TACing in Denver
Last Friday, Pat King and I flew to Denver to begin the process of training new Tiger Authenticity Inspectors for that general area. Bill Pass picked us up at the airport and took us to our hotel near the training site. There we met Kragh Curtis who spearheaded the process of selecting potential trainees and gathered the group of owners that wanted to have their Tigers authenticated. Because of the travel costs associated with this event CATO elected to charge $150 per Tiger to offset this unusual expense.
Saturday morning we drove a few blocks to a reasonably new facility that is sponsored in part by Hagerty Insurance. This facility is the first in a program Hagerty is developing to aid automotive enthusiasts and the owners of collectible cars. There we had access to two hoists to get the Tigers up in the air for detailed examination. Kragh had arranged for a MkI, a MkII, and an Alpine to use for training.
We spent the entire day training and testing eight new Inspectors, including the very knowledgeable facility manager Bill Roushey (who doesn’t own a Tiger yet). Before dinner we assembled a crew and drove to two different locations to Authenticate Tigers in non-movable condition.
The next morning we continued our “TAC on Wheels” operation at two more locations before getting back to the Hagerty facility. Having had the Grand Tour of greater Denver, we were anxious to get to the main event. The arrivals were times at 30 minute intervals and we got down to the business of inspecting, taking the proper data, filling out the Certificates and applying the Hallmark stickers to the Tigers. The rest of the day was pretty much a rush to keep up with incoming Tigers.
At the end of the day, we ended up with 8 new TAC Inspectors and 15 newly Authenticated Tigers. The $900 in TAC fees collected allowed the STOA to financially break even with the expenses incurred for this event.
The STOA established the TAC Program over 25 years ago and we have operational TAC cells in The Bay Area, Los Angeles, Seattle, Florida, Atlanta, Washington DC, Dallas, and Australia. We hope to select a Senior Inspector from our Denver crew in the near future.
My accounting now puts our total at 1191 Tigers Authenticated. I’m expecting another batch of authentication data sheets from the TE/AE meet in Long Island. So we’ll make the total 1200 milestone before the end of the year.
