[DeTomaso] POCA Membership, right vs. wrong coast & a fellow by the name of Drew

[Julian Kift]

It's not often I get vocal, but it's hard to sit on the sidelines and not get drawn into posts that started as a personal attack on a good friend and then seem to have denegrated and split into threads on general merits of POCA membership and right vs. left coast splits.
 
Here's my random (sometimes tongue in cheek) collective thoughts on recent days posts;
 
Fact of life is "you can't please all the people all the time" and the geography of Pantera ownership will dictate where the focus lies with events. It is only natural that larger gatherings will be around the geography of Pantera ownership. There's an old saying "If the mountain will not come to Muhammad, then Muhammad must go to the mountain". In my book you should not accuse your club of not supporting you if you don't support it, whether that be in actions or words. 
 
A tradition at the Fun Rally is to see where people have traveled from and I guarantee you there are bunch of people that travel the ~2,000 miles from right coast to Phoenix, and heck some of them even drive their Pantera. The Fun Rally regularly attracts people from as far away as Europe & Australia, so distance is not necessarily the barrier, attitude is. Do you know how many Pantera owners attended the Le Mans tour in 2012? Over 50 and the event was organized by a POCA chapter that has one single member! Provide quality and you break down the barrier of distance. The 'same shit, different year' approach was what drove the Fun Rally from Las Vegas to different locations and as I understand the intent is to now keep it moving every couple years (subject to local chapters wanting to take on organizing it). For today's crowd it has to be relatively fresh and offer something more than just a gathering of old friends. I live in Reno, but I'm all for the Fun Rally in Phoenix (or anywhere else), like the many who attend and make it a success I'm not so self centered that it has to be in my back yard or I won't go.
 
Some people seem to be forgetting POCA stands for "Pantera Owners Club of America"; that is a collective of people with a common interest around the De Tomaso marque (not the tent - Mike's happy I took real English in school) and although we have a few elected officials it is IMO the membership at large who will dictate the success or failure of the club. In my experience seeing and presenting opportunities for improvement will get you a lot further than finger pointing to probelms. As in any crowd there are always a few more vocal than others and to those I say if you have a beef with the way POCA is run then a) take it up with the elected board members directly, not on an open forum and b) stand for election in one of those positions and make a positive change. Speaking of which the latest newsletter arrived a couple days ago, it had a column of positions open for re-election, IIRC there was not one position that was being contested, so I'd say "Put up or shut up". If you think you can do better step up to the plate and let the majority decide whether they feel you are fit for that office, give it your best shot but don't be a sore loser.
 
How do you really expect to attract new membership if as a potential member I google the DeTomaso list and pull up the past week of list e-mails, where the members not only deride the club, but specific members of it. "You are what you eat" or something like that, no maybe it's "don't shit where you eat". Which is sad, because the strength of the Pantera community is actually in the owners, if it wasn't for the people I'd likely have traded my Pantera's some time back. I liken it to customer service e.g. guy buys a crate motor and it grenades and he is vocal on as many forums as possible, it doesn't matter if that engine builder had built 1,000 motors before his or a 1,000 after, that one event creates enough doubt in prosective buyers minds. Nowadays social media and forums spreads information like wildfire.... it must be true I saw it on Facebook. IMO that plus regurgitating and perpetuating myth's from the '70's around shortcomings of the Pantera puts off potential owners and keeps prices low.  Anyway I digress back to membership, I for one would be interested to know where membership stands and it would be nice to get a report back on how POCA membership is fairing, i.e. % renewals, new recruits, health of individual Chapters etc. and for non-renewals maybe some follow up to find out why membership was dropped. I'm interested to know if Pantera's are changing hands and new owners not joining POCA.
 
The question of 'Profiles' was addressed well by Les Gray and people seem to struggle in diferentiating character/friendship and duty. That said we live in the real world with extenuating circumstances, so I'm all for giving a guy a break, especially one who is after all a volunteer and fulffiling a duty, not only as Profiles editor but as an active senior pilot (Major?) in the USAF by dragging his ass in a C5 (the World's largest flying target) across the likes of Afghanistan. We might joke about bulletproof vests in threads and Mike himself jokingly writes from far away seemingly idyllic places about broken and grounded planes. But do you think airplanes break sat still, hell no that shit Mike is dealing with in real time in the air on a frequent basis. As he once explained to me after I asked exactly that the question "the Air force tests stuff until it breaks, fortunately we have redundancy in aircraft design", there is none of the change it out after 2/3 design life philosophy that a commercial airline might employ. Mike sir I take my hat off to you and I for one can put my need for Profiles slightly lower in priortiy to my Freedom, keep up the good work!
 
As an example PCNC do a great job on a newsletters and I go to their website download the PDF and read it each month, if I want to read it whilst partaking of a beer sat on my deck I press 'print' and low and behold in but a few minutes my peripheral device spits out a fully transportable paper copy! Now I appreciate there may be a few amongst us that don't have a computer or printer and to that all I can say is Darwin's theory of evolution has been proven to hold and those few will be extinct soon..... and I can say that because they likely won't be reading this and if they are they won't be able to print it out :>)
 
Julian
 

> Date: Wed, 3 Oct 2012 06:42:44 -0400
> From: michaelsavga at gmail.com
> To: MikeLDrew at aol.com; detomaso at realbig.com
> Subject: Re: [DeTomaso] Right coast
> 
> Aside from having a funny way of appreciating your defenders, two words.
> 
> RENO & PHOENIX.
> 
> Michael Shortt
> On Oct 3, 2012 2:43 AM, <MikeLDrew at aol.com> wrote:
> 
> >
> > In a message dated 10/2/12 20 20 27, michaelsavga at gmail.com writes:
> >
> >
> > It isn't now nor has it been in my 7 years of
> > Pantera ownership, as Rob pointed out, those of us to the right of the
> > Mississippi river have no involvement opportunities at all.
> >
> >
> > >>>For 20 years I've heard this, and find it SO tiresome. Both editors
> > crave inputs from everywhere--there is no discrimination against
> > right-coasters. In fact, the club has gone out of its way to try to be
> > inclusive, even once taking the rather dubious step of using club funds to
> > fly two officers to the Pocono event to attempt to represent POCA (I was
> > there also--on my own dime!)
> >
> > The simple fact is that there are more people and more cars on the west
> > coast, and a better local infrastructure. Attempts to create a similar
> > infrastructure in the eastern half of the country have had varying degrees
> > of success, at least partially due to greater geographical separation
> > between owners which makes it less conducive for regular get-togethers etc.
> >
> > The greatest irony, though, is hearing people complain that they never
> > read anything about their events in the POCA publications. This, of
> > course, is because nobody bothered to contribute anything. If you hold an
> > event and don't tell anybody about it, how are you then expected to read
> > about it afterwards?
> >
> > Mike
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