Inside Bob Pond's car collection

60 cars of famed Palm Springs collector up for auction in Burbank

Pond's collection is wild, wacky, diverse, and entirely earnest. Photo by Blake Z. Rong.

Robert Pond was an industrialist, an aviator, a Navy pilot, an aircraft designer, a genuine car enthusiast, a philanthropist, a Minnesotan at heart and a man who turned a family business from eight employees to a global $100-million concern. Pond was born in 1924 in Edina, Minn., 10 miles southwest of Minneapolis. He signed up for the Navy Air Corps in 1942, and survived three years of training on J-3 Piper Cubs and PBY Catalinas to graduate in July of 1945 -- just three months before Japan surrendered to the US.

So, he went home. Pond left the Navy in October of 1945, aching to jump into the booming business of commercial aviation. But the family business called him back, and -- owing to that sense of obligation ingrained in all Midwesterners -- he signed back with Advance Machine Co., an organization, started by his grandfather Merritt Pond, that built floor polishers and industrial vacuum cleaners. Pond was the eighth employee. He went from bookkeeper to salesman in just six months, and the traveling required by the job was the perfect excuse to talk his family into buying an airplane -- a Cessna 180, then a 182, then larger and larger planes. A jet came in 1970, fulfilling both Pond's overseas expansion and flying dreams.

In 1994, Pond, long since in charge of the company and living in Palm Springs, orchestrated Advance's sale to a Danish company. The sale was rumored to have been for as much as $500 million. In four decades, he had gone from working for his father to overseeing a $100-million global enterprise, his machines in every supermarket -- no doubt Horatio Alger would be proud. Pond, technically retired, went home to his collections.

 Blake Z. Rong
Brought over from Palm Springs were the original boards showing the maintenance of all of Pond's cars.

Pond was fond of saying that he "always had three cars when I needed one, and six cars when I needed two." At the peak of his collection, he had 110 cars. "100 cars and I need one," he said in 1999, "but these are the cars that I love."

The cars Pond oversaw with the keenest attention to detail, like his airplanes. On an airplane, of course, you don't just get in and hammer on the throttle. You perform meticulous preflight checks, inspecting for damage, observing fasteners, looking for leaks. There's no evidence of patina in Pond's cars. Everything is damn near immaculate. Everything is -- or was, when Pond would drive friends and family across Palm Springs for ice cream -- exercised on the regular. "It doesn't always work out that way because we…sometimes run out of gas because the gas gauge doesn't work," said Pond. "This is a regular occurrence, by the way. My wife Jo never gets in my cars without her telephone."

Which makes the collection just that much more interesting. Walking into the Pond collection is reminiscent of an automotive fever dream, a strange afterlife Valhalla of scattered cars, covering the entirety of motorized history, spread haphazardly across a gleaming warehouse. There's the 1908 Ford Speedster. There's the Mercedes 300SL roadster. There's the 1949 Buick Roadmaster Convertible from "Rain Man." There's a Muntz Jet. There's a Fiat Jolly next to an Isetta. There's a friggin' Vector W8, next to a DeLorean, bridging the great Weigert/Delorean rift of the 1980s. There's not many places where you'll see a Citroën 2CV next to an Edsel Citation, the two in front of a Kaiser-Darrin, next to a Porsche tractor, next to a Kaiser Manhattan with '60s mod upholstery -- and the whole shebang in front of a 1969 Oldsmobile Ninety-Eight in front of a gold Excalibur built by George Barris, next to the (the!) Texas Bullshit Scraper. Pond was a Lincoln man -- he bought his first new Lincoln in 1954 -- but the collection is open to as much interpretation as you'd like; it's either heavy on America or as exuberantly diverse as possible.

Pond passed away in 2007, and the fate of his 93-car collection verged on breaking up. The collection passed to his granddaughter Setorii -- model, socialite, fashion designer, "California's Car Queen," and a perfect ambassador for the collection, and the world of car collecting, if there ever was one.

Three years ago, a man who revealed himself only as "Michael" quietly bought the entire collection, moving the whole thing from Palm Springs to an unassuming warehouse in Chatsworth, Calif. Michael came from the world of real estate and is quick to defend his car-guy credibility. He's not planning on flipping the cars for a quick profit, not all of them anyway -- he plans on keeping a handful of the cars for himself and his family members, probably Pond's Ferraris.

"He's had them maintained in a minimal way, I'd say, just making sure they run," said Ian Kelleher, the managing director of RM Auctions. "This collection is best suited by going to auction. It gives people the opportunity of buying something they've known for a while."

The collection has been kept together, and in good running shape. But on Aug. 1, at the Marriott outside Burbank Airport, 60-some odd cars from the collection will go under the hammer, as part of Auctions America's "Iconic Southern California Collection." The remainder will head to Pebble Beach a few weeks later, as well as its flagship auction, in Auburn, this August. The As have it, it seems.

For those who want to see another of Pond's collections, there's always the Palm Springs Air Museum.