PREPARING FOR EXTINCTION; Collecting cars, art and animal heads that may disappear one day.(News)

Byline: PHIL BERG

MARK THOMAS

REAL ESTATE DEVELOPER, RETIRED

''It's much easier to buy things than to sell them,'' says Mark Thomas, a Michigan car collector who is also a passionate fan of early Georgian and Victorian architecture, as well as automotive art. He's not a pack rat, but he admits that he was at a point where he had enough cars that his personal parking spaces were gridlocked. He couldn't drive any of them until he found a place to spread them out.

One of the cars Thomas has parked in his recently acquired meeting-hall-turned-garage is an example he's owned for 51 years, a 1931 Willys sedan he bought because his father wouldn't let him drive the family car. "I've owned this since before I could drive,'' says Thomas, a Wisconsin native who moved to Detroit to work at Ford. In 1969, he went into the real estate business and became a self-described workaholic until he retired in 2000, when he began to collect cars that he liked and wanted to know more about. The more he collected, the more addicted he became to the hunt.

The Packard he bought from a farmer after spotting it during a geology field trip at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wiscon-sin, fascinated Thomas. During a search, he found an old mechanic nearby who knew the car's first owner, Arthur Swallow, a Milwaukee auto parts supplier and local society member who hung out with Augie Pabst and the Uehlein family of Schlitz beer fame. Swallow's granddaughter had moved on to her third or fourth husband by the time Thomas got "Grandpa's'' car, the Packard, and when he contacted her in Florida to get more information on the origin of the car, she immediately arranged a party for the car's resurrection, a grand black-tie affair in Milwaukee, where Pabst and friends showed up in Bugattis and Ferraris.

Thomas' aim for expanding his collection is to acquire one example of each of the 13 carmakers that produced a car in the city of Pontiac, Michigan. He has a 1940 GMC pickup, the successor to those built by Grabowsky Motor Co., where the original GMC name came from. He's looking for an original Grabowsky and knows of only one, in Arizona. He would like to find a Pontiac-produced Grabowsky, Rapid, Welsh, Carter-car and Friend.