The Petersen Automotive Museum celebrates Presidents Day in style

It was a bit surreal even by LA standards: Eisenhower’s open-topped parade limo cruising through Los Angeles with a Soviet cosmonaut sitting up in the back seat waving to adoring crowds. I was in the front seat, also waving, which made it even weirder.

Behind me and the astronaut was the bright yellow Volkswagen van from “Little Miss Sunshine.” Not one like the one in “Little Miss Sunshine,” the actual van in which Greg Kinnear had ferried around Alan Arkin, Steve Carell, Toni Colette and a very young Abigail Breslin to the beauty contest that would change them all.

Behind that was: the time-machine VW Beetle convertible in which Austin Powers saved the world in the offensively titled (but only in the Commonwealth) “The Spy Who Shagged Me”; the 2002 Jaguar XK-R driven by the bad guy in the James Bond movie "Die Another Day," complete with rear-mounted Gatling gun; the pink-on-pink Honda S2000 from the seminal existentialist drama "2 Fast 2 Furious"; a very nice replica “Back to the Future” DeLorean piloted by a proud father and son team; the real Niekamp roadster that won the first Grand National Roadster Show; and a 1929 DuPont Model G Speedster, a sister car to one that ran in the Indy 500.

What the heck was going on? I’ll tell you what the heck: It was just another fun day in LA with the Petersen Automotive Museum.

“It’s Presidents Day, we had a few presidential limos, why not?” said Petersen Museum director Terry Karges, noting that it was also the museum’s 25th anniversary.

Karges was bravest of all in the lineup, driving the Sunshine VW van, a vehicle that required fancy heel-and-toe work to make it stop without stalling. Prayer was also helpful to avoid brake failure, engine fire and frontal collision, I suggested.

“I’ve owned plenty of Volkswagens,” Karges intoned confidently, before listing them all. He’d owned plenty and he was still alive, which I found encouraging. Plus, that parking brake that came out of the dash was still working, so we had that going for us.

But the astronaut, what was the deal with her? Yes, it was a she. And the suit she was wearing was one that actually flew to the International Space Station with a real Soviet mission commander inside it. The Chrysler Imperial parade car had been used to carry astronauts (but no cosmonauts, obvs.) in those ticker-tape parades down Fifth Avenue, in addition to presidential duties. So the museum went with the astronaut instead of a fake Abraham Lincoln/George Washington pairing. The actual Russian cosmonaut being predisposed somewhere in Kazakhstan on Presidents Day, a young and very enthusiastic public relations representative from the Petersen’s PR firm had gallantly — indeed, gleefully — volunteered to step in. Abbey Beckert was perfectly fit for the job, as I soon learned.

“I was my college mascot,” she said. “It was a dolphin.”

In a concession to practicality, the dolphin mascot creature of her college days had feet, or at least holes in the suit to accommodate human feet, suggesting less dolphin and more a missing-link-fish-human evolutionary species as-yet undiscovered by science. There is a photo on Instagram somewhere. But the dolphin experience was just what she needed to crawl into the cosmonaut suit. And once inside, to sit in the same spot as Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard Nixon and John Glenn.

Next I clambered into the DuPont, built by a member of the DuPont chemical family who liked cars, E. Paul DuPont. When you’re a DuPont and you like cars, you start your own car company and build these. This one was a Model G, only a handful of which were ever made. Maybe three, maybe seven, sources vary. One of them raced at Le Mans, one in the Indy 500. Mine was driven by the Petersen’s collection manager Dana Williamson.

“I’m driving it because I’m the only one who can shift the gears,” Williamson said with a smile. “You have to double-clutch it, it’s not synchromeshed.”

He was good at it. The G’s 5.3-liter straight-eight made 125 hp and what felt like a ton of torque — even by today’s standards. It wasn’t hard to imagine being a riding mechanic at Indy in this thing.

Thus equipped, we rolled through greater Los Angeles in a rollicking 40-or-so-mile loop, starting at the Petersen; then past the original Thunder Alley where Iskenderian, Traco and Guldstrand once plied their powerful trades; down to the new Google campus in Playa Vista where Howard Hughes once built airplanes and helicopters; over to Abbott Kinney, where bearded hipsters sat at sidewalk cafes and argued about who had discovered Husker Du first; then up to the Kodak Theater, where the Oscars will cram your TV set on Sunday; then in a circuitous route back to The Pete. The whole deal was aided by a police escort from the LAPD motorcycle corps.

All the while, people lining the route stopped what they were doing and reacted. Most smiled. Some cheered. Many took photos. One or two were irritated. One mean old lady refused to give way to the parade and demanded her right to cross in front of our glorious cavalcade no matter what.

“I don’t care if you’re the Pope,” she said. “I’m crossing the street.”

And she did. The parade revealed as much about its watchers as it did anything else. Were they open to fun new exciting things, unexpected and joyful? Or were they so closed to happiness that they hated everything and everyone and nobody’s going to make me smile today dad gummit, nobody! Luckily for humanity, most people were on the joyful side. The great majority of them were. Which bodes well for the future of our species. Just as the preservation and celebration of cars offered by the Petersen bodes well for the history and preservation of these fun things.

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