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David Muir '02
Adventures After Graduation, 2005
An adventure really is the way to describe it: interesting, challenging, scary and how the time flies. It’s been three years since I graduated from the Restoration Program at McPherson College - just three years - and so much has happened. I think the best way to describe it is just the way it happened: in chronological order.
Immediately after graduation, I started an internship with Duesenberg restorer Randy Ema in Orange, California--part of the Jay Leno/Fred Duesenberg scholarship awarded to me after my first year of school. This was a great chance to work beside a world-class craftsman at the top of his game, so my wife and I packed up the cats and moved from the open plains of Kansas to the center of the car universe. This was culture shock, to say the least; more people per square foot than in some mid-west counties. But the cars made up for it, amazing vehicles everywhere, and all the time. There is literally a car show in the LA area 365 days of the year (my favorite show ran from 6:00 to 8:00am every Saturday, short and sweet!). The three months at Randy’s were amazing and went by way too fast, with all my time during the day spent on Jay Leno’s 1927 Bugatti Type 38: getting it ready for Pebble Beach. A beautiful little car, which was the best primer for final assembly and show prep you could ask for. The evenings were spent searching out car shows, meeting people, and enjoying those soft So-Cal evenings.
During this time I started looking for a permanent position. A professor at McPherson mentioned a job he had heard of up north, so we made a quick drive to San Francisco. TSR Enterprises was looking for a car restorer—though their primary line of work was vintage race prep. Once I saw the cars they worked on I was hooked.
 TSR had taken on the restoration of a 1959/60 Ferrari Testa Rossa just before I hired on and I was added to the team. One year out of school and I’m on a Ferrari, and not just any Ferrari, this one had been driven by a Who’s Who of the period: Hill, Gurney and Ginther, among others. This was way beyond my expectations and just a bit daunting. The car was headed for
Pebble Beach that year and it had to be correct. It was a steep learning curve but Terry, the boss, was willing to give me a lot of free rein. Again and again, I was able to take on tasks that stretched my skills to their limit. I had several advantages as well, in the form of co-workers with huge amounts of experience and easygoing attitudes. Having people that you can turn to for a bit of advice can make all the difference at the start of your career. You learn volumes in just a few minutes watching over the shoulder of a pro.
The Testa Rossa was on a very fast track with less than 9 months to complete the car before Pebble Beach and everything had to be perfect. We hired a consultant to find all the period details unique to this car. Like any race car it had been modified during its race career and there are no manuals for cars like this; you have to find the all the details yourself.
Nine months and many, many late nights later it was complete: a bright red, beautiful and very loud piece of history, driving onto the field at Pebble. At this point we just held our breath, and waited through a very long day for the judging. The outcome still seems like a dream. We won First in Class and the Luigi Chinetti Award. It felt like going to the World Series your first year as a rookie.
Since then some amazing cars have come my way. One of the six Shelby Daytona Coupes went through a ground-up restoration; a 1964 Cobra USRRC competition roadster is still in process; and we have just started work on a GT40 and one of the five 1963 Corvette Grand Sports--very heady stuff. I have to pinch myself on a regular basis.
What have I learned? That it is a lot easier to do a good job when you know why you are doing it, when you care about the project. That more than half the job is working out the details, staying organized and on schedule. That I am so glad I went back to school at McPherson!
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