Stocks vs Houses and Gold; a Cold Wind; The Sealyham Terrier and Two Great Race Car Drivers
January 22, 2024 Volume 4 # 36
Where you Made Money In the Last 95 years. Not Housing.
In a week when the American stock market hit a new high, here are some comparison numbers for the United States. The real estate figures for Canada, and maybe Britain, would be higher, in certain years. Gold bugs have been praying for a replay of the 1970s but they may have a long wait.
These numbers are average returns from 1928 to 2023.
Wind Turbines Don’t Turn in Extreme Cold
When temperatures fall to -30C or below, metal becomes brittle. Wind Turbines automatically shut down so their giant blades don’t shatter.
Canada’s oil and gas powerhouse, has tons of wind power. Much more than coal.
A week or so back, temperatures were as low as -40. The Wind Turbines shut down. There is seven hours of sunlight but it was cloudy. Then two gas turbine plants shut down. There would have been rolling blackouts in one of the richest energy spots on earth, but the population responded in less than half an hour to a plea to conserve energy and the crisis was averted. Edmonton is two degrees of latitude south of Moscow, but the capital of Alberta has more brutal winter. Edmonton is on the same latitude as Dublin and Hamburg.
Weather worries People Even More than AI
The Sealy Sit
Poppy the four-year-old Sealyham Terrier. The only breed I know of who can pull this off. This is our third Sealy The Sealyham was bred by an eccentric English gentleman who wanted them for hunting otters. They have the largest mouth of a small terrier. Hunting otters is a no-no. Poppy chases squirrels she never catches.
Once very popular Sealyhams are now quite rare. Princess Margaret had some as did Alfred Hitchcock who liked to appear with them in cameo scenes in his films.
The Car I Want for Valentine’s Day.
I realize it’s a little early, but anyone interested in a prezzie might need a few weeks.
This is a Caprice TC2, an all electric car made in Holland. It is a shameless knockoff of a Porsche 356, a car first introduced in 1948 and made until 1965. It has a range of up 300 kilometres depending on the size of the battery pack. Spartan interior.
It costs about US$56,000 or C$75,000. I can dream on. It is legal in Europe but it would have to go through some major hoops to be imported to Canada or the USA.
The Greatest Race Car Driver of All Time
Juan Manuel Fangio of Argentina in Monte Carlo, 1957.
Take a look at that car. No roll bar. Fangio driven in a tee shirt and an old helmet. That takes guts. Five times world champion in the 1950s. He died at home in 1995.
Essay of The Week
I seldom write obituaries of people I know, but this one. Horst Kroll was a mechanic who fixed my old German cars. I spent a lot of time in his garage waiting for my car. We would go to breakfast At Ted’s, a great old fashioned restaurant next door or meet downtown. If we drove to a lunch place in one of old Porsches he hugged the road and took corners as if were on a race track,Horst had endless stories and some interesting friends.
Horst Kroll, who has died at the age of 81, won the Can-Am Motor racing championship in 1986 when he was 50 years old, an age when most auto racers have retired. The only other Canadian to win a Can-Am championship was Jacques Villeneuve Senior.
Can-Am racing ran from 1966 to 1987, with no race in 1975-76. The cars were behemoths, unlike Formula 1 cars they had much larger engines. Horst Kroll's car was 5-litre engine developing more than 550 horsepower. After his most celebrated victory in more than 20 years of racing, he quit and went back to running his car repair shop in West Hill, in Scarborough, Ontario.
Horst Kroll was born in Kreuzwalde in Silesia, a town that has been part of Poland since 1945. His life was shaped by the Second World War and the Cold War that followed. The family later moved west to Saxony and lived there during the Second World War. At the end of the war Horst, his two sisters and his mother Elisabeth were refugees fleeing west away from the advancing Soviet Red Army.
A woman gave the family refuge in a house near Dresden.They were there on February 13 to 15, 1945, when British and American bombing force dropped 3,900 tons of high explosive and incendiary bombs on Dresden, causing a firestorm. It was a controversial raid on a city of little strategic importance. Even British Prime Minister Winston Churchill questioned it after the war.
Horst Kroll was eight years old and remembers hiding in the basement about 50 kilometres from Dresden and feeling the ground shake from the explosions. "When I went outside it was night, but the flames from Dresden lit up the sky like it was the sun," he told friends many years later.
His father Emile Kroll was in the German Army and died several years after returning from the war. The family was now living in East Germany. Horst finished eight years of school and then took a three-year apprenticeship as an auto mechanic. He worked in a local garage and then in 1955 or 56 decided to leave East Germany. The police stopped people from leaving, but it was before the Berlin Wall, built in 1961, so he left by saying he was going to an auto show in West Germany.
