About Me

Welcome to the Always Looking For Another blog.

This is a blog about my personal Alfa journey with a bit of Alfa history, news about the Alfa Romeo community, Alfa personalities, and watches or wine.

My earliest memory of Alfa Romeo was riding along with my older brother Tennison in a Giulietta that he bought from our cousin Kenny. Tennison and I shared the car gene passed down from our father.

My father was my primary influence in my car world. He told me about the transmission in the Model T he had to re-build at the community college auto shop in my hometown int the 20s. He told me about times when cars had to use reverse gear to go up Carmel hill from Monterey because some cars in those days didn’t have enough torque. We used to take drives in his Studebaker Power Hawk, the sports car of its day. He bought a new 1957 Porsche in Germany and brought it back to the small farm town we lived in. Then he gave it to my older brother when he graduated from med school and he got a Buick Special; in 1963 he bought another 356B in Stuttgart and drove that every day until it became mine in my senior year of high school. It was the car that I learned how to drive in.

I was pretty much without a car during  my college years except when I got to come home for summer and winter break. I joined the Naval Reserve after college and went through a string of ordinary cars but in 78 my brother Tennison needed to get rid of the leased 77 Corvette that he had, so I took it off his hands.

After the Corvette and a Porsche 914-6, I purchased my first Alfa Romeo in 1987. That Alfa was a 1982 GTV6 in silver gray with blue interior. It was an instant love affair.  I started learning more about Alfa Romeo as a marque; it was the remarkable technical innovation in the early days of the 20th century that hooked me to it.  My next Alfa was an Alfetta sedan purchased to use as an everyday while the GTV6 was having some much-needed body and front end work done. Buying the Alfetta was cheaper than renting a car for a month, and it was way more fun to drive. In 1995, I had occasion to acquire the GTV6 Balocco that I own and drive now (more on that later); I got it from the mechanic that had done all the work on my other Alfas, Danny Wells at Foreign Auto Menders in Poway. I also bought a 1982 Spider Veloce from Danny, he talked me out of buying a BMW R80, he said drive the Spider for a weekend and you won’t want a motorcycle and he was right!

In 1996, my very good friend Lorin offered me her very nice 1986 Spider Quadrifolio, the Quadrifolio designation by Alfa denoted the model that had all the options that were offered as standard equipment; air conditioning, removable hard top, 15” alloy wheels, and a bit more aero cladding for a more aggressive look. This one also had a chassis stiffener installed, so it handled much better than the 82. That Quad then became the daily commuter.  Jennifer and I had our engagement pictures taken in the Quad Spider. I became involved in the local chapter of the Alfa club after returning to San Diego from the Santa Barbara area. I started working with my good friends Dave and Lorin who were the newsletter staff at the time.  A huge thanks go out to them for keeping me in Alfas.

Getting involved with the local chapter was the best thing I ever did for my Alfa and for my social life. I was immediately drawn to participating in events and was drafted into the board of directors and have been on the board in some capacity ever since 1990, including several stints as president, vice president, secretary, “at large”, newsletter editor, webmaster and social events chair.

In 2015 I was urged to run for the national board of directors and not knowing any better I said yes. Under the then and current president Cindy Banzer, I fill the role of technology/social media coordinator which entails being an administrator and moderator of FaceBook groups and coordinator for InstaGram. Recently, I also served as the co-chair for the Alfiesta Coronado, the 2022 national convention here in San Diego.