DIAMOND CAR

By Ken Gronbach

If ever there ever were a love/hate relationship, it’s with humans and the snooze alarm.

“Snooze alarm” is an oxymoron and the technology occupies a dubious position in our culture. Until the snooze alarm became part of the alarm clock in the 1950s, the transition from slumber to consciousness was a clean break. You were one or the other. Sure, sometimes you would sleep through your alarm, but that was still sleep. With a snooze alarm you can alternate from being asleep to awake in nine-minute intervals. It would be interesting to see research on how many times the average person hits the snooze alarm. Myself, I am a two-, sometimes three-hitter.

We were visiting friends not long ago and as I am given to do, I snooped. A black-and-white 50s-era photo displayed behind a glass door in a china closet caught my eye.

The picture obviously was a subject of pride. In the photo, a man is sitting in a two-seater sports car, which I couldn’t identify. At first I thought it was a King Midget or maybe a Crosley. But according to my friend Shirley, “The car is a Dimond and that’s my dad, Herbert Merrill Dimond.”

Her dad built the car in 1955, but not from a kit with directions. He designed it exactly the way Corvettes were designed. He started with a clay model and finished by hand laying the fiberglass himself over a wood frame built on Crosley running gear. So, I was close.

“He only wanted to build one and never had ambitions to mass produce the Dimond,” Shirley says. “Being unique was very important to him.”

He drove it every day for years. It had a convertible top, but it was seldom used. The Dimond actually had a few very interesting, luxury features. One was the gauge console on the driver’s side that you straddled, a hood scoop, ‘54 Chevy taillights. And it had seat belts, which weren’t standard in those days.