Driving into history: How 86 cars could make Palm Springs’ birthday a Guinness World Record
When it comes to celebrating their own birthdays, cities can be, well, a little predictable.
You really can't go wrong expecting some probably exaggerated speeches about the supposed glories of days gone by, and some rusty carnival rides to be thrown up in a parking lot somewhere. Maybe if you're lucky, the city council will blow the annual budget blasting off a bunch of fireworks.
More sensible, or else just bland, burgs might instead treat their residents to a concert from a "pop star" who last charted in the ’80s, or maybe just say the heck with the theatrics and just bake a big cake to slice up and give some giddy kids the sugar high of their young lives.
But not Palm Springs.
Nope, to celebrate the 85th anniversary of its incorporation, Palm Springs — ever the individual — went bigger and bolder Saturday. So big and bold, in fact, that if all goes according to plan, the city just might write its way into Guinness World Records.
Local car auctioneer Keith McCormick said he first came up with the idea of trying to set a world record during the birthday party when asked for ideas on how he could use his car expertise to help make the celebration “special.”
He decided to check with Guinness World Records, which for decades has served as the authority on incredible feats of human achievement, about what kind of parade-related records had been set. He quickly learned that there were no shortage of records involving parades of everything from Subarus to alpacas. But he had an idea for one record that did not appear to have ever been set.
“Nobody had put one (car) of each year together,” McCormick said. “And I figured if I could gather up 86 cars — from 1938 when the city was formed to 2023 — then we could pull off a record.”
On Saturday, McCormick and a cast of dozens tried to do just that. Vintage car owners to drove their prized whips to Palm Springs. They lined up in order of year outside the convention center and paraded to downtown, in the process attempting to set a record for the most cars from consecutive years driving in a parade.
A spokesperson for Guinness World Records, Kylie Galloway, said it doesn't have any record for "most cars from different years in one place," but people who think they've set a record can submit evidence that follows the organization's guidelines.
The parade, which was named “Cruising Through The Years,” departed from the convention center heading for the Downtown Park around 11:30 a.m. Afterwards, all of the cars were set up around the “Forever Marilyn” statue for a car show.
The event was not McCormick’s first time taking part in a Palm Springs birthday celebration. During the 50th birthday parade, he rode in a trailer next to a giant birthday cake that was baked for the occasion.
“And I hope to be around for the 100th,” he said.
Convertibles, ’Vettes and military jeeps
But before he could think of attempting the record, McCormick first had to face a rather daunting challenge: finding the willing owner of a car from each of those 86 years. While McCormick wasn’t initially sure it could be done, interest in participating would soon prove to be higher than he ever imagined. At one point, he said, he was hearing from 100 people a day who wanted to drive their cars in the parade.
“Word of mouth spread on social media like wildfire on this,” McCormick said. “We even managed to get a ’55 TBird from Newport Beach… Everybody wants to be in some kind of record.”
Of course, it helped that McCormick was able to reach out to some of the 20,000 or so classic car enthusiasts he says have entered cars in auctions run by his downtown business, McCormick’s Classic Car Auctions.
And even with the help of all those connections and word of mouth, McCormick said the effort still went down to the wire, with the final few vehicles only being secured in the last couple of days.
Those final additions aren’t some standard hotrods either. Instead, they’re 1943, 1944 and 1945 Jeeps sourced from the March Air Reserve Base near Riverside. As McCormick explained, “they didn’t make cars during World War II, they made tanks and armored vehicles.”
Although the Jeeps surely stuck out among the Corvettes and convertibles, McCormick said there were plenty of cars that most people don’t come across very often. He said he was particularly excited about the oldest car in the parade, a 1938 Chevrolet Master Deluxe Convertible that came from Indio.
“You don’t find these cars anywhere,” he said.
But while McCormick is glad to have secured enough cars, there’s still the matter of getting the record recognized by Guinness World Records. He said the attempt has been registered with the company, as required before a new record can be attempted.
Guinness World Records makes trained verifiers available to attend record attempts, but McCormick said he wasn’t initially confident enough that he would get cars from all 86 years to justify the $5,000 price tag.
Instead, the car auctioneer opted to have someone shoot video and photos of Mayor Grace Garner and Police Chief Andrew Mills inspecting each of the cars in the parade to make sure there is one from every year, which will then be sent to Guinness along with a letter testifying they verified there was a car from each year.
Whether a record is set is ultimately out of his control, but McCormick said he did everything he could to make sure nothing was left to chance.
“I phone all the (car owners) nearly every week to make sure that the car is running alright and will be clean and there at the convention center,” he said ahead of the parade. “I don’t want to blow this.”
In total, McCormick estimated he put around 400 hours of time into planning for the attempt, an amount he says will be more than worthwhile if the record is set.
But even as he looks forward to hopefully seeing Palm Springs represented in a literal record book, McCormick says he is under no illusions that it will be there for long.
“I think probably next year, you’ll get Chicago or some other city saying 'Right, well we’re going to do 100 years' and then they’ll have their own record,'” he said. “That’s the nature of records.”
Paul Albani-Burgio covers breaking news and the City of Palm Springs. Follow him on Twitter at @albaniburgiop and via email at paul.albani-burgio@desertsun.com.
This article originally appeared on Palm Springs Desert Sun: How Palm Springs’ birthday bash could set Guinness World Record
