My Favorite Ride: That was Tom Bertuccio's beloved 1969 BMW 2020 on the auction block
Bill Manwaring was likely the last person to drive the 1969 BMW 2002 I wrote about a few weeks ago, the one that was up for auction and whose owner I was trying to find.
The car had belonged to an old friend, Manwaring told me today, a man who loved and drove the car until bad health forced him to park it off a gravel road near his Mt. Gilead Road home.
Manwaring was visiting Tom Bertuccio one day in 2014 when the man said his old BMW "needed some exercise" and suggested Manwaring take it for a spin.
"I thought it would be fun to drive, so I figured I'd take it out for five or 10 miles but as I was crossing the railroad tracks there near highway 45, I slowed down to look both ways and the engine died right there in the middle of the tracks," Manwaring recalled.
"Luckily I was able to start it up. I turned right around, drove the car back and parked it."
It was his wife, Priscilla Manwaring, who saw my September story about the mystery BMW and contacted me, wondering if it might be Bertuccio's car.
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She said Bertuccio, an ardent environmentalist from Brooklyn, New York, had worked since 1975 as an electrical engineer at Indiana University's former Cyclotron facility along with her husband.
He and the Manwarings would meet at Bloomington's Runcible Spoon restaurant on Tuesday nights for dinner and Irish music. They said Bertuccio, loud and opinionated, was known by the regulars. His vintage car sometimes would be parked in the lot out back.
"He really appreciated fine engineering, hence that car, which was his baby. And his Rolex watch," Priscilla said. For several years before Bertuccio's death in 2019, the 82-year-old's daily-driver 1999 Honda Civic and the BMW sat parked outside.
They were still there when his daughter arranged to sell the vehicles at auction last month. I heard that the 54-year-old car, which was still running, went for $5,400. I wish I knew who bought it.
"They had sat since Tom's death and a few years before that a little distance from the top of the road down to his cabin," Priscilla said. "Tom had mostly driven the Honda Civic, but he couldn't bear to part with the BMW."
Manwaring said Bertuccio drove the BMW a lot before he grew too old to manage the five-speed, and that it spent a lot of time with a mechanic.
"Tom was no good with mechanical things, no good with cars, and that BMW was in the shop on and off all the time.
"He did not want to let go of that car."
Have a story to tell about a car or truck? Contact My Favorite Ride reporter Laura Lane at llane@heraldt.com or 812-318-5967.
This article originally appeared on The Herald-Times: My Favorite Ride: That was Tom Bertuccio's beloved 1969 BMW 2020
