Cadillac LaSalle Club of Australia
Ken Moss is the most important figure in founding the Cadillac LaSalle Club of Australia in 1970. In 1965 Ken took his family and his 1912 Cadillac on an epic from Sydney to the USA and drove from California to Detroit. Another important person was the president of the US Cadillac LaSalle club – Norm Uhlir of Detroit - who urged Ken to start a Cadillac club in Australia.
Ken was a member of the Veteran Car Club of NSW and was reluctant to break away from that club and its pioneer and good friend Bruce Cooper, as he didn’t want to be disloyal.
However by 1970, 35 letters of invitation were sent out to known Cadillac owners in several states and Mossie and friends staged the first ever meeting of the Cadillac LaSalle Club of Australia. The Club was formed and had begun to exist. It was as simple as that – no name was registered, no company structure set up and they had yet to draft a constitution – they just called themselves a Club and got on with it.
Unofficial “Cadillac Club” in Sydney – late 1960s
Interestingly in the late 1960s, well before a club had been thought of, some Cadillac owners who lived in Sydney’s inner north-western suburbs – places like Ryde, Epping and Carlingford started to become aware of each other. They mostly drove Cadillacs that were 20-30 years old and they knew others from around Sydney including some Veteran Car Club members. Unsurprisingly, Ken Moss knew just about all of them.
When a Cadillac Club got started officially, there was a range of owners of all sorts of models who already knew each other.
Through the Veteran Car Club, Ken had also made the acquaintances of two other Aussie 1912 Cadillac owners, Dave Fiechtner from Drayton in southern Queensland, and Henry Formby from Drouin, east of Melbourne. Dave and Henry were keen to help get such a club going, and each knew other local enthusiasts with various models of early Cadillacs and LaSalles. These gentlemen soon created interstate regions of the Cadillac LaSalle Club.
It was essentially a Sydney club in the early years, but a few Victorians and one Queenslander always attended the Annual General Meetings held in the Veteran Car Club hall at Fivedock, in Sydney every July. Sydneysiders would arrange a busy weekend of activities for locals and visitors alike (which Mossie described as “Tour and Looting”), and many decades-long interstate friendships can be traced back to those AGMs in the seventies.
Veteran Car Clubs were formed in some states in the fifties (1954 in NSW, 1955 in Vic), as were clubs for vintage sports cars, and later for other vintage cars. There was little enthusiast interest in thirties, forties or fifties American cars because these were still plentiful in good condition, offering little challenge and even less appeal at the time. There were no clubs for individual makes except Rolls-Royce, and in the late sixties Packard and Buick clubs were formed in NSW – these were the first one-make car clubs in Australia.
Obviously this changed as the years rolled by. Today there are active Cadillac LaSalle clubs in five states of Australia.