@LOLD FRIENDS GATHER FOR A NOSTALGIC BUT BUMPY RIDE INTO AUTO HISTORY[F/L] (For use by NYTimes News Service clients)[F/L] [E/P] July 17 [E/P] @BBy LINDA SEEBACH[F/C] @Lc.1994 Los Angeles Daily News [F/C] [E/P] LOS ANGELES [-]@B @LLast week, I went to Reno to visit the past. One whole section of the parking lot at the Reno Hilton was roped off just for Packards, a feast for anyone's eyes and a living tribute to an important part of American automotive history.[E/P] The occasion was the 29th Annual Meeting of the ``Packard Club,'' and several hundred people who own Packards, or who, like me, just admire them, came to Reno to see the sights, swap stories, take pictures and enjoy a reunion with friends. For many people whose cherished old car is practically part of the family, no vacation trip would be complete without a national meet. And when you've seen children grow up from a baby stroller to a Packard of their own, sometimes it seems as if gas and oil make ties as strong as blood.[E/P] My friends Stella Pyrtek and Stuart Blond were married at the Packard national in Pittsburgh in 1986 and what could be more natural? They met at the 1985 national in Providence, R.I., so when they decided to merge their Packard collections, of course they let the Packard Club set the date. Stella lived in New Jersey, and Stuart was from Los Angeles, and so everyone they both knew would be in Pennsylvania.[E/P] Their wedding plans presented a small problem, though because no one would believe they intended to be married in a Parking lot. So many clergymen hung up on them, apparently thinking someone was playing a practical joke, that for a while Stella thought they would have to stage a fake wedding.[E/P] It was part of the official program, after all and they didn't want to disappoint anyone. The wedding was beautiful. The bride rode down the aisle in a 1929 Packard Twelve Cabriolet with a custom body by Brunn.[E/P] ``I thought only a few close friends would come, she said, and when I got out of the car and everyone a the meet was there, I almost cried.[E/P] For their wedding pictures, the couple posed in ``Old Pacific, a 1903 Packard that had recently been driven coast-to-coast to commemorate the first such trip ever, made by a 1903 Packard. I took pictures of the wedding with Stuart's camera.[E/P] This year in Reno, we had another wedding to celebrate, with a reception in the club' hospitality suite for Jeff and Joan Price of Dayton, Ohio.[E/P] From 1973 to 1986, I went to Packard nationals every year. For nine years, I was editor of the club newsletter and I spent the week frantically trying to make certain I had an identified picture of every car that showed up.[E/P] It seemed to me that if someone cared enough to drive a Packard hundreds or even thousands of miles to the meet, the least I could do was put its picture in the newsletter. Now Stuart is the newsletter editor, and he's the one out in the hot desert sun walking up and down the rows of cars with a ton of cameras.[E/P] ``Do you miss it, Linda?'' he asked. And I do.[E/P] Not everyone brings a Packard to the meet, but everyone gets to ride in one. Or in several, which is even better. Just stand out in the parking lot and someone will ask you to hop in. On one tour, I rode in a 1938 Super 8, a seven-passenger touring limousine owned by Wayne Parsons of Santa Rosa, Calif. Wayne, who has had the car since 1951, was among the founders of the Packard Club in 1953. Now it has about 4,000 members.[E/P] That's actually rather small, as car clubs go, because Packard was not a large manufacturer. There are car clubs for every make, for every era and for every imaginable specialty. The fact is, antique and collector cars are not only a family hobby, they're big business. And for all our happy nostalgia trip last week, the business and the hobby both are gravely threatened by federal regulation.[E/P] Supposedly pursuing the goal of cleaner air, the Environmental Protection Agency is pressuring the states to get older cars off the road, regardless of the fact that they contribute only a small part of the problem of pollution. Nasty little nuisances like leaf blowers and wood whackers probably do more damage to the environment than the antique car hobby does, and there's nothing historically valuable about them.[E/P] A small fraction of cars, typically those that are badly maintained or have been deliberately tampered with, emit most of the pollutants. They can be identified by with on-road testing. But bureaucrats at the EPA, like bureaucrats everywhere, love to make up rules that other people have to follow and they don't care if it ruins your harmless hobby or reduces the value of your property.[E/P] Stella Pyrtek-Blond is the Packard Club's vice president for public relations, and part of her job is to monitor legislation that might affect old cars. New Jersey, she says, is testing the sort of centralized emission-testing equipment that the EPA tried to force on California. It's been inoperative a large part of the time, and when it is running it doesn't give consistent results. But if fully installed, it would cost New Jersey drivers and taxpayers an estimated $222 million. Lobbying pressure to adopt big, expensive solutions is intense.[E/P] The greatest threat to the hobby is the so-called ``clunker'' bills. Typically, they provide that old cars can be scrapped [-] just because they're old, not necessarily because they are in poor shape [-] in return for pollution control credits. These bills don't usually target antique or collector cars directly, because legislators can read their mail. But, they often do require that the major systems of the cars be destroyed rather than recycled, and that can make it impossible to find the parts needed to keep collector cars in good repair. Which is, no doubt, the intention.[E/P] The effect on air quality is not easy to determine. If someone scraps an old car that was in regular use, it will eventually create a demand for another new car, and automobile manufacture is a resource and energy intensive process. Even if the new car operates more cleanly, the difference may not be great enough to make up for the pollution created by manufacturer of the new vehicle. If an old car that was scarcely driven at all is scrapped, that doesn't help the air, but the emission credits gained may allow pollution to continue elsewhere.[E/P] Car owners are beginning to do their own lobbying to counteract the advocates of scrapping programs a lot of history will be unnecessarily scrapped if they fail.[E/P]