EXCALIBUR AUTO - Key Persons
Alice owns the company with the Stevens families blessing. Her passion for these cars and their history is what drives her to continue making sure that all owners old and new can get the parts they need and the paperwork to register their cars no matter what country they are in.
From the early cars, Series I through the Series V, she has been involved with the car, from its birth in 1964, in all phases of hands on, from mechanical, fiberglass, paint and upholstery. Then into the machine shop and head mechanic on the Excalibur race team for 7 years. From drawing the prints, machining prototype parts and making the parts on your car to running the R & D department, involved in every and all phases of the car from start to finish.
She has been running a business, since leaving Excalibur and working in her own shop, she has been doing business worldwide for the last 35 years. She started Camelot in 1999 after closing the Brooks Stevens Museum.
Jerry Allen was clearly a key person in the foundation of the Excalibur marque, not only because he was the New York Show organizer (without whom Brooks could never have exhibited his car), but also because he was a Chevrolet concessionaire in the Big Apple. Brooks Stevens remembered that: "We engineered sufficient interest at the Show to convince him…we even took twelve firm orders…and we named Allen the sole concessionaire for the East Coast. He sold our first cars like the proverbial hot cakes as he had an absolutely prime location in New York, including a sumptuous showroom right next to the Coliseum. But, he was also rather worried about something which eventually caused the first modification to be carried out to our car. One day he said to us: ‘Listen guys, I don't give a damn about your Studebaker chassis because nobody can see it and the maker's name isn't stamped on it. The problem is that I can't sell cars powered by Studebaker engines from a showroom that's on the ground floor of the General Motors building. The director's office is on the top floor and one day they're going to stop off at my showroom out of curiosity on their way to lunch and I'm going to have my ass kicked. Couldn't you put a Chevrolet engine in it?' Of course we could…and our first Excalibur turned out to be the one and only one with a Studebaker engine; all subsequent machines received Chevrolet power!"