The Surviving Rocky Mountain Life Insurance Company Cougars
Every story has a beginning, and that was told during the story of Rocky Mountain Life Insurance Company. Once the cars were returned by RML, the story has all sorts of twists and turns.
Some say all the cars were repainted to fit the normal paint selections. Robert's car was one of five resold by Dearborn Motors in Kamloops, BC that were still purple. Over the years other purple cars have also surfaced or been indicated through assisted searches.
With Robert's introduction to these cars in 2003, when he bought his, many sources of good information had already been lost. The introduction of the freedom of information act, further restricted access to most of the data. Recently he also learned the for and against of computerization, how historical records were not brought forