Car museum owner looks for buyer.

BRANSON, Mo. - It's 1957: The sky over Flint, Mich., glows at night from the spark-showering assembly lines. At Ford's River Rouge Complex in Dearborn, the hammering goes on day and night. Corvettes get fuel injection. Chryslers get tinsel-bright tail fins big enough for Sputnik to see. The Detroit Lions win the NFL championship.

The Motor City is firing on all cylinders.

That was then, and this is now, and now - as everyone knows - is a desperate moment in the history of automaking. So you might expect a certain longing for the glory days. Yet on a recent morning at the '57 Heaven museum here, only a handful of out-of-towners meander through the tail-finned forest of Packards, Plymouths and Pontiacs.

The museum, opened less than three years ago in the Dick Clark American Bandstand Theater, includes a showroom-perfect example of every convertible built in the United States in 1957, as well as a large assortment of '57 hardtops, wagons and pickups - 66 in all.

Long minutes pass when no one is there to admire the barge-like Lincoln Premier Convertible (18.6 feet) or the aquamarine Hudson hardtop. Background music - Platters, Fats Domino, Elvis - plays surreally to the empty hall.

Museum ticket sales were off 50 percent in 2008. In September, the museum's owner, car collector and real estate developer Glenn Patch told employees he plans to sell the cars and the museum's contents. Asking price: $17 million.

Like Detroit itself, he says, "I'm looking for a bailout."

There are dozens of U.S. car museums, but the '57 Heaven is the only collection of note organized around a single year. From a historian's perspective, says Ken Gross, former head of the Peterson Automotive Museum in Los Angeles, "it's a very eccentric way to collect cars."

But it was some year. If 1967 was the Summer of Love, 1957 was the Summer of Chrome.

Here's a Ford Fairlane 500 Skyliner, the first retractable hardtop. There's a Chrysler 300C, one of the original muscle cars, with a 161/2-rpm record player in the dash, the era's iPod. And over there, a Nash Metropolitan, a British-built tadpole of a commuter car, precursor to today's Smart car. In some ways 1957's cars weren't so different from those of 2009.

And, as it is today, the industry was cutthroat. By 1957, domestic automakers had caught up with demand for cars - any cars - following suspension of auto production during World War II. To walk among the extinct nameplates now is to be reminded of the industrial Darwinism of postwar Detroit.

That year "represented a lot of firsts and a lot of lasts," says Bob Schmidt, the museum's curator since it opened in April 2006. "It was the last year for DeSotos with hemi engines, the last year for a full line of Packards . . . the last year for Hudson. It was survival of the fittest."

A half-century later, it's the difference in Detroit's circumstances that makes the museum so melancholy. Inside these doors, Cadillac is the Standard of the World, the malts are flowing, and the Chevy Bel Air is the coolest thing on wheels. Outside, the Big Three are on the brink.

Museum owner Patch made $100 million in publishing, retired before he was 50, and went on a car-buying tear. "I've always had a lot of toys," he says. "A buddy of mine had a red and white Corvette, and I told him, 'Hey, I'm going to get one of those too.' "My buddy said, 'You know, you can't have them all.'

"I decided, he's right, I needed a goal. I decided I'd get all the '57 convertibles, 32 of them."

Why 1957?

"I thought they were the prettiest, with the tail fins - lovely design. The '57 Chevy Bel Air convertible is the best-looking car ever made."

Born in Picayune, Miss., in 1942, Patch spent much of his 15th year "running up and down the road in my dad's pickup. Everybody was cruising, everybody going to the drive-in. It really was like that."

The museum seems to honor the Main Street of his memory, with a Texaco station, a drive-in movie theater, a diner; a suburban tract home diorama with a pink kitchen and bathroom. There's a small population of a dozen or so mannequins - a waitress, a couple at the drive-in, a mechanic - frozen in moments of '50s wholesomeness.

Schmidt, the curator, met Patch in 1993 after the millionaire bought one of his restorations, a spectacular snow-white DeSoto Adventurer convertible with gold trim (now in the museum). Within months, he'd been recruited to help build the collection.

By 1994, Schmidt sold his restoration company to Patch and went to work for him full time. Along the way, the collection expanded to include assorted hardtops, wagons, trucks, even a tractor.

Patch has had a few tire-kickers for the collection, but no buyers. He wants to sell it whole, but vintage car expert Gross thinks that's unlikely.

"The fun of these cars is in the collecting and restoring," he says. "What can you do with these cars? You can't drive them. You can just look at them." As for the $17 million price tag, he says Patch is "dreaming."

Schmidt has advice for the Big Three: "Make fun cars with great styling that remind people of great cars of the past. They should make cars so good that one day people will want to put those in a museum."