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Celebrity Healeys

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Uncle Walter, Walter Cronkite raced Austin Healeys, saw a video about it on the web a while back. Think he owned one too. I read through most of this didn't see him mentioned. Not sophisticated enough to paste a link from my smartphone.
 
glemon said:
Uncle Walter, Walter Cronkite raced Austin Healeys, saw a video about it on the web a while back. Think he owned one too. I read through most of this didn't see him mentioned. Not sophisticated enough to paste a link from my smartphone.
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Can't believe I missed that one since I've seen this video before:

 
OK, some internet Sleuthing, a site quoting Denise McCluggage says Walter C. did indeed own a big Healey https://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/20/walter-cronkite-the-race-car-driver/ best article I could find about his Healey ownership and racing career, and a nice obit about his brief racing career in the NY Times https://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/20/walter-cronkite-the-race-car-driver/ most every story I have seen on the net mentions or links to the video you found Rick, which is the one I saw too and seems to have made the rounds, or "went viral" as they say these days.
 
Steve Van Zandt - (member of Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band, in which he plays guitar and mandolin, and has acted in television dramas The Sopranos (1999–2007), in which he played the character Silvio Dante, and Lilyhammer (2012–present), in which he plays the character Frank "The Fixer" Tagliano)

"My first car was a used 1963 Austin-Healey ragtop."
 
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Whatever became of the guy wanting to restore/sell the Healey with the monkey (chimpanze?) driver? That story kind of faded pretty fast...
 
HealeyRick said:
I LOVED that story. Here's the link to the background story https://books.google.com/books?id=8FMEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA11&lpg=PA11&dq=life+magazine+austin+healey+monkey+chimpanzee&source=bl&ots=Buxpff0wLE&sig=SA9nmzqZ0hZIXf6xrf4n1h-YwwI&hl=en&sa=X&ei=W1ogULa8G4iS9QSB4IDwAQ&ved=0CE8Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=life%20magazine%20austin%20healey%20monkey%20chimpanzee&f=true Car was on eBay about a year ago and I have a link but can't figure out how to seach auction results that old.
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:smile: SOme of those adds bring back memories; my Mother belonged to one of those record "clubs" (Columbia, I think) and when she'd get a "free" record voucher, I got to pick one out for me. Those things would getcha, if you forgot to mail back the card on time, but she was diligent about it, and I'll bet she stayed a subscriber for more than twenty (>20) years.
 
Robin Williams' 3000 MkII is alive and well in Brisbane!
Alwyn
 
World's Heavyweight boxing champ Ingemar Johansson and his wife picked up their new bugeye from BMC Sweden:

35irsp2.jpg


And it looks like he may have owned a 3000 as well:

6qcjs4.jpg
 
The 24th PM of Australia Paul Keating was a teenage rock’n’roller who managed a covers band and hung out with Tom Jones. “I used to go out to places to hear music and meet people and have a drink. I ran across a group of musicians at a hotel in Ashfield in Sydney and this was The Ramrods … They were getting peanuts. I took them over, we got their earnings up, some for me, and then we encamped at certain hotels for years.”
“It was a scream, really. There was 200 or 300 yards or metres of people round the corner, girls everywhere of course, girls everywhere. And we’d hoon around, I had the Austin-Healey 106.” https://m.fasterlouder.com.au/news/37628/Paul-Keating-was-a-teenage-rocknroller
 
Zombies guitarist Chris White:

"Cars figured very highly in the Zombies' life, they all had this thing about investing in cars. I had a Mini I painted in black and white psychedelic art, which became quite a feature. We used to go looning around in that, because it was a friendship maker. Chris originally used to bomb around in an Austin Healey, but then I got an MGB, and I had mine done up so it went faster than his. Rather than get his done up Chris got rid of it and got the E-Type

https://aln3.albumlinernotes.com/Zombies_Chronology_66-68.html
 
Regarding former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating's Austin-Healey: I put an item in our local AH club magazine mentioning that connection at the time of Keating's tenure as Prime Minister (mid 'nineties). I was castigated by other club members for drawing attention to the cars' connection to a very devisive & unpopular political figure.
I never was able to ascertain the model, all that was mentioned in the newspaper profile where I found that bit of trivia was that at the time of Keating's management of the Ram Rods, he owned an Austin-Healey.
 
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