Hello everyone. Gas prices may leave a bit to be desired but at least the weather seems to have turned around. Have heard rumors the last couple of days that the State is considering dropping the gasoline sales tax to the tune of about 20 cents per gallon. As the Beach Boys said back in the sixties; Wouldn"t It Be Nice??????

Before I go into event coverage and club business, let me cover what I know you have all been waiting for. It is now time to assign Round 2 of the Car of the Month Articles that you all know and love. An absolutely phenomenal effort on your part from Round 1 got us this far. A big round of applause to all of you that participated. Once again, I randomly drew names from my trusty Ziplock bag. And the winners were for May; Tom & Vicki Stanger - Charles & Poncho Neefe - Warren & Sharon Payne. June; Bret Sanford - Mike Ryder -Steve & Cameron Papai. July; Keith & Chris McLelland - Dennis Clark - Jim Roseberry. Aug; Wayne & Jodi Barnes - Errol & Nancy O Berry - John & Yvette Arvizu. Sept; Jim Kendall - Tim & Rain Taylor - Alan Blalock. Lastly in Oct; Brian Nickless - Donald & Esther Hawthorne - Mori Benveniste.

Please look at the website or previous newsletters for ideas of what everyone else is doing. If you do not have pictures of your car, Jim Lent will be happy to take some at a future club event. As before let me know if I can help! Am confident that you will all come through and get the job done. Thanks in advance for your participation. Everyone enjoys reading them and you get your car put on the website for the world to see! Oh Yeah!!!!!!!!!! Please submit to Jim Lent during the first part of the month for which you areassigned. Jim will be happy to answer any questions you may have on this!

Weather turned out really nice for our March 11th Pyramid Brewery Show 'N'Shine. Check out this newsletter or the website for pictures of everyone having a great time. Thanks to Jim Lent for chairing this event for us. Our cars, plus members plus lunch and a Brewery tour made for a very pleasant afternoon.

As this will get to you after March Good Guys, our next two events are the Benicia High School Car Show and the Central Pontiacs Yearly Event. All were covered in last months news letter. Larry Holt is once again chairing the Benicia event for us and he mentioned to me two things last weekend at Pyramid. The first was that he had it on good authority that the weather would be GREAT. The second was that our club would once again have a turnout worthy of the club participation award. We did it last year and we can do it again. This is a Sunday happening so all you folks that can't make it on a Saturday, come on out and join the rest of us. The Central Pontiacs Show is always a good time and draws a large number of entries. Their club members do a great job of putting on a truly fun show. They are really super nice people. This show is definitely worth your time.

Our next meeting is on Weds April 5th at Harrys in San Leandro. Lets see if we can match the crowd we had there last time. We are going to try using the area back by the bar as there is more room. If it works; fine, if not we will go to Plan B. I will no doubt come up with Plan B on the spot if the need arises. I can talk pretty loudly as most of you know but have no desire to compete with a noisy bar area. We will begin discussing our hosting the June Good Guys show at this meeting. Those of you that are interested in working the show can sign up with me then. Let us try to have our biggest showing yet which will need to be 55+ cars. Look for more info. in our separate article elsewhere in this newsletter and please make my job as event coordinator easier by taking note of and following the instructions outlined there. Thanks!

I hope that many of you are finding our website to be both informative and helpful. Once again, I urge everybody to always check it out for additional information right before an event. It is one of our best ways to notify you of any last minute changes. Our Webmaster, Skip Hendricks welcomes your comments and suggestions. If you want to pat him on the back to say thank you for the fantastic job he has done, I am sure that it would make his day a little nicer. Skip is keeping everything totally up to date. You owe it to yourself to check it out as there is a lot of fun stuff there.

Another way is to get on the GGGoats email list. If you are not getting periodic messages about events, then be sure to give Jim Lent your e-mail address. Send your address to jimlent@home.com.

