That car pictured in last week’s My Favorite Ride column, the Rolls Royce I spotted in the North Carolina mountains a few months back? It’s a Silver Ghost, year of manufacture unknown.
This may be all we ever find out about the classic beauty.
The car identification comes all the way from the United Kingdom, where Malcolm Tucker, past president of the Rolls Royce Enthusiasts Club there, has owned, restored, and shown the high-end automobiles for 60 years.
Thanks go to Bloomington resident Cynthia Mahigian Moorhead, who sent the photo I took of the car to longtime friend Tucker, whom she met in the 1960s when he attended Indiana University and was a member of legendary coach Doc Councilman’s swim team.
Tucker knows Rolls Royces.
“His firsthand knowledge of and commitment to, as they say in the UK, ‘motoring,’ most especially involving Rolls-Royces and Bentleys (he’s owned and worked on over 35 of them), is pretty much unsurpassed,” Moorhead wrote in an email. “He was the youngest-ever chair of the Rolls-Royce Enthusiasts’ Club in the UK.”
He studied the photo that I took while standing in a water-filled ravine, knew right away what he was looking at and sent this response:
“It’s a Silver Ghost. Very hard to tell exact details. A side view would help and the chassis number would let me know all about it! It is probably one of the American ones built in Springfield, Massachusetts, from 1921 to 1926. The ‘drum’ headlamps give it away. What’s the story?”
Well, the story is I was able to get just this one picture before my phone battery ran out. I was wearing my good hiking boots and didn’t want to go into the general store where the car was parked to find the owner. I was on vacation and didn’t even have my reporter’s notebook.
Off I went, becoming more curious about the car days later when I returned to work.
So, unless someone around Beech Mountain, North Caroliina, gets wind of this column, “that’s about it,” Moorhead said.
Oh well. It won’t be the first car I’ve come across whose story has gone untold.
Rolls-Royce expert Tucker still has a hand in the game, employed at the company’s Goodwood headquarters, the design, manufacturing and assembly center. Production of the luxury car plummeted to less than 1,000 in 2008, but numbers had increased to 6,000 in 2023.
Other Rolls Royces I’ve known
Although I don’t know a thing about this century-old Rolls Royce objet d’art, I have written about a few others in my car column days.
There was Lloyd Orr’s 1952 Silver Wraith in May 2003. A March 2004 mention of a 1923 Rolls Royce Silver Ghost once owned by Howard Hughes that was among 17 “topless” vintage vehicles from around Indiana displayed indoors under the dome at the West Baden Springs Hotel.
A 2005 column about hood ornaments explained how the Rolls-Royce company had foreseen the danger of hood ornaments that extended beyond the car and installed a sensor that detects an impending collision and retracts the “Spirit of Ecstasy” hood ornament.
In a 2006 column, professional car painter Larry Lloyd told me about a customer who shipped a Rolls Royce from England for Lloyd to disassemble down to the chassis and repaint at his rural southern Indiana shop.
In 2011, Tom Taggart’s 1929 Rolls-Royce limousine, purchased at the height of the Great Depression for $18,500 and shipped to the U.S in parts, was parked on display in front of a historic hotel. A man named William “Bill” Bird, a favorite chauffeur at The Elite Casino and a great uncle of basketball standout Larry Bird, was sent to New York City to drive the Rolls-Royce back to French Lick.
In the spring of 2019, I followed the Ladd family’s 1979 Silver Wraith II through Bloomington’s Elm Heights’ neighborhood until they finally stopped to pick up a friend for an afternoon outing. I took one picture before my camera battery died, really. They told me about their 40-year-old car, one of three Rolls Royces in the family garage.
Before I knew it, I was sitting in the back seat admiring the fancy car. “I looked to my right and noticed a lighted vanity mirror embedded in the side panel behind the window,” I wrote back then. “My hair, a mess. The car, an elegant jewel.” I did some research and learned just 2,135 Silver Wraith II’s were produced from 1975 through 1980. This was a rare automobile.
On Valentine’s Day in 2020, My Favorite Ride featured a much older Silver Wraith, a white 1948 limousine Jason Beard had purchased to rent out, with a chauffeur, for special events such as weddings in and around Bloomington.
I await word from anyone with news about my 1920s North Carolina Silver Ghost.
Next week: Bill Bays of Freedom, Indiana, has two restored Ford Thunderbirds, a 1959 and a 1960. I’m going out to see them.
Have a story to tell about a car or truck? Contact My Favorite Ride reporter Laura Lane at llane@heraldt.com or 812-318-5967.
