HOW I CAME TO ACQUIRE THE DOCUMENTS FROM GAMR ’53 & ‘54

_______________________________________________________________________

I have been sharing info I recently acquired for the ’53 & ’54 GAMR over the past month or so on my Facebook Page.

A little more background on where this info came from:

In December I was contacted by someone in Missouri who had acquired some documents about some sort of race in 1953 & 1954. He found my postings about GAMR and tied the documents to the event. He sent some photos he took with his phone which really peaked my curiosity; especially since I had no real info about the first two years of the event. We corresponded for a few days and I came to find out the documents were in a storage locker he purchased. (Apparently this is somewhat of a business for him.) I told him I was interested in his find and to think about what he wanted for it. A few weeks later I found out that he had posted it on EBay for; shall we say a lofty amount. Hi ask was way more than I would be willing to pay so I waited for a few weeks and contacted him as someone who essentially is the unofficial archivist of this event. I told him that I would hope we could come to an agreement so that all the info could stay together. Fast forward a week or so and I made an offer I thought was fair and he accepted it. I made a brief posting back on January 4th about the package with the documents showing up at my house. Everything was as he said it; chronologically archived in a ring binder for each year; and every page was in a separate plastic sleeve to protect it. I spent a number of weeks scanning the docs and putting this into some semblance of order. I have been reading through them and putting together the history of a team who ran the event for the two years.

The team was a James Yule of Maryland and his brother Roger of Philadelphia. James was the Driver and Roger was the Co Driver (Navigator). They ran in James wife’s car – a 1951 Healy Nash. (Awfully nice of her to lend them her car for a 1000 jaunt thought New England in late Fall!) Turns out James were a member of The Motor Sports Club of America (MSCA) the club which organized The Great American Mountain Rally for all four years of its running.

I will try and put interesting tidbits together to tell some short stories of different aspects of the event from a competitor’s perspective.

As I compile this information I am learning details about the event and hope that you enjoy sharing my discoveries.