final credits - nethercutt collection and museum
Born in South Bend, Indiana, Jack Boison Nethercutt moved to Southern California when he was 9 to live with his aunt, Merle Nethercutt Norman. Norman, working out of her house, started a small business producing cosmetics for sale locally in 1931. Nethercutt eventually dropped out of college and joined the venture, helping establish Merle Norman Cosmetics. Nethercutt subsequently bought out his aunt, her husband and the other shareholders in the company and eventually created a firm with $100 million in sales with 2,000 Merle Norman franchises across the country.
Nethercutt is perhaps better known for his other passion, the automobile. The Nethercutt Collection and Museum contains nearly 250 automobiles, a mecca for car enthusiasts and collectors since it opened in the 1970s. The Nethercutt Collection and Museum contains nearly 250 automobiles, as well as a nationally known automobile library and state-of-the-art restoration shop.
Jay Leno, avid car collector and talk show host, knew Nethercutt and praised his work: "He was more than a car collector, he was a historian. He has done a Smithsonian-style effort on the history of transportation. It's the equivalent of Cooperstown in baseball or the rock 'n' roll museum in Cleveland. It's the hall of fame for cars."
Nethercutt once said that his interest in cars developed during the early part of his marriage to wife Dorothy. They loved to take drives, and "We got to the point where we could identify a car two blocks away and pretty well quote the specifications on it," he recalled. "Years later [when] we were affluent enough to afford those gleaming monsters we had remembered so well, we found that most of them were in dreadful condition," Nethercutt said. This was the beginning of a lifelong passion for buying and restoring cars.
Nethercutt started his collection in 1956, purchasing a 1936 Duesenberg convertible roadster for $5,000 and a 1930 DuPont town car for $500. Nethercutt estimated that the DuPont restoration would take just a few weeks, but it took 18 months and cost more than $65,000. Two years later, the DuPont was shown at the Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance, one of the world's leading classic car contests, winning "best in show" and establishing Nethercutt as a force in the classic car world.
The Sylmar, Southern California, facility houses a 15,000-square-foot restoration shop that employs 24 experts on automobile engines, woodwork, metal work, upholstery and leather. Nethercutt's attention to detail was emulated and admired by other collectors. "J.B. brought the standards of automobile restoration to an unchallenged mark," said Bruce Meyer, a Beverly Hills developer, car collector and member of the Nethercutt collection's board of directors. "He raised the bar, and he did it with his automobiles, with his fabulous museum and with life in general."
Nethercutt played an active role in the restoration process and in the museum, said Skip Marketti, the collection's curator and archivist. "He often said that he had a different favorite car every day of the year, based on style, performance and engineering. Recently, he has been adding more affordable family cars like Fords, Dodges, Dorts [built before 1920] and Graham-Paiges [built in Detroit in the 1920s and '30s] because he wanted future generations to understand that not everyone drove very expensive V-16 Cadillacs," Marketti said.
Nethercutt also believed that his cars - even the multimillion-dollar vehicles - needed to be driven to assure that they were in good working order. Each spring, he invited hundreds of friends and acquaintances to a picnic in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains and assigned each of them a car from the collection to drive to the site.
The Nethercutt Collection and Museum also houses one of the world's largest collections of orchestrions, the large mechanical musical devices that replaced orchestras in German dance halls and hotels at the turn of the 20th century. There is also a Wurlitzer theater organ, again one of the largest in the world, as well as disc music boxes, cylinder music boxes, nickelodeons and reproducing pianos. This separate collection started when Nethercutt wanted to buy a music box for his wife, and it became a hobby for him.
The museum also houses a 1937 Canadian Pacific Royal Hudson steam locomotive and a 1912 Pullman private railcar.
In his later years, Nethercutt sought to ensure the future of the collection and museum by establishing a perpetual endowment.
For more information, visit the Nethercutt Collection and Museum web site.