Car Guy Magazine Car Guy Magazine Issue 215 | Page 21

It isn’t perfect. For a few moments, the engine
struggles to catch. Starter grinds are drawn out,
though the mechanized whines ring determined.
But what follows the wait has a high net worth.
This is a distinctive machine; a custom Aston
Martin Bertone with no peer-year 1953. It fires
with an abrupt cough, and after a couple of sputtering grunts, settles into a low, sexy rumble you
can feel all the way through to your ribs. The resonance is throaty. In the engine compartment the
cams clatter with clean precision. That’s where the
highly polished plaque is; the one that sets this car
apart from all other Aston one-offs. It reads:
Presented to Charles A. Ward, president and
general sales manager, Brown & Bigalow, with sincerest appreciation from your 60 sales managers,
Christmas 1953.
Below the names of the sixty sales managers
from forty-eight states are etched into the polished
metal. These managers, from the Minneapolisbased greeting card and calendar firm where Ward
was chief, paid $6,800 for this Christmas present.

That’s $52,337.08 in today’s dollars, according to
the Federal Reserve; a bargain when you consider the current entry level Ford-era Aston, the V8
Vantage, will consume more than 100,000 of today’s dollars.
And this is a far more distinctive piece of
machinery. Ward’s monogram is embedded in
the steering wheel hub. A commission plaque is
affixed to the dash. Included with the car was a
personalized tool kit in a custom-crafted wooden
case. The car was fitted with just three seats, with
the fourth behind the driver’s seat surrendering to
a custom-made picnic hamper complete with a bar
and glassware. Ward was a lover of picnics.
According to automobile collector Gene Ponder, Charles Ward owned the car for exactly one
year. “Well that’s the sad part now,” Ponder says
with some exasperation. “They gave it to him
Christmas of ’53 and he sold it the next year. I
mean, your employees go and give you something
like this and it means no more to you than to sell
it the next year?”

WORDS MARK STUERTZ
PHOTOS GLENN ZANOTTI

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