Three Sundays before Christmas 1997, Tacoma Mayor Brian Ebersole did what dignitaries in parades do. He climbed into the back of an old classic car to wave at the crowds lining downtown streets for the annual Christmas parade.

His driver that night? Norm LeMay, son of an old garbageman who spent 40 some years collecting mostly mint-condition old cars – some 2,400 of them and counting.

Ebersole and LeMay marveled at Harold LeMay’s cool, quirky hobby.

By the following July, however, the wheels set in motion that drizzly December night led to 78-year-old Harold LeMay and the City of Tacoma announcing joint pursuit of a downtown museum to show off LeMay’s collection.

In the 12-year-long slog toward making a museum real, Harold LeMay died. Tacoma’s political leadership has completely changed. The museum concept morphed from grand to grandiose under the creative strokes of architect Alan Grant’s pen. Fundraising, once bullish, has sputtered with the U.S. economy. We, the people, have grown so numb to the painstaking, incremental progress reports that we’ve wondered out loud if the darn thing would ever get built.

And, most significantly, America’s love affair with the automobile – the driving force behind the museum’s original appeal – clearly has started to end.

This week, General Motors will notify nearly 1,200 of its auto dealers that their franchise agreements to sell GM cars in 2010 won’t get renewed. And that won’t be the end of it.

GM, forever our country’s largest automaker, announced in April that it plans to shrink its dealer network from 6,200 to 3,600.

Chrysler announced Thursday that it would close 789 of its 3,181 dealerships while it simultaneously goes through bankruptcy and the transfer of some assets to European automaker Fiat.

WE MIGHT SOON BYPASS DEALERS

David Childers, CEO of EthicsPoint, recently wrote that we eventually will buy cars from automakers like we buy computers from Dell – online, direct from the manufacturer, custom-ordering the accessories and accoutrements we need. Carmakers don’t have to worry about supply and demand because they make the car as you order it and cheaper by saving a bundle with a streamlined supply chain.

This week in The New York Times, Christopher B. Leinberger, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution, real estate developer and author of “The Option of Urbanism: Investing in the New American Dream” wrote this:

“This country is in the middle of a structural shift toward (a) walkable urban way of living and working. After 60 years of almost exclusively building a drivable suburban way of life, which the market wanted and we in real estate built, the consumer is now demanding the other alternative. That alternative is for places where most everyday needs can be met within walking distance and cars are not a necessity for every trip out of the house.”

Need more evidence that our love affair with the automobile has soured?

Guess what vehicles ranked No. 1 and No. 2 in sales in Pierce County in March? The Toyota Prius and the Ford F-series pickup. Neither of those models sells based on a buyer’s love affair with the automobile. The Prius, a hybrid electric car, sells because of its buyer’s love of the environment. The Ford pickups sell for functionality.

COLLECTION’S VALUE SOARS

What does all this mean for the LeMay collection?

It means we have something much more valuable, much more historic, much more attractive than we thought. LeMay’s vintage cars no longer simply represent quaint points in time of an ongoing era. They represent an era that may already have ended or soon may no longer exist.

And the relentless push to break ground for the museum in September has become more meaningful, more urgent, more epic.

We should have seen this coming. Molly Carsten did. The curator of the Museum of Transportation in St. Louis studied one-fourth of the LeMay collection in late 1998.

While we all gushed over the fact that the Guinness Book of World Records officially deemed LeMay’s collection the largest in the world, Carsten told us to stop focusing on its size and focus on the treasures in it.

Some cars are so notable in their distinctiveness that she listed them in her report as of “inestimable” value.

“It’s the most extraordinary collection I’ve ever seen,” Carsten told The News Tribune. “It’s the most comprehensive anthology of vehicles in this country. … Once they become museum artifacts, their importance and their value lies in what they mean for interpretation.”

For interpretation of an old love affair, but definitely an affair to remember.

Dan Voelpel: 253-597-8785

dan.voelpel@thenewstribune.com