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[Music] welcome to corvette today
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the podcast that talks about everything corvette with your host steve garrett mc and dj at one of the largest corvette
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weekends in the country corvette fun fest president of the corvette club of kansas city missouri
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and radio disc jockey at the number one radio station in kansas city for over 40 years here's steve garrett
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[Music] hey thanks for listening to corvette
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today the podcast that talks about everything corvette i'm your host steve garrett i appreciate
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also a shout out to canadiancorvetform.com welcoming corvette owners from around the world my guest on corva today is an
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avid motorsport and aviation enthusiast he's also the founder and retired ceo
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of bloomington gold and he created the gold certification judging procedures he's one of the
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world's experts in determining the metrics used to measure the originality or non-originality as the case may be
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of collectible vehicles and aircraft he co-authored the book called corvette restoration
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state of the art his museum quality restorations have set the bar for today's corvette
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and car restorers around the world he is mr david burroughs david welcome to
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corvette today thank you steve appreciate the invitation i'm glad to have you on david let's talk about your early years
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i always ask everybody this when did you know you were a car guy somewhere probably around five or six somewhere in
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there i asked my dad for a birthday present for my parents but my dad normally for this i wanted
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carburetors and starters i was fascinated with carburetors and starters then i could take them apart
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and so he would get carburetors and starters and other components out of engines and given to me for my birthday they were
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junk then i could take them apart and fiddle with them and put them back together again and then that led to more things than
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automobiles and then go-karts building soap box derby cars and then regular powered go-karts and go-kart
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racing kind of went on from there that's kind of interesting because when most kids that age are looking for
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tonka trucks and hot wheels you're looking for carburetors aren't you yes carburetors and starters now i had
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no idea what they did i knew it was a carburetor but i didn't already know i knew gasoline came out of it
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but i was five or six years old and i lived in a living on a farm i still live there a matter of fact
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so as a farm kid i was around tractors and trucks and engines and noise and smoke and gasoline
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great place to grow up as a kid so i had my fingers in gasoline and dirty parts and oil since i was a little kid
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how did you get first introduced a corvette david this sounds paradoxical but at the chrysler garage my dad was a
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chrysler guy i live in el paso illinois which is a small town that time it was eighteen hundred people but it did have a
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chrysler garage and those wheel garage my dad would go in and spend time with the chrysler guys at the dealership
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and so my introduction to corvette was a horrible automobile you know any chrysler could beat one
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huh so i thought corvettes never paid attention to them i just knew that they weren't as fast as a chrysler and i looked down on them to tell you
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the truth because that's that's all i heard from the chrysler people that my dad was around at the dealership that he bought his
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chrysler's from so that was my introduction to corvette it was not positive well it obviously turned to a more
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positive thing how did that go after that it did it actually did and i can even tell you the date it was in
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august of 1961. i was visiting a friend in north webster indiana
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which is a kind of a tourist town has a lake anyway at night we were walking down the street because we didn't have
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any driver's license because we were too young to drive so we walked everywhere and as a resort town this was perfect setup it was kind of
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like an american graffiti night the street lights lighted of course as the cars went by and a white
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corvette i think a 58 came down the street toward us and then made a right turn into a gas station and
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as it pulled under these lights these beautiful gorgeous lights rippled off the white paint on this corvette
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and i thought now there's a corvette and told my buddy out there there's a corvette there in which we
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would have kept on walking with one exception about six girls came out of nowhere and swarmed around
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this white corvette and all of a sudden corvette went from lowest on the totem pole
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two i gotta get one of those and that was in eighth grade so that's when the tide turned and i
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thought i think i better reconsider my favorite car very smart idea what corvettes have you
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owned in the past david and what is in your garage right now well i've had the fortune of being
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exposed and the fortune of owning several rather historic vehicles that sort of came into
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because i was the right place the right time with the right knowledge at one time owned in partnership with a couple
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other people 367 l88s at the same time wow had 267 l88s parked
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in the garage side by side very nice and other cars like that but owning them wasn't really the objective they just
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happened to be things that i thought i could contribute to and hopefully save them so the only way
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to save them was to buy them and do the proper things with them to make sure that they didn't get destroyed unknowingly by somebody who didn't know
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how to take care of them so there's numerous historic vehicles like that that i've been fortunate to get my hands on and do something to
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contribute to their long-term survivability the only thing i have really today is the first corvette i ever had which is a
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67 so i'm not a collector or i guess i am a collector of one owning one doesn't really mean that much
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to me it's what i can do to preserve one or help somebody else preserve one that is historically important talk about
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that thirst for preserving corvettes and how that led you into forming bloomington gold
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well in 1973 i started showing the corvette that i just told you that i have i took it to several corvette shows at
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that time it was an old car but think about it was 1967 and this is 1973 so it's you know
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six years old which at that point time would be old so the paint was a little bit faded silver but everything else was
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bone stock original and of course there wasn't a chance in the world i'm gonna win anything with a silver
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67 coupe with black wall tires and coffee can hubcaps you can't win anything and i thought
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well gee going to these car shows back in the early 70s there were no standards there were
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judges that really didn't know what they were doing other than making sure that there was no dirt in the fender wells and the paint
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was pretty and nice design the thing that really caught my attention was there was one winner usually and
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everybody else was a loser as a marketing guy i thought that doesn't look like a sustainable concept
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so i thought the car that's original has been left alone but it doesn't have a chance unless somebody made it into a station wagon or
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put stars and stripes on it or glittery wheels or something like that i thought why don't i do something for cars that
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have not been altered or changed and so forth then rather than having one winner and everybody else losing i thought what if
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we set standards like high jumping and so if you can jump over the high bar at seven feet we'll certify you you can jump
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seven feet and if you jump six five guess what you don't get certified so it's not like everybody gets a
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participant award but if you set the standards high and don't negotiate that's what it is if
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you can't clear the bar this year go practice some more and come back because the bar is not going to change right if you get better you jump over
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the bar so i thought that concept makes sense and there was a lot of cars out there that had not been restored and had not
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been modified and had not been customized and made to look glittery i thought well that's a pretty big
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market that's a bigger market than the cars that have been changed so i've came up with this idea to certify automobiles
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the way they would have left the factory and everybody thought that was the dumbest idea they'd ever heard of because i asked a lot of people what if
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i created an event that recognized cars that had been left alone in the original condition and people would say
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well why in the world would you do that and i explained it i said well that could be a car out in the parking lot
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i said yeah that's exactly the idea and they said that's a dumb idea so anyway i did it anyway had 127
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automobiles show up at the first event of which half of them were furious when they left
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because they'd never heard of such a concept they didn't know that's what they were getting into attendance at the first bloomington gold
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was i think 127 vehicles and the next one was 80. so i made a pretty big impression that
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this is not where you want to go if you've got a quote show car i remember a number of people telling me
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this is ridiculous everywhere i go i win the best of show and i didn't even get a certificate here and i said right yeah that's right and
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i'm never coming back and i said that makes good sense because you won't do any better next year either
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and then gradually people started saying well i got a bloomington gold certificate
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basically people referred to it as bloomington and they got a gold certificate so then that ads would start showing up in magazines that they got
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this xyz corvette for sale with a bloomington gold certificate i never did any real serious advertising
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all the owners advertised for me by promoting their vehicles with a bloomington gold certificate and then went from there well and we're
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going to talk in the second segment a little bit more and dig deeper into your bloomington gold years but
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david you've also written books on corvette restoration talk about that book and where people can purchase it well i didn't write it
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i contributed to mike antonic who's a very good friend and just a super
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research guy mike wrote secrets of the show cars he writes the corvette black book which has been in existence 78 or
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something like that right the book was actually written somewhere i think around 1980 i think it
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came out in 81 so mike is the actual author i gave him the content we've done it for
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multiple multiple times and i took it all the photography and the books corvette restoration state of the art as you mentioned and it was the
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documentation of the first corvette ever to have been done to my knowledge not just the first corvette but i think
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the first automobile on which a book was written about how to document what a vehicle looks like and
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then to be able to restore it to exact factory look which included scratches
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scuff marks blemishes that are all factory produced that are documented both through photography of the vehicle
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before it was taken apart and also i've got quite a background at the corvette plant in st louis where i knew
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how the product was built and was there and studied it recorded so the book was sort of a groundbreaker to show people
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how it could really be done if you really want to do an accurate or authentic restoration to factory production very
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nice it was so long ago it's almost 40 years ago that we wrote that of course it's like i think long
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out of print but you can still get it on google i think you can still look for it probably 50 60 bucks 70 bucks you can
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probably buy a copy great and you're also an accomplished pilot talk about how that got started when you soloed
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when you got licensed and when you even became an instructor well i got interested in airplanes
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before automobiles i think i started with automobiles maybe at five or six started with airplanes when i was
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probably one or two so the time i was six i'd built a hundred flying airplanes model airplanes i never remember
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lifetime without being fascinated and involved with airplanes of some sort being grown up on a farm it was kind of
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a remote thing because there's no airplanes around here but i had great space to build airplanes and fly them rubber band
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powered and engine powered and so forth i just progressed and i knew i wanted to be a pilot when i was
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four five six years old i wanted to be an indie race driver and or a pilot and was able to get quite
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a bit of that done i wanted to be an astronaut to begin with but eyes weren't good enough so i didn't make it all that way but
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started flying took the controls for the first time at nine and soloed at 16 a commercial pilot at
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18 instructor 21 and corporate pilot by 23. that's it absolutely incredible david
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let's take our first break and in segment number two we're going to talk about your years and how you started bloomington gold on
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this is the corvette today podcast with steve garrett
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thanks for listening to corvette today the podcast that talks about everything corvette i'm your host steve
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garrett with me today is david burroughs the original owner and founder of bloomington gold as a matter of fact in
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the second segment we're going to talk about david's bloomington gold years david we touched on this in the first
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segment and i really like the way you made the concept of bloomington gold where you're not judging against
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somebody else's car you're judging against a set of standards talk about those standards
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and the level of certification of different things that you can win for bloomington gold okay well to begin with the standards are
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based as we said earlier on the vehicle has it left the assembly plan
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and that's reasonably documentable because there were plenty of vehicles around that we've got photographs of
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brand new understanding the plant so first off you can't really have an award for something unless you have standards
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that are documented so the standards came from how close is the restoration
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or the preservation of one of these vehicles that you bring to bloomington gold how close is it to the way it left the
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assembly plant in terms of the configuration the originality the condition
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and also the technical operation and kind of back to grade school days and report cards which is where i took the
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concept i thought anything that would be within 95 percent or greater would be a gold level
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certification so that would be gold certified if it was preserved or restored to between
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90 and 94 of factory authenticity then that would be a silver level of
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certification and anything between 85 and 89 which would be equivalent to a c
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according to the way i got my grades in grade school that would be a bronze certification so if you came
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there the first year and you got everything pretty close but not quite and you got 93 which is really good you would be
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sober certified and you could quit or you could come back make some the corrections
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which we would hopefully point out to you what you could do to bring it up so it was about educating as
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much as winning a prize the whole objective was to preserve these vehicles or at least restore them
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accurately so we don't lose them to history and then you could come back the next year you made your improvements hopefully and
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then guess what you've got a 96 percent it's gold certified and then of course some people say well i want to go
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further than that i want to get 100 well come back as often as you want you can go as high as you like but no matter what you do you're not
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going to get anything higher than a gold certificate period that's it so it did away with the
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i'm better than you are you're all good so if you all can jump the seven foot high bar well you'll get a certificate
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if you jump the five foot bar you're going to get a sober certificate and so on so that really wasn't that complicated
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for people to figure out and it caught on it became something more important than winning a prize the important thing was
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that you got to learn some things from people who really didn't know what they were talking about because the other secret to this is you
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have to have people out there who doing the judging they have to have standards against which the judge which before this
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nobody had any standards everybody just made it up as they went along so we had judges that were trained properly had to have people skills
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and then the owners could come there enjoy themselves not worry about beating the next person
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all they had to worry about was can you get within a very very close tolerance of what it looked like or left the factory
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if you had a custom car by definition we're not going to do that because that's antithetical to what the
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whole point of limington gold was so we did it for the first two years we had custom cars in there
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in my opinion it diluted the whole point and confused people about what we really stood for
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so that didn't last very long i think now bloomington gold is doing that again i don't know what results they've had i
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assume it must have been okay but at that point in time the categories or the levels of certification were gold
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silver and bronze and the primary objective was be a place where people could come and
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learn and not just get a hundred points but get a 100 point vehicle and we tried to draw the
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distinction between this award isn't about you the owner it's about the authenticity of what you brought here
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very nice bloomington gold became the standard for the corvette industry you created that standard talk about
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what sets bloomington gold apart from other shows or other concourse this is my personal opinion this is me
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speaking nobody else i don't like car shows i don't find them necessarily productive i find them
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entertaining but i don't find them productive and i oftentimes don't find any real great amount of learning that goes on
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it's more entertainment which is fine i just wasn't interested in entertainment i was interested in helping people
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learn if they wanted to they could learn how to preserve things or at least restore things accurately that's all it was designed
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for and people determined whether they liked that idea or not and if you didn't like it there's plenty of other car
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shows you can go to and that's where you should go so it's kind of like you know anything in marketing you have to stand for
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something as long as you can appeal to a market that's good enough to support the operation and make a profit on top
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of it that's what you do and that's another thing to mention bloomington gold was never a club it was a business it had to be a
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business because we had a lot of expenses we paid the judges expenses we paid for uniforms we paid for a lot of things
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rental of the properties so it was a true business it was not political there was a board of directors but they weren't elected
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it was pretty much dictatorial i found the people that were competent as financial people or as operations
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people or tech people whatever we needed and paid them paid them well so it's not a membership organization
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it was a true business created to teach people and give people an incentive to come there and hopefully everybody would have a
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good time and enjoy it and get an education out of it we added other events around it to make it more
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entertaining as well you also sold bloomington gold at some point david talk about your exit what
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came next and who did you sell it to there were some other people in the organization i came into it in 78
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it was a swap meet and had some judging but the judging was very disorganized and a lot of politics and i
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don't like politics i don't like disorganization so i made a suggestion to the people there then that they got
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this idea called certification they thought that was okay that's where it was introduced was in 78 but it
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wasn't called bloomington gold it was just called gold certification the marketplace called it bloomington gold they got a bloomington gold
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certificate so then i branded it the actual show then bloomington gold anyway that was in 78 that it started
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gold certifications in 78 and 83 was rebranded bloomington gold where a lot of other events came in to
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play special collection road tours restoration workshops all kinds of other ancillary events for
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entertainment and education and then in 1994 some of the other
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people that were involved with it with me thought that they could run it better than i could so they decided to buy me
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out i gladly took their check well i never left i'm professional market research guy with a big company
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and got out of it at that time and i was gone for 10 years dana mecum bought it in 1997 i believe
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and then he asked me to come back and run certification because he was busy with the auction and then a little later he
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asked me to come back and actually run bloomington gold and so i was gone for 10 years came back for 10 years
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and then guy larson bought it from dana so i wasn't needed there anymore for that so guy bought the brand