"I left everything behind except what I could carry. I left friends, relatives and I had no money," Mr. Kroll told an interviewer in 2002.
In West Germany, he landed an apprenticeship at Porsche factory in Stuttgart. He worked building the Porsche 356, the original Porsche sports car, which was a derivative of the Volkswagen. Mr. Kroll would say he knew the car so well he could repair one blindfolded. He ended up servicing and looking after VIP and executive cars.
After two years in West Germany, he snuck back into East Germany to see his family. "The Vopos (East German Police) caught me. They kicked me out. I only had five hours visiting my mother."
His daughter Brigit Kroll says her father might not have been allowed to leave, but he lied to the police saying he had a fiancé back in West Germany.
Volkswagen, which sold Porsches, sent Mr. Kroll to Canada to work in Toronto, specialising in servicing and setting up the Porsche 356. He made an effort to learn English, he always spoke with a soft German accent, but his friends were other young Germans who were interested in cars and racing. He joined a German racing team and started racing Porsche 356s at a track at St. Eugene, near Montreal. By 1963 Horst Kroll was ice racing, then racing at Harewood Acres, a track just west of Toronto. He started out racing a Porsche 356; then he moved to a Formula Vee, which looked like a small Formula 1 car but was not as advanced. The Vee stood for Volkswagen, and the Formula Vee ran on a Volkswagen engine. Mr. Kroll built his own Formula Vee and was also racing a Porsche Speedster. He was winning race after race.
"Sometimes I would come home with six trophies in a weekend from Harewood," said Mr. Kroll.
At this stage, he was still working at Volkswagen Canada, and he could experiment with souping up the VW engine for his weekend race car.
"I would work late at night at Volkswagen of Canada and build an engine. I would test it, and if it wasn't right, I would tear into it and do it again, until I got it right," said Mr. Kroll. Not only did he race the Formula Vees, but he went on to build 18 of them and sold them to other drivers after he left Volkswagen and opened his own shop.
Peter Felder, a racing manager, and admirer said it was his intimate understanding of the workings of the engine that made him such a great race driver.
"He had a phenomenal mechanical mind. He knew the engine. He also had focus and concentration when he was driving," said Mr. Felder.
During the mid-1960s Mr. Kroll raced a Porsche 356 Carrera, the fastest version of the early Porsches; all Porsche 356s are worth a lot of money today, but a 2 litre Porsche Carrera sold this year for US$517,000.
In 1968 Horst Kroll was the Canadian Driving championship. For the next two decades, he raced all over North America, from Mosport near Toronto to St. Jovite at Mont Tremblant, and in California, Texas and Wisconsin. He raced on a shoestring, financing his cars, as he found it difficult to find sponsors.
"At races, my father would go through what the other race teams threw away," said his daughter Birgit who accompanied her father to many races. "Sometimes other drivers or mechanics would come by and tell him there was a good camshaft in the garbage bin."
From 1978 on Mr. Kroll continued to race on what he called `a limited budget'. He then got a sponsorship from Chipwich and that allowed him to perfect his Can-Am car. In 1984 he came third overall, then second the next year before winning the championship in 1986.
Peter Felder says Horst Kroll could have done better if he had had more money.
"The trouble is he couldn't afford to crash. It was his money. If it came down to it he would have to back off in the final corner," said Mr. Felder.
Mr. Kroll drove off the track in much the way he did when was racing. He drove fast and cut the edges off corners. He received a lot of tickets, but more than once the police who stopped him let him off because they were race fans.
Once he and his girlfriend Connie were driving a Porsche 356 and a 911 back from California when they passed a police speed trap, on the other side of the road in Oklahoma.
"I saw he spotted Connie and was wheeling around to come after us," Mr. Kroll told a reporter. "I told her if she ever saw me flashing my lights to take the next exit." She did, and they made it to a motel.
"We checked out in the middle of the night and kept going on back roads."
At one point the 25 year old 356 had some engine trouble, but Mr. Kroll repaired it in a hurry.
For many years Mr. Kroll ran a car repair service on Kingston Road in the West Hill district of Scarborough. He was a great mechanic, but not a great businessman.
"Horst's lot was jammed with cars because he was a terrible salesman. If someone came in and tried to haggle over the price, he refused to deal with them," said his friend Dan Proudfoot, an auto journalist, who recently wrote a series of articles on the restoration of two of Horst's Porsche 911s than he never managed to sell.
Mr. Kroll loved cats. He took in strays, and they lived all over his garage, some of them sleeping in one of his old Can-Am race cars.
Horst Kroll was born in Kreuzwalde, Germany, on May 16, 1936. He died in Toronto on October 26, 2017. He was 81. He is survived by his daughter Birgit, his wife Hildegard, from whom he had been separated for many years, and his sisters Renate and Krista.