Though I never knew what it actually looked like until it arrived at the Cadillac & LaSalle Club’s 2014 Grand National on July 12, I was oddly familiar with the “Elegante.” The one-off, aluminum-bodied Elegante retractable hardtop was brought to the show in Lake George, N.Y., from West Palm Beach, Fla., by Dick Birdsall and his older brother Bob.
My familiarity with the car came through an article published in The New York Times on April 28, 1955. The article lacked a photo, but proclaimed this $30,000 creation to be “a style leader at the $500,000 International Automobile Show that opened at Cross County Center” in Yonkers, N.Y., on April 27 of that year.
Building a dream
The brothers Birdsall, having grown up two decades prior but one town west of me in Hartsdale, N.Y., harbor their own fond memories of such local car nut landmarks as the “Pipeline.” It was along the “Pipeline” where their father, noted commercial artist Harry Birdsall, could explore the speed potential of his Ferraris without worrying about intersections. A shared passion for racing boats (which remains a professional interest of his sons today) also forged fast friendships with the bandleader Guy Lombardo and famed engineer Zora Arkus-Duntov, who fortified a Ford Flathead V-8 powering one of Birdsall’s watercraft with Ardun Hemi heads and a SCoT supercharger.
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