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bought the show and then he's the owner and ceo so then i left that i was retired at that point from my
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professional career and at that point i branched into other ventures in authentication and we're going to talk about that in
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segment three actually we've had guy larson on the podcast he was the first podcast in 2021
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but let you and i take our final break david and in segment number three we're going to talk about your current company
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and now back to corvette today with your host and my husband steve garrett
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[Music] hey thanks for listening to corvette today the podcast that talks about everything corvette
25:35
i'm your host steve garrett with me today is the original founder of bloomington gold
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mr david burroughs in this third segment we're going to talk about david's current company called pruvit david your passion for
25:47
originality brought you to start this company call prove it talk about the beginnings of it
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and what the mission of your company is now well i was asked to inspect a race car
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as a matter of fact and it was a corvette and it was purported to be a bonneville race car that was owned by
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mickey thompson wow and it had been restored nice restoration it was quite authentic to the bonneville
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delivery it looked just like it did at the track not really a track but it had the salt plants and there would be some
26:16
significance to it since it was owned by mickey thompson and it had been sold i think a couple times and before it was sold
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this time i was asked to authenticate it to make sure that it really was what it was claimed to be so i did and
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found out kind of good news and bad news that no it is not what it's claimed to be it never was
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nikki thompson's bonneville race car which it had been i guess around the show circuit for 20 years or so and that's what it was
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considered and then i'm the person that has to bring the news that no it isn't there was forensic evidence and
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a lot of circumstantial stuff the main thing was there was physical forensic evidence that showed clearly that is not what it's purported
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to be because we had documentary photographic evidence from 1963 and 64. when the car did
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run bonneville this did not match that vehicle so that's the bad news the good news was we've determined that
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mickey thompson had far more seat time in this vehicle than the bonneville vehicle oh so yes it was mickey
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thompson's personal car mickey thompson had more to do with this car than he did the bonneville card
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so that was the bad news that turned into good news sometimes that does happen we find out that it's not what it was
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purported to be but it is something that kind of got off track in somebody's enthusiasm to maybe make the story
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better but they had been better off if they left the story alone in the first place and so we were able to get that car
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straightened out and it has since then gone into i think numerous collections with its real history and important
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history revealed and straightened down so from that other people heard about that and then i got asked to do other authentications
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and that's where the name prove it came from people would want me to come in and prove whatever it was they wanted to prove
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so i branded it prove it since then that was in 2012 so been doing this almost 10
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years i guess but it has gone from corvettes into vehicles in general to airplanes to
28:07
iconic movie artifacts to historic artifacts pruvit actually does and can do
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authentications pretty much on anything it's the process that's important not the object we're doing a document that
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was i can't tell you i could but i'm not allowed to it's a document that went to the moon
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and circled the moon about 100 times and came back i can't tell you who took it but that project is just getting ready to get
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started to be able to authenticate that that is documented circle the moon 100 times that's amazing
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yeah it's interesting it's an interesting business did a movie jacket that james dean supposedly wore in rebel without a cause
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did that doing an airplane that was flying during the attack on pearl harbor wow it's gone from everything from
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bonneville race cars to objects that circle the moon with your background as a pilot and an
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aviation mechanic prove it also works obviously in the automotive and corvette industry but
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aviation as well that's really a rare combination david it's beyond that we do stuff that's
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beyond aviation you know in the movie business as well james dean's jacket had nothing to do with automobiles or aviation
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it's the process we go through to authenticate something forensically testimony records all sorts of things
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you have to go through and every project is totally different the thing that's unique about pruvit is is the process we use
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and how we do it and then who makes the decision whether it's authentic or not authentic or how confident we are because i'm not the
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person that makes the decision anybody who has something authenticated by prove it the interesting thing is
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nobody can pay anybody off because if you were the client you wouldn't know who to pay off to make it come out your
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way we come in we do the research you give us your information and then we look for somebody who
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disagrees with you and has the other point of view and we get research from them and we go through we actually build two
