Inside Bob Pond's car collection

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.

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 Citro

By Blake Z. Rong