We just received confirmation from Jim Wangers himself that he will be travelling to the Bay Area next May 5th & 6th to attend our 5th year Blowout! We want to get ideas for all aspects of this event from as many of you as want to participate. We will bounce idea off idea as we usually do and decide by vote, majority rule. One member, one vote. The board has no intention of dictating policy with this unless the group as a whole cannot come to an agreement on its own. The board members have one vote like everyone else, myself included. We, the board, will intervene only if it is absolutely necessary to keep moving forward. This is your club and your event. You can have as much input on this as you choose. Some preliminary questions we need to answer:

1. A one or two day event.

2. Club only or invite others?

3. If we invite others; A-bodys only, or?

4. Type of event. Picnic, car show at dealership, cruise & car show. Lots of possibilities.

5. Our financial responsibility will be to cover lodging, food and travel expenses for Mr. Wangers.

Do we want to cover expenses and charge for attendance or give ourselves one heck of a 5th anniversary party?That should give you something interesting to think about until we meet again. For now feel free to e-mail me your ideas, comments etc. on this at: MITYGTO@aol.com

Let the brainstorming begin!

Absolutely great weekend for Golden Gate Goats at Good Guys. We had everyone make it for our indoor display, 19 cars in all and they were all lookin good! As it turned out, that is all that would have fit. GGuys had given us the go for 23 cars. No way! We chose to park the cars in 2 single file rows for maximum space around them. Darn good thing as Saturday's attendance was huge.

We had an enormous amount of people interested in joining the club come by throughout the weekend. 12 to 15 new members would not surprise me. A GGuys staff photographer was seen taking pictures of a number of club cars so

perhaps we will get a mention in an upcoming GGuys Gazette. All of you out there this weekend, ya gotta admit that it got us pumped up even more for the June show that we host. Talked to a lot of people working on their cars that are planning to have them ready for June. Those of you that were not there missed a great time. Our club goal is 100 GTO's at June GGuys.

We have the #,s so lets make it happen!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

In closing. As you can see by the amount of different things discussed here, we have an incredibly fun year in store for all of you. The weather is fine so go ahead and give your GOAT a little workout. See ya in the fast lane!

John

As many of you already know, Golden Gate Goats is the host club for the GoodGuys 7th Summer Get Together at the Pleasanton fairgrounds. This has proven to be our largest event to date with 50 GTOs in attendance last year. Our club has become one of the largest GTO clubs in the nation with approximately 165 current members. The enormous amount of exposure we get at this show has played a large part in helping us increase our membership. Good Guys management was very happy with the job we have done as well as the fact that we pretty much blew 'em away with our level of participation! (I suspect that our past performance had a lot to do with our being offered an indoor display at this years March show.) They invited us back for this years show during last years show! For a niche club such as ours, the opportunity to host a show of this calibre is a really big deal!

Myself along with Jim Lent & John Phillips will be the event coordinators. I will be the pre-show contact and the three of us will be working together during the event like we did last year. We will be spending whatever time is required at the next 2 club meetings to plan for this event. 2000 will be our fourth year as the host club.The previous events went off without a hitch as I am sure this years event will as well. Like fine wine, we are improving with age. It takes a lot of member involvement to make this work. I would like to thank all of you that have worked the previous shows for all your hard work. I am sure all of you will want to participate again this year. Let's make it our goal to make this our largest event ever.

One of the many benefits we receive, as the host club, is our choice of where we want to park. Plan to come on out and work the show, you will have a GRRR8 parking place for the day! I have asked GoodGuys for some acknowledgement in their newsletter, the Good Guys Gazette. Let's totally blow them away with a huge turnout and give them a little positive reinforcement, making them want to give the Golden Gate Goats some ink! We can do it!

Let me go back to early 1997 when our club was but a few month's old. Club member John Phillips was at the right place at the right time and was instrumental in introducing us to Good Guys. John also belongs to the P-Town Pushrods, the club that hosts many Good Guys shows each year. He found out that P-Town was not going to be hosting the upcoming Muscle Car Nationals as they were already doing 3 shows and their members are heavy into rods. John called me immediately and we were able to get the 'gig' so to speak. Without John's help, we never would have been given this opportunity. Thank's a lot, John and I hope I got the facts close to correct!

