When Erin Seidemann takes her Curved-dash c1903 Oldsmobile (she calls it the CDO) out on the Veteran Car Run this year she will be continuing what her late father, Dr Michael Seidemann (1946-2021), introduced her to more than 10 years ago. We invited Dr Nina Baker, an engineering historian with an interest in women in motoring, to interview Erin about how she became interested in veteran cars.

My father was always a car collector, you know? Of course when my brother and I were growing up and going through college there wasn’t so much money around, but once we had both moved on to support ourselves, he really started buying up a lot of cars. But even before that, when you’re just growing up with somebody who was that interested in cars, you're going to car shows all the time. It really wasn't even like a second thought to me. We were just going in the Corvette to the old car shows, although perhaps not quite what we think of as ‘old cars’ now.

My Dad's daily drive when I was growing up was a 1975 Corvette with the classic Stingray body, but unfortunately, as far as Corvettes go, the ‘75 was the slowest ever made because it was the model that came out right after the pollution control laws came in. Then, when I was a teenager, his next one was a 1962 Corvette. He ended up with 18 ‘collector’ cars by the time he passed a few years ago. He bought a warehouse after a while to keep them in because they filled up their garage, their driveways, and I was keeping one here at my condo, and he kept on buying, and I had to say to him, “Dad, you gotta buy a place to keep all these because they're the type of cars you don't want to keep outside.” 

He wasn’t so much into the really vintage cars until later on. When I got my first iPhone I found a ringtone that sounded like one of those old bulb-horns – ‘Parp-Parp’ – and I allocated it to my Dad’s number in my contacts and when he heard it he told us "Well, I don't have any cars like that. I don't have any cars that old. It's just never really been like anything that I was interested in." So, of course, later on, once he bought up quite a few of them, I always teased him, "Never say never, Dad!" He got a 1900 De Dion-Bouton Type E Vis-à-Vis Voiturette, and of course the Olds that I will be driving in the Run. He also got one of the very few of the exact replicas of the Benz Motorwagen, and I learned how to drive that thing (see below). They were built, just a hundred I think, by John Bentley.

Any time my Dad bought a new car, it was just understood that I would learn how to drive it too, which was a beautiful thing because a lot of people don't do that with their kids. But he raised us that there was really no difference being a woman and a man – you just do whatever you want to do. I followed his example and bought my 1932 Nash when a big private collector’s museum closed in Tupelo.

Although there is really nothing quite like the UK’s London to Brighton Run in the USA, there are many Concours d’Elegance events such as at Pebble Beach and Amelia Island. Erin was her Dad’s usual co-driver, as her brother was not so interested. She joked that her role, especially in the early days of her going along to these events, was to be the one to get out and push!  It seems that there is a rule at Amelia Island that, if you win an award, the car has to drive up to the award stage to receive the award. 

Erin said that de Dion Bouton never really ran all that well, but they were due an award from the Amelia Island Concours: 

It was towards the end of the show and we're just like, OK. Please run. Please run. Please run. And it stalled on the way to pick up the award and oh, no, no, no. I jump off the car. It's always been my my job to push because you know, I'm the young one. So I jump off the car. I start pushing it, and Dad gets it started. And we got our award! But this is true of any of our old cars, you can never be sure they will run. Just the other day I went to drive the 1957 Thunderbird, and I stopped to get gas, and it wouldn't start again. So, you know, that's just part of the experience. My Mom lives closer to the warehouse where we keep all our cars but she doesn’t drive them all. I do, when I can, but I’m surprised on a day when I go over there to drive Dad's cars, if they all run.

The first couple of times my Dad, Mom and I came over to the UK for the Run, it was just as spectators to see if this was something we were interested in. And of course, my Dad goes nuts over it and wants to buy a car so we can participate in it. So, he bought the CDO and the first year that we ran the car in the Run was 2013. So it's been over 10 years now. And we just had the time of our lives, we dressed up for it, the car was in the Concours the day before the Run, and it was just fabulous. And, again, we joked that the reason I had come was in case the car needed to get a push up the hills.

My dad was a big guy, so we weren't sure if it was going to handle the weight of the three of us up the hills and, not surprisingly, there were a couple of hills that I had to get off and push and it actually stalled right before the finish line in Brighton. We had no idea why, but we were waiting in line for the guy at the end to interview us and I didn't want the car to not be running. But Dad got it started again, he did the interview and the second we pulled away from the interview, it died again. So I ended up pushing it into the parking spot. Our British mechanic, who keeps the car at his place out in the country, he comes over and he says, “Well, are you out of petrol?” And we say, no, we filled up in in Crawley, but he opens the thing and it's bone dry! So at least it wasn't anything mechanical. 

 

 

The first time I drove the Run, I could only take off work for one day. So I took the direct flight from New Orleans and arrived in the middle of the Concours on Saturday, and having no idea that my Dad had planned this: he sprang it on me that he wanted me to drive half the run tomorrow.  Oh no no no, Dad, no, I'm not doing this, I've never driven the car before in my life. And he says, “We'll go for just a few minutes after the Concours today and drive it around Hyde Park."

He was always really great about wanting me to drive the cars, but I also knew that these cars were so precious to him that if if I ever did anything to it I couldn't live with that guilt. But what it took for me to accept I'm going to do this was our mechanic, and he's one of these rough guys and he's not going to heap praise on anybody. At the time I had a twin engine aeroplane and it was an older model with none of the automation that’s usual now. And he leaned over and he whispered just to me, “Erin, you fly a twin engine aeroplane with no autopilot and no automation. You can drive this car.” So it took something like that coming from someone like him to convince me. Okay, I'll do this, and it turned out to be a really good thing because my Dad got ill not long after and of course passed in 2021. Then there was the pandemic and I didn’t get back until the ‘Deluge Run’ in 2022.

I love coming over for the Run so much because it's literally the two days a year that I can hear that sound not coming from not just one of our own cars but from multiple cars. To me that's music and it's perfume when you smell it. Because I've grown up around cars and I don't like these new cars that you can't smell, and there's no sound like a one cylinder car. There just isn't!”

 

Erin Seidemann, who works in finance, holds a commercial pilot’s licence and has been using her small plane to ferry supplies into the remote areas of the USA affected by Hurricane Helene. She has written a book about her flying exploits, Postcards from the Sky, Adventures of an Aviatrix and is also a judge in international craft chocolate competitions. 

Author

Nina Baker, OBE, DL, PhD, BSc, FIES, HonMWES, engineering historian and Late Deacon (2022-23), Incorporation of Hammermen of Glasgow

Women in Engineering History Blog

Books: Beneath the Radar. An illustrated account of an ordinary radar operator's life in RAF radar stations 1942-6 and Adventures in Aeronautical Design: The Life of Hilda M. Lyon