Interesting thread, and no easy answers.
I moved away from the local car clubs many years ago for all the same reasons folks have mentioned here. I do still belong to MAFCA and MARC but really don't see the need. The Internet has made them obsolete.
I've also dropped the AACA. To me the best values of old car magazines are Hemmings Muscle Cars and Hemmings Classic Cars. They come monthly, they are heavy stock paper all color photos about 100 pages and stuffed full of information, at a whopping $1.88 per issue if you pay for 36 months! Compare that to the bi-monthly club magazines that come out to over $8 per issue and they are 75% redundant fluff I don't care about. Compared to the Hemmings magazines if they were monthly they'd be $16 per issue.
Keith also mentioned about the big marque club shows and the repetition of cars and how old it actually gets seeing them. I can't agree more. I stopped going to the Mustang shows, Shelby shows, and all that because it hit me one day, just how boring that all actually was. A line of '65-'66 Mustangs all 50 of them with the hoods popped open and usually some snob sitting in a lawn chair behind it. Naw, never again.
I am a die hard Ford guy, so I want to see all of them, Torinos, Galaxies, Fairlanes, F-Series pickups, Torino Elites and Starsky and Hutch Torinos, heck even old Fairmonts and Granadas plus old Chevies and Mopars and Caddies (from the 60's!). I saw a '68 Mercury this summer just like the one McGarrett drove in the original Hawaii Five-O. I loved that car how cool was that!
I appreciate all the old cars not just stuck on one make, although I'd never own anything personally but the Blue Oval that's just me
