Hooray for LeMay!

Amazing, awesome and amazing!

Yep, those words describe the LeMay Family Collection of automobiles and other eclectic items in Tacoma, Washington.  My longtime friend, Helen, suggested that we visit this museum while we were staying in Olympia.  We were here around 4 hours and I ended up taking over 300 pictures!

Harold LeMay started his own garbage collection business and ended up collecting thousands of cars, boats, bikes, trucks and various memorabilia.  Approximately 600 cars are housed here at  the former Marymount Military Academy.  The rest of his collection is spread out over 200 storage places in the surrounding area.

The first room you are ushered into is the former Marymount gymnasium, stocked full of expensive, and fully restored collectible cars.

Above Sandy and Jerry is a Compass Echo house trailer.  The small trailer was built to 1/4 scale of a regular trailer and hauled around to shows so people could see the floor plans.  Now, all you have to do is get on the Internet to view the various floor plan options and pictures of what the inside and outside look like.

How would you like to ride along in this, inhaling the fumes from the car? I don't think you could even be called a backseat driver from here.  Maybe this was the mother-in-law seat!

Below is a 1929 Windsor White Prince Roadster, complete with the Windsor Coat of Arms for the Prince of Wales.  Buckingham Palace objected to this and threatened to sue.  The company went out of business the next year.  Price new was $1485.00, quite a sum for 1929.

This is a 1955 Chevy Nomad "Playbunny Coach".  The top was chopped down 4 inches, then combined with parts from a Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser,  the front end of a Mustang and a Lincoln rear end in the late 1960's.  I think it would fun to drive this one around

Check out the beautiful candy apple red paint job on this chopped 1951 Mercury.  It now sits in the former Marymount pool house.  The pool room has the cars on top and car parts stored in the former heated swimming pool.

Sandy stopped a moment to let Elvis croon one of his favorite songs to her.  Kind of looks like he is singing "Love Me Tender" and Sandy is thinking about a response..

You have to be "old" to remember these ice cream carts!  This was over in one of the corners, but it caught my eye.  Don't think they have any of these on the streets anymore.

Part of the tour was in this cavernous warehouse, with 3 rows of cars stacked up to the ceiling.  Think of how many tires there are in just this building to keep pumped up!

It would be really easy to park this little BMW, which is only 7.5 feet long.  For access to the single bench seat, you have to open up the front door, which is attached to the steering wheel!  I think this would feel like driving in an over sized tin can and it would be downright scary to drive it on our Phoenix streets.  Death wish comes to mind.

This double ugly car is a 1956 Citroen.  Check out the seats!  This would not be the car you would want to use on a cross country trip.

Harrison Ford drove this car in the movie "Indiana Jones".

This Westfalia VW is perfect for some people, but not for Don and I.  It would be a bit cramped to live in for months at a time!

One of the more unusual items was this 1961Civil Defense Shelter, which you could buy and bury in your back yard in case Russia attacked the U.S.  Maybe there are still some of these around in people's back yards.

The olive green car below was driven by Mr. Cunningham on the TV show "Happy Days".    Okay, maybe you aren't old enough to remember seeing the program when it was originally on prime time TV, but the reruns are still around!  Who can forget the Fonz?!

Jerry is looking at the car hauler that Harold LeMay bought just so he could transport the cars he bought back to Tacoma.  There is an interesting story behind this.  Harold purchased these cars at auction in 1999, then drove them back and put the truck, cars and hauler in a storage facility.  Mr. LeMay passed away, and no one else knew where these were.  Last year, his son went to check out some of the 200 places they store cars and found them, just as they were left 14 years previously!  The cars (except for one) have not been moved from the car hauler since the auction.