Slant Six Club, South SF Bay Area Meet - Alviso, California 9-29-02

This year's South Bay SL6 car show and social get-together took an interesting twist.
Seems like the Alviso Marina, where we have held our car show for the last 9 years is now part of the Santa Clara Parks Dept. (it used to be the city of Alviso's Marina) At first the change seemed OK, we just called Parks Dept.'s reservations desk and they said our event would be no problem, just follow the park rules.

So all seemed to go as planned, we "setup" at 9:00 and cars started rolling-in at a steady pace. At 11:00 we see a big "prison bus" drive into the parking lot and off-load a crew of inmates to do some "weekend worker" maintenance. No big deal right, seeing that the inmates and even their "supervisors" seemed like Slant Six cars and the car show so hey, have a look, enjoy the event.

So the cars keep rolling-in and everyone is having a good time. We sign-in 53 cars by about 1:00 and then....

The Santa Clara Park Dept. Ranger squad rolls in and guess what, they are not happy. The Rangers tell us that we can't do this show and that everyone has to leave. When asked why, they pullout the rule book and make-up a mile long list of issues such as: need a special event permit, need a $1,000,000.00 insurance policy to protect the Parks Dept., need a sellers permit, (some members had brought parts to "swap") cars were not parked in the allotted spaces, no working on cars on park property, (hoods were-up) dogs must be on a leash at all times and a car show gets in the way of our inmate work crew and makes it hard for them to complete their assignment.

As luck would have it, we had the nicest old time club members smooth things out with the rangers. After a bunch of discussion like "wow, that's not what the reservation people told us" and "oops, we did not know that" and "sorry we will move cars as needed" and the like. In the end, most everyone did their best to comply with the ranger's requests and after a while, those guys jumped into their trucks and left. Good thing because one member's car did not re-start and needed a quick "in park" distributor swap to get going. (a stripped distributor gear and cracked fuel pump hose repair) Members "chipped-in" with a spare distributor and helping hands, needless to say, this SL6 car had broke down in the right place!