Silver Anniversary Sixer
The right thing to do.

It’s been a good year.

All digits remain firmly attached to hands and feet, a warm roof keeps the rain and snow at bay, and my loving wife continues to endure with supreme grace my seemingly endless enthusiasms, including completion of five years of work on a Ph.D. (my day job is teaching) and editing this newsletter.

A couple of months ago, I sat in the audience listening to a guest speaker at my university while he leveled his forensic guns at BMW owners. He made a rather poor case that we who own BMWs do so because our cars are status symbols, and that if we cared about the state of our fellow human beings on this planet, we should be ashamed to drive such vehicles. As I listened to his Naderish tirade (you know, of course, that Ralph Nader made a career of attacking the auto industry without benefit of ever having learned to drive), I wondered how such an otherwise intelligent and compelling individual could get it so wrong.

Thank God there are no federal arbiters of automotive correctness. We have the freedom in this country to drive whatever we want wherever we want whenever we want. Given a set of wheels and a driver’s license, any citizen can enjoy one of the most powerful of all liberties: the freedom to go, to move, to motivate over the hill.

It’s been my experience that most people own BMWs because they love to drive. Those who don’t get that simple truth belong with the same folks who double-punch Presidential ballots and then whine about it.

The freedom to drive whatever we want sometimes means changing horses in midstream. Since March, my ‘86 635CSi has shared garage space with my wife’s Cadillac STS. Tonight, thanks to the aforementioned freedom enjoyed by yours truly, the STS has a new garagemate.

Yes, I have once again exercised my automotive freedom to choose. The white 635 is gone. She sits comfortably in the nearby garage of a friend and fellow club member who loves Sixers and will give the coupe a fine home.

My new road partner? She’s a familiar face, both to you and me. The first of my three Sixers is now back in my life after a couple of years of careful ownership by the same friend who bought my ‘86. That’s right - he and I swapped cars. I wanted to use the trade difference to fund my upcoming 25th anniversary with SKS, and not just because she has enabled me to live out my dreams, automotive and otherwise, over the past quarter century. I figured the least I could do was exchange a little of the accumulated value of all those car trades for the sake of realizing a few of her own dreams. Let’s just call it the right thing to do.

Three years ago, just back from 15 months of graduate residency at the University of Missouri, I answered a classified ad in the Tulsa World. In so doing, I found the car you see on the masthead of this newsletter. As the owner and I walked into his garage, there before my eyes sat a swooping low German coupe with fetching polaris silver body and red leather interior. At some point its TRX wheels had been painted black, no doubt in response to Porsche doing the same with 911SCs of that era. Otherwise, the coupe was a well kept and bone stock example of a 633CSi, vintage 1983. Of course, I brought her home. Thus began my love affair with the BMW 6 Series.

While other people might have seen an old used BMW, I saw (and see) a gracefully aging and well-preserved Sixer with lots of unused miles remaining to be driven. I know every piece of maintenance done on her for the last three years, a lot of it by my own hand.

Everything from valve adjustments to suspension surgery to brake booster replacement - it’s all there in the maintenance records my friend and I kept during our respective ownerships. Taken together, those records not only insure the integrity of the car which now sits in my garage, but stand as a shield against having to spend big repair bucks anytime soon. A good thing, too, because that money is earmarked for my first and best partner in life.

Did I just hear her say she’s always wanted to visit Germany...? -Rick Sparks

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