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cases we build one for you we build one against you and then you get to look at all that evidence and correct it if we said it
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wrong and then the counterparty can look through their evidence and then that evidence goes through a review and then eventually goes out to a jury
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of critical thinkers like test pilots surgeons attorneys anybody who has as a profession something is looking
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at evidence and making a conclusion when the evidence goes out to that panel or that jury of five the jury doesn't know who the other four
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people are and you the client don't know who the jury is so you can't pay me off because
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i don't make the decision i just gather the evidence and we present the evidence on both sides of the argument
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so you can't pay me off because i don't do anything other than organize the research and coordinate it you can't pay the
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witnesses off because there's too many of them you can't pay the jury off because you don't
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know who they are and the jury can't get together and collude against you because the jury doesn't know who the other four
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analysts are so it's the only i've been told anyway that this is the only authentication service that's that
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rigorous so when you get an authentication promise why you can pretty well take it to the bank very unique you're also david a
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four-time national aerobatic champion and an eight-time national formation champion
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talk about those two titles that's really cool not much to talk about i fly airplanes
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upside down right side up straight up straight down do it a little bit more precisely than whoever i was
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competing against those four times formation flying is quite different that's kind of like what the thunderbirds and the blue angels do
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except we're not nearly that fast we fly much slower world war ii airplanes i wouldn't call it a hobby
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it's just a very interesting lifestyle to fly with people like that that are that well trained and you have the trust to fly with those
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kinds of people so it's very rewarding to be around those kinds of people very unique too you also set restoration
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standards because of your ties to the smithsonian national air and space museum talk about how those standards helped
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you with corvette and aircraft as well precision documentation that's critical whether it's improvement or anything
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else we look at things in a very very different way than car show judges do
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or beauty queen judges things like that this is a whole different mindset of which drives probably most people
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crazy and they would think that's ridiculous and it is ridiculous unless you've got something that has high value to it it's
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very important i'm not tied to the smithsonian in any professional way i just happen to again have the good fortune of knowing people
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at the smithsonian and have had for about 20 years so i've gone out studied their processes how
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they do things when they do a restoration for example i do the same thing i learned it from their procedures
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as they take a nut bolt and washer out or off of something that nut bolt and washer is never
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separated and it's documented as to which hole it came out of left rear right rear top bottom wherever that's all
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documented it goes into the plastic bag and if that gets replated it's all remembered
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photographed and then when it comes back and goes back on the artifact that bolt washer and nut go back in
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the same hole in the same order to the same number of turns on the bolt so that's ridiculously precise and
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totally useless to most people and it would drive most sane people
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insane but when you're in the business of trying to document some high risk and high value artifact whether it's an
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airplane race car lunar lander or whatever it happens to be it's important to do that because
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that does show provenance it shows documentation that this is the real artifact this has
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not been replaced with other hardware bolts this is the bolt that came out of that race car that raced at le mans or
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race at indianapolis driven by mario andretti this is the same seat this is the same
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stitching in the seat that john kennedy was in etc etc so those kinds of things are appropriate for the smithsonian for the
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regular garden variety restorer that would be ridiculous and terribly expensive and unnecessary
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but that's the mentality when you're in the kind of business that i'm in now we have to look at things very carefully because that
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can turn a case from an original artifact to a fabrication that it's authentic
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fabrication but it's a fabrication nonetheless and that is not the part that was on the indy 500 car that andretti drove
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that's the tie-in to smithsonian david if somebody wants to get in touch with you at pruvit how can they reach you best
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way is email or website website is p-r-o-v-e hyphen it.net pruvit.net with hyphen
34:18
between proven hit that sounds good david thank you so much for being on corvette today the stories
34:24
were just amazing and best of luck with prove it thank you steve it's a pleasure thanks for listening to
34:29
corvette today and thanks to our sponsors american hydrocarbon at american americanhydrocarbon.com
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34:49
you've been listening to corvette today with steve garrett if you'd like to contact steve with any
34:54
thoughts on the podcast or ideas for guests on corvette today you can email him at steve garrett dj
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at steve garrett dj thanks again for listening to corvette