{"id":41501,"date":"2020-08-16T16:58:31","date_gmt":"2020-08-16T16:58:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/namgar.com\/NAMGAR2020\/?page_id=41501"},"modified":"2020-08-16T16:58:31","modified_gmt":"2020-08-16T16:58:31","slug":"profile-larry-pittman","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/namgar.com\/NAMGARMAIN\/profile-larry-pittman\/","title":{"rendered":"Profile – Larry Pittman"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"LarryVice Chairman<\/span>
\nLarry Pittman<\/span>
\nPhone: (810) 348-9318
\nEmail<\/a><\/p>\n

Hi everyone. I\u2019m Larry Pittman, NAMGAR\u2019s Advisor Emeritus. I\u2019ve been in this position for the last year transitioning from the Vice Chairman position which I held for eight years.<\/p>\n

I live in Fenton, Michigan and belong to our local NAMGAR chapter, the Michigan Rowdies. I lost Mitzi, the love of my life, in 2022 due to Pulmonary Hypertension. I still haven\u2019t gotten over that but carry on the best I can. Helping with that are my 5 children and 6 grandchildren. All our children are located in Michigan, too, except for our youngest son who\u2019s living in the Denver, CO, area. I\u2019m an army brat so I lived in a number of places while growing up. I was born in Ft. Warren, WY, but both of my parents were born & raised in Paoli, IN. We\u2019d go visit there while I was growing up and we did live there on and off for short periods of time. Mitzi grew up in Springville, NY, south of Buffalo, and her family remains there. I went to school at Missouri University of Science & Technology and eventually graduated with a degree in Electrical Engineering. Most of my working career was spent with General Motors \u2013 my first assignment was with a GM division in northeast Ohio. I was transferred to Michigan in 1984. I retired in 2008 but have plenty to keep me busy. <\/p>\n

I purchased my first car, an MGA, for $325 when I was 21. I bought it in Paoli, IN, during one of our visits there. I didn\u2019t manage to hang onto the car for long. At the time, I was still at Missouri S&T but took a \u201cco-op\u201d assignment with Xerox Corp in Rochester, NY, in the winter of \u201968-\u201969. The winter there was far beyond what I was used to and I had lots of trouble with the \u2018A\u2019 including both getting it started in the mornings and staying warm on the way to and from work (the heater \u2013 you all understand). I finally gave up and talked my father into taking the car for the rest of the winter while he loaned me a \u201cspare\u201d car. Anyway, my brother ended up with the car and he managed to run it into a tree. Although my Dad did manage to bring the car back to life, I never really had the car as my daily driver again. My Dad was always one to work on his own car, so I picked up lots of the basic automotive maintenance skills from him.<\/p>\n

And, somehow, I was still fond of that \u2018A\u2019 I\u2019d had. I\u2019ve always had an interest in cars and my work at GM kept that interest alive. During that time, I often had thoughts of restoring an older car. However, life and lack of excess funds held that thought at bay for most of my working years. It wasn\u2019t until after I retired from GM and began work as a contract engineer for several years that I was able to purchase a restoration project, a 1958 MGA. At the time, I was spending a lot of time building and flying radio controlled airplanes, something I still do, but not nearly as often as I did before the MG\u2019s came into my life. Turns out the MGA was sitting in the barn of one of my radio control club buddies. I\u2019d never asked to take a look at the car and actually thought he had an MGB back there. But when I found out it was an MGA, it didn\u2019t take me long to bring it home. Even with the problems I\u2019d had with my first one, it sure fit the bill of being a restoration project. His son was a British car mechanic on the side to help with college costs \u2013 he had managed to completely disassemble it prior to his own planned restoration. As a result, it came home to me in boxes. They included not only MG parts, but parts from other MG\u2019s, Triumph\u2019s, Healey\u2019s, and so on. Took me quite some time to figure out what parts belonged to the \u2018A\u2019 and what parts belonged to other cars. But it eventually went back together the way it should. The project took me about 3 \u00bd years. I even created a web site on the restoration at: http:\/\/www.larrysmga.net<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n

I first joined NAMGAR in 2004. We tried to drive the \u2018A\u2019 as many places as possible and have made most of the GTs since, although I now, of course, travel alone. Our first GT with the restored car was GT-33 in Seven Springs, PA. Since the completion of the MGA, I\u2019ve purchased and restored a 1952 MG TD. That one took me 5 years to finish up. Guess I can\u2019t help myself as I\u2019ve now purchased a 1959 MG Magnette ZB which seems to be in decent shape except for metal rot around the entire bottom outside of the body. Not sure what the restoration timeframe will be on it as I\u2019ve now hit the 6 year mark and it\u2019s far from done.<\/p>\n

As you may know, the role for the Advisor of NAMGAR is a new position so my duties are still evolving. I plan to stay close to ongoing events within NAMGAR and provide advice as needed to help other board members as best as I can.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Vice Chairman Larry Pittman Phone: (810) 348-9318 Email Hi everyone. I\u2019m Larry Pittman, NAMGAR\u2019s Advisor<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-41501","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/namgar.com\/NAMGARMAIN\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/41501","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/namgar.com\/NAMGARMAIN\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/namgar.com\/NAMGARMAIN\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/namgar.com\/NAMGARMAIN\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/namgar.com\/NAMGARMAIN\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41501"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/namgar.com\/NAMGARMAIN\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/41501\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/namgar.com\/NAMGARMAIN\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41501"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}