Front Cover Back Story

By Mark Johnson

Gerald Curts, owner of the beautiful cover Porsche 356 expaines some of the history of ZoneFest and the history of the color of his car.

Back many years we used to a multi- regional event in Suncoast Region known as WerksFest, and Gold Coast had a similar event known as SonnenFest. I was often the chair of the Suncoast event and Mike Joffee was the chair for the Gold Coast event. After several years of fewer and fewer entrants the two regions got together and elected to have a joint event and called it ZoneFest. Mike and I were co-chairs of that for many years. Great memories!!

OK, the color of my little 356 has no official name. The color was chosen by the wife of the original buyer, Dr. Eugene Willie, They lived in Hawaii and the wife loved the color of the water in the bay near their home. She had the paint mixed in Hawaii to verify the color was to her liking; then sent the paint to the Porsche factory in Stuttgart. The factory then sent the paint on to Reuters, the coach builder across the street from Porsche factory and the car was painted with the paint provided by the owner. Ironically, the paint code on the Kardex is 5 digits where all paint codes assigned by Porsche are only 4 digits. Very unusual, this is not “paint to sample” or “paint to match” which both do have Porsche 4 digit codes. After many inquires I heard from 356 Registry Historian, Jim Perrin. He believes the paint code was assigned by Reuters, not Porsche, which seems to be a reasonable explanation.

So, there is no name given to this color in the Kardex, the Certificate of Authenticity, or even the “build data” sheet I received from Reuters. When I restored the car there were many places where the original paint was still in present. The top of the dash under the leather dash cover looked completely untouched, so I cleaned and polished that area and used a photospectrometer to get a color match.

In my fairly detailed research I did find a mention that when the car first came out of the paint booth at Reuters, the Germans hated the color and called it fauliges Grün (Putrid Green). So I have adopted that as my “Official Color Name”.