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" (This Side Glances\u00A0originally appeared in the April, 1992\u00A0issue of\u00A0\u00A0Road &amp;amp;amp; Track\u00A0)    A few\u00A0weeks\u00A0ago, my old\u00A0friend Bill A. Mills called and asked if I could\u00A0attend an Alfa club gathering at his car dealership. Bill owns a\u00A0Hyundai shop and recently added the Alfa Romeo line to his show\u00AD room. To stimulate some interest in the new marque, he threw a little Saturday morning party, so Alfa enthusiasts could drive the new 164 and 164S and also attend a tech session given by an\u00A0Alfa Romeo factory service rep.\u00A0 Sounded like a good way to spend part of a snowy winter weekend, so I\u00A0stopped in. Having never been to a strictly Alfa function, however, I didn&amp;#039;t know exactly what to expect. Single-marque clubs, for some rea\u00ADson, have this funny reputation in the car world. Among automotive general\u00ADists, they seem to excite\u00A0that odd mix\u00ADture of dread and fear that grips ordinary citizens when any person with a clipboard and/or free literature rings the doorbell; the sinking feeling that you&amp;#039;ve been spotted through the win\u00ADdow and it&amp;#039;s too late to hide behind the\u00A0sofa. Perhaps no human fear is stronger than that of being cornered by a person with Conviction.    So I went to the Alfa gathering with an\u00A0open mind and\u00A0my car\u00A0parked close to a handy side-door, just in case. What kind of group would this be? What I discovered, of course, after a few hours of eating doughnuts, drink\u00ADing coffee and chatting, was the nicest bunch of people anyone could hope to meet. Nearly everyone I talked to was a dyed-in-the-wool sports-car fan, and most had owned dozens of fun, offbeat and interesting cars. Mechanical know\u00AD how, restoration skills and racing knowledge were the norm, along with a strong sense of automotive history. I talked to people who had owned Hill\u00ADmans, Saabs, Jaguars, MG TCs, Volvos, Porsche Speedsters, Fiat Abarths, Sprites, Corvettes, Mustangs and so on. Better yet, and perhaps most impor\u00ADtant, there were others for whom an Alfa was a first sports or GT car, an en\u00ADtree into the world of automobiles with\u00A0an emotional component.\u00A0 If there was one recurrent theme to\u00A0be singled out, however, it might be that many of the club members had owned quite\u00A0a\u00A0few\u00A0British\u00A0cars before\u00A0settling on Alfas, perhaps seeking a more even bal\u00ADance between character and wrench time. (To be fair here, it&amp;#039;s important to remember that you can still buy a brand-new Alfa Spider, while the last mass-produced British roadsters left the show\u00AD room about 12 years ago, and most departed a lot longer ago than that.) Quite a few members still owned Ameri\u00ADcan, Japanese, British or other European iron and saw their Alfas as an important part of a small collection. At any rate, the ethnocentric blinders were off. There was an obvious love of things Italian here, but not the mindless chauvinism that car clubs are some\u00AD times reputed to foster. So not only did I not make an early escape from the meeting, but I was still there at two o&amp;#039;clock in the afternoon, talking to a guy who was thinking of selling his 1750 GTV, one of my favorite cars. If I&amp;#039;d stayed any longer, Bill would have had to throw me out so he could close the shop and go home for the evening. As our local newspaper used to say, a good time was had by all. I don&amp;#039;t know what else I expected. You&amp;#039;d think I might have learned my lesson by now. After 12 years in the magazine business, I&amp;#039;ve had plenty of visits to other car clubs. And whether the common ground has been MGs, Corvettes, Jags, Porsches, Ferraris or Alfas, I&amp;#039;ve always had a good time and met nice people. And yet, it seems that I&amp;#039;ve always been warned. Whenever I&amp;#039;ve gone off to speak at a car club, or just to visit one of its func\u00ADtions, someone has inevitably raised an eyebrow and voiced one or all of the fol\u00ADlowing possibilities:\u00A0  The members are all going to be snobs. They wear gold chains.\u00A0 They don&amp;#039;t work on their own cars.\u00A0 They don&amp;#039;t know anything about other kinds of cars. They wear their underwear backward. Etc.  These stereotypes are particularly prevalent when\u00A0expensive\u00A0cars\u00A0are\u00A0part of the picture. Ferrari clubs, especially, are supposed to be crowded with well-to-do dilettantes. Yet I&amp;#039;ve worked with all kinds of Ferrari owners while doing stories for R&amp;amp;amp;T and found them to be almost always charming, knowledg\u00ADeable and down-to-earth. Many of the Ferrari vintage racers I&amp;#039;ve met bought their cars as inexpensive wrecks and spent years\u2014and most of their not-so-grand incomes\u2014 restoring the cars as a labor of love. My friend Larry Crane\u00A0joined the Ferrari Owners Club when he moved to California from Texas 28 years ago (even though he didn&amp;#039;t own a Ferrari), and he said they were such a great bunch of people that they became his second family. No one seemed to mind that he ran his Alfa in all their ral\u00ADlies and races. And so on. Anyway, I&amp;#039;m still waiting to meet a typical Ferrari owner. Or a typical Rolls owner. A few years ago I was invited to a Rolls-Royce meet in England and frankly expected it to be a very stuffy affair. It wasn&amp;#039;t, of course. It was a re\u00ADlaxed gathering of random, largely fun-loving car nuts who had been attracted to their cars for a thousand different reasons. They came from all walks of life, defying any neat journalistic classification. And so it has been with others.    I don&amp;#039;t mean to be overly glib and cheerful here, painting the human race\u00A0as altogether perfect. There generally is at least one member of every club who really is a snob and who doesn&amp;#039;t know about other cars, etc., etc., but this person has the salubrious effect of making everyone else look good. The social value of the glaring bad example who puts us in a good light should never be discounted. I could use a lot more of them, Lord knows. Nor do I mean to minimize the vaunted benefits of Diversity. Most of us who like cars have gradually come to favor one kind or another, which is only natural. We have our esthetic and philo\u00ADsophical preferences, and they lead to a kind of modern tribalism, a gathering of like-thinkers around a common camp\u00AD fire. We have our own special totem, and the guys who live in the next valley and worship snakes or volcanos are al\u00ADways suspect. Besides, they paint their faces oddly and wear their Rolexes on the wrong wrist. Marshall McLuhan spotted this pattern long ago and predicted it would intensify as television and 3 billion identical hamburgers made us anxious to separate ourselves from the herd and find our own speciaized communities. All good fun. Yet, based on my vast experience in soaking up free refreshments at convo\u00ADcations of many and varied marques of automobiles, I have to admit that most car clubs\u2014at least those I&amp;#039;ve known\u2014 would pass the blindfold test with no trouble. I&amp;#039;m sorry to report that if you couldn&amp;#039;t see the cars or the jackets and patches, you wouldn&amp;#039;t know if you were talking to a group of TC owners or an Alfa club or a Roverphiles Anonymous meeting. They may live in different visions when they stare into the campfire, but it seems to me they are all equally crazy, in the best sense of the word. Except for Morgan owners,\u00A0of course, who tend to be more equal than others in this respect. Also I should mention that I&amp;#039;ve never actually been to a Reliant Robin 3-wheeler owners&amp;#039; club meeting, though I&amp;#039;m sure they are fine people whose many shortcomings have been greatly exaggerated. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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