Hey There!

I've been infatuated with vehicles for as long as I can remember. Growing up in Southern California in the late '70s and early '80s put the whole car culture in front of me early. I rode in my mom's 1961 Morgan Plus 4, and in the back seat of her best friend's new chocolate-brown 1980 Porsche 911 SC while she romped on it around a circular freeway on-ramp — and that was it. That was the car for me.

A few years later I was sitting on a curb up in San Pedro when a lowrider wedding procession rolled by, heading up to Point Fermin, and it changed my life. Candy colors with lace and ghost patterns, dingle balls, hydraulics — full-size GMs, Fords and Lincolns, and super-clean '40s bombs, all of it decorated with tissue-paper flowers stuck to the paint to mark the day. It floored me. I had to have one of each when I was old enough. I couldn't understand how I could love both worlds at once — only to learn, as I got older, there were many more I'd never even heard of.

It was in my blood. My dad came up from South Central; when his family moved to Anaheim in the early '60s he had an Anniversary Gold 1958 Impala with white tuck-and-roll, lowered, on whitewalls and chrome reverse wheels — wrecked during his Army time up in Tacoma — and then a spotless two-tone Robin's-egg-blue-and-white 1956 Buick Century. My mom was in a 1955 Chevy two-door wagon and a '57 Chevy around the same time, before they'd even met. My brothers and I never had a chance. Cars were in the DNA.

Together they ran a lot of fun cars — European roadsters and sedans, early VW Bugs, a 1967 Caprice wagon, and the ultimate SoCal family rig: a “Paddy Wagon” VW bus by Sun Dial. The bus was our daily, and eventually our moving van — a family of six and our Great Pyrenees, Harley — up to Washington State and a whole new scene. Gone were the Countachs and Porsches on PCH and the weekend lowriders; now it was muscle cars, immaculate 4x4s, and backyard builds like the Ford LTD woody wagon lifted on some unknown 4x4 frame on 33s down the street. That's where I learned car culture is unique to its region — and that the culture itself is an inherent value.

By 18 I'd already had a lot of cars pass through my hands, and I spent my college years studying cultural anthropology. The world's cultures and the way they approach life and art fascinated me — still do. It took me until my early 50s to realize that interest cycled all the way back to those first automotive experiences as a kid in Southern California. All those years of oral histories, production data, factory options, old ad magazines, buying and selling, and the arrival of online forums that finally connected car nuts across the globe and exposed entirely different regional cultures — that's what became Parclines.

What I'd realized is this: the automotive world is so vast that most of the attention and asset value pools around the blue-chips the average person can't always break into — while an entire sub-culture lives outside them, and the existing valuation tools treat all of it as an average. But a car's stories, receipts, build provenance, factory options, custom colors and wheels, engine and suspension work — that's a uniqueness that gets overlooked. I built Parclines to account for those builds, because we should all get a real reality check on our cars and our assets. The car market moves like the stock market. Not every individual choice is great for the value — but it may be fantastic for the owner, and that's what makes car culture great.

That's the line between smart and lucky.