Cool Cat

At 90, Bruce Meyers—the man who gave the dune buggy to the world—is still a kid at heart.

 

 

- Preston Lerner

Here at Big Bear Bash, the country’s largest annual dune buggy gathering, Bruce Meyers lounges in the shade, receiving supplicants with the grace and patience, if not the gravitas, of Marlon Brando’s “Godfather” character. Meyers didn’t invent the dune buggy, but he was the Moses whose seminal creation, the Meyers Manx—the world’s first fiberglass buggy, built in 1964—led the sport out of its Southern California home and brightened up the world.

“That was a once-in-a-lifetime accomplishment, and it won’t happen again,” says Harry Klumpp, whose lifelong dune-buggy fascination began when he saw a Manx on the cover of Car and Driver in 1967. “Carroll Shelby didn’t do what Bruce Meyers has done. Neither did Enzo Ferrari. They just hired the right people. Bruce designed the car himself, and he made it himself, with his own hands. A lot of people ripped him off over the years, and he was very bitter about that. But nobody cares about them anymore, and everybody loves Bruce Meyers.”

Nearly 5,300 Manxes and 1,700 derivatives were sold before the crushing weight of 250,000 knockoffs drove B.F. Meyers & Company into bankruptcy in 1971. But Meyers and his wife, Winnie, rebooted the business in 1999 and have been knocking out modern buggies ever since. “I just turned 90, and everybody thinks I’ve got one foot in the grave. Well, I don’t,” Meyers says. “I’m making a model of my next vehicle—tube frame with Subaru parts. It will give you the performance of a Ferrari and the creature comforts of a bicycle.”