GM Heritage Vehicle Collection

My 2006 visit to the AACA Fall Eastern Meet, better known as “Hershey”, was likely the 5^th consecutive year I attended. Before that, most of my trips to eastern PA car shows were to Carlisle. However, Hershey’s focus on original cars which were 25 years and older was becoming a more attractive proposition to me.

Hershey has had a long history with mud. Ask any oldtimer, and they can regale you with stories of mud up to the knees, and classic cars buried in mud up to their axles. While more and more of the field area was gradually becoming paved, in 2006, not all of it was on asphalt yet. One photo in particular documents what appear to be Car Corral vehicles parked across the street from Hershey Park, on the lawn in front of the Hotel Hershey. There’s lots of sunshine as well so the infamous and soon to be gone Hershey mud was not a factor that year.

Ever since my rally brother Steve and I discovered it in the late 1990s, the spectacle of witnessing the Saturday morning parade of show cars has been a must-see part of the Hershey visit. Several of these photos capture that parade, as disorganized as it may appear! Take a note of all the spectators alongside the cars, enjoying the same sights as I was.

The big surprise of 2006 was the special display trucked in by General Motors. They dipped into their “GM Heritage Vehicle Collection” and brought a number of cars and trucks which were set up in a special area near the Giant Center. The most outstanding of them, in several ways, was the GM Futurliner. I had been reading articles about these massive vehicles for years. In January of 2006, a Futurliner sold at a Barrett-Jackson auction for $4 million. More shocking to me was their size, something difficult to capture in photographs. It makes me wonder how GM was able to move it; but of course, being GM, they have all kinds of vehicles and equipment at their disposal. And if you’re asking yourself “why is there a Saab near the Futurliner?”, it is because GM had purchased Saab and included several of the Swedish brand’s models in its display. A stretch? I thought so then, and still think so now.