd say, "Okay, Chuck wants you to buy this if you want. It's so much money," and so we always took it, because, you know, we knew he wanted us to own it [laughs]. And then a number of those came from auction, though, so we did go to auctions and buy some of them. And quite a few years later, when the person who owned the profile self-portrait had a divorce—how do things become available? You know, debt and divorce and death. Pace learned about it, and they wanted to resell it through Pace, and Chuck said, "You have to offer it to Jon.
And then I think we bought the pulp-paper piece at auction. And then one day—and I do not remember what the year was on this. It would probably have been around One day, I get a call from Chuck, and it's, like, at night, so it's, like, in the morning in Manhattan.
And he said, "I've decided to sell Big Nude. Do you want to buy it? I'd seen it in a book. It's about this big, and it's like—. You know, the thing's 23 feet long; so in the book, it's tiny. And I said, "Sure. And—but I decided that with my physical condition, something could happen to me at any time.
I should have some money put away, so I decided to sell this, and Arne's going to take a minimal commission or something on it, and so I can get the money and put it away. You know, we've never seen it. We'd like to"—. And I said, "Okay," and I think we had them hold onto it until this house was finished so that—when we were walking through the house, you asked me was any of the house designed for a specific work. That wall was designed to hold that work. We knew that was going to go down there, and then we kind of worked our way around with the other works of Close that we owned at the time.
So when we moved into the house, that piece came, and put it on a stretcher and hung, and it's an interesting work, because the paint on it is very thin, and it's rolled, and it comes in a roll. And some of the white part of it, like the hairs on her arm, I believe he just scratched the paint off the surface, so it's the canvas showing through.
It's only ever been loaned once. It's never been on public exhibition in the United States except the one time. Pace did a show of Chuck's nudes in Chelsea, and he wanted it to go back to Chelsea.
So it went back to Chelsea and came back here. So that was only—a typical show is up, you know, what, six, seven weeks. The only time it's ever been in a public show was twice in Germany. It traveled to Germany twice in the early days. And there was a show of his work at the Henry Art Gallery. They wanted to borrow it, and Chuck said, "Don't loan it.
It's too fragile. Is that true? He came back; he was honored by the University of Washington quite a few years ago as one of the—you know, they have a program where they bring back graduates of the school who have achieved something important in their lives, and they brought him back. He gave a talk in one of their halls, and I remember that despite everything that the ushers could do, they couldn't stop—all of the walkways were—all the chairs were full, and there were students sitting on every step of the way out of that place.
If there had been a fire, it would have been horrible. And he was just so great and answered the questions from the students. He has a terrific capability of sitting down in front of an audience and just being mesmerizing and telling these wonderful stories and talking about his life and talking about all the things he went through—the fact, you know, he was dyslexic.
When he applied to Yale, they thought his written material was such that he couldn't make it through college, so he sent them a bunch of drawings [laughs], and they accepted him based on his art. And just the whole—all through his life, the difficulties he's had to overcome, and then being in the prime of life and being—he was at the mayor's when he had the aneurysm, giving out awards at Gracie Mansion, and it was just—to have overcome everything and make it to that stage, and then have that happen to you, and then to come out of it and go right back to painting [], just like he was doing, with a brush strapped to his wrist.
I really love the man. I just think he's such an amazing example of what the brain can be and how people can overcome really terrible personal tragedy and go on and thrive.
I feel sorry for what's happened now, though. I'm really worried about him. Shirley has served on the board since , longer than anyone besides Bill Gates and venture capitalist David Marquardt, who joined in The Medina resident decided not to seek re-election at the annual shareholders meeting in November.
His statement in the news release:. I could only make this decision knowing that Microsoft is well-positioned for success in the years ahead. Shelby did a great job with the way they sorted that car out. I was in New York on business with a friend. It took us an hour to get from the edge of the crowd into where you could actually see the car.
I understand now why the crowd was in there. To me it was the most spectacular car. You have to think back to that year. That was what? That was an amazing automobile in and I just fell in love with that too. Great interview with Mr Shirley. What a treat that must have been to see all of those great cars in one place. You would have needed to yank me out of there! The Rossellini MM is the best in my book.
Great job on the interview with Jon Shirley. I really like the fact that he takes the cars out and uses them — though I will miss seeing the TR out on track. That, and the memorabilia collection….
A great and very informative read. Superb pictures too. Thanks for another magnificent article. Actually, quite boring. At the end of the game a building full of toys with none of them really more than purchases. Quite sad. I read the interview, additonally boring. Here today, and gone tomorrow. I rank him with Mullin — an empty vessel. Anonymous — Did you read the same interview as me? And rest assured, Shirley is a car guy through and through.
His cars are magnificent! Thanks for the article. I have been on several driving events in which Jon was driving his cars. He is a true enthusiast who is willing to put his cars on the road for all of us to enjoy. Hats off to Jon Shirley!
Few people would have the resources or the opportunities to do what he has done.. But his combination of dedication. And he has such a great attitude about it all. Thanks for both the interview and the gallery of pictures. I remember Talacrest advertising it last year. The transporter offered by Talacrest was a different one. Shirley has owned this one for many years. The only thing that would make his collection better would be some etceterinis: Bandini, Stanguellini, Abarth, Moretti etc.
Just kidding! What amazing taste and it looks like he uses the heck out of them so hey Anonymous stop making silly comments!
One of the things he got was the Mercedes fuel formula. This he shared with a few of us lucky ones. Mixing it weas a several step operation and if not followed properly, resulted in a bunch of unuseable jello!
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