Those of you that have not yet participated must be curious as to what "hosting" the show entails. Here is what is in store for ya! Our day begins early. We rendezvous in front of Specialty Sales on 1st street in Pleasanton at 5:30 a.m.! We leave promptly for the fairgrounds at 5:45 a.m. We drive to our club parking area near the museum and park the cars. The fairgrounds are very quiet until the exhaust note of 20,000 GTO horsepower fills the air, along with blipping throttles as we back em in. Unless you plan to "cruise"the fairgrounds, this will be your spot for the day. Good Guys event personnel will meet us here and outline what we need to do. We have done everything in previous years from helping with the special areas to directing traffic inside the fairgrounds. Whatever assignment we get is always a good time. Our level of participation determines how long we each need to work. I anticipate one hour per day per person. Those of you with cars in progress, come on out and join in the fun! As more information comes in, we will do a work schedule and post it via e- mail and on the website so each of you knows exactly where you need to be and when so you can maximize your fun at the show. We will also mail the schedule if time allows.

REALLY BIG NEWS!!!!!!!

I just received confirmation that the Good Guys have revised what the host club

receives in return for services and you are gonna love it!

1) $500 donation to our club treasury!

2) Complimentary admission both days to members that work the show

3) One complimentary event T shirt per worker. Additional shirts can be purchased at Good Guys cost ( yet to be determined ). Our club logo will be in color.The shirt will have last years big winners and is always very colorful.

4) Golden Gate Goats will have an article about our club including pictures in the Good Guys Gazette which continues to increase our exposure. This is the national newsletter and is sent to Good Guys members everywhere!

To use one of my favorite sayings, I was stoked when I got off the phone with Good Guys Director of Events & Operations Harry Daviess. Actually, I was beyond stoked but I don't know what to call it! A sweet deal now becomes even sweeter. The club will be doing a BBQ lunch both days. We provide everything except beverages. We need volunteers to help work the show as well as to handle the cooking chores, shopping, etc. Those of you that will be at our April meeting can let me know then. My final deadline to get everything back to them is May 4th, the day after our May meeting.

Once again, if you are working the show you do not need to register (pay) as you get in complimentarily. You can work either day or both days. We will have a work schedule for each day. With the benefits that we now receive, I should think that our turnout will be huge! Don't be shy, let's really pull out the stops and make this our best turnout ever. If any of you have questions, or want to volunteer you can call me at (650) 349-2095 or e mail me at MITYGTO@aol.com or better yet, let me know at a meeting. The sooner you let me know, the easier my job becomes.

To those of you that don't attend many club functions, this one has evolved into the big daddy of them all so to speak. As I mentioned, it is a 2 day show and we are there both days so if you are busy one day, you still have the other! It is impossible to talk this show up too much! To my knowledge, this is the largest Musclecar oriented show on the West Coast. We may be the only GTO club in the country hosting a show like this. I urge all members to come on out and join the fun!

Once again, we will be discussing this event in great detail at the next 2 club meetings. With our April meeting in San Leandro and our May meeting in Redwood City, more of you than ever before will have an opportunity to hear all about this. This hopefully will result in a record # of cars along with a new attendance record. Let us set an aggressive goal of 100 cars to attend. I will be e-mailing all the car magazines letting them know that we are coming out in force. They are always looking for GTOs to do articles on and we have some mighty fine examples of the ORIGINAL MUSCLECAR! Plan to be there!

JOHN

WORK IN PROGRESS
by Ed Cutshall (from the Goat Farm)

Although I have not had much time to attend any of the club activities, I still look forward to receiving the news letter and reading about some of the cars and the experiences of their owners. Over the last 20 or so years I've owned several Pontiac A-bodied cars, as well as some other Pontiac powered vehicles (57 Chevy sedan, '62 Stude, and a couple of Ford F100 trucks). Each one or them was my favorite at the time.

My current project is this '64 Le Mans. I have been assembling it over the past few years with all the left over bits from my business. Some of the modifications I have done so far include fabricating a new front frame section and installing a straight front axle. I have also added a 4:56 12 bolt rear, a set of American Mags, a Ford Thunderbolt hood scoop, and a Craig 4+4 tape deck for some cuising music. The engine is a .030 over 400, with a solid lifter Crane cam, dual AFB's, and Weber Aluminum flywheel.

At this time the biggest project ahead of me is the construction of the fender well exit headers. My future plans at this time are for a Candy Blue paint job and a black vinyl top.I am looking forward to getting on the road this summer.

It should be just the thing for comuting back and forth to work.

NEW MEMBERS

Ann Davis            Sebastopol                 1968 H.T 

Bill Christie         Santa Cruz                 1965 H.T. 

Greg McKay      Richmond                   1969 H.T. 

Dave Cicero       Daly City                    1965 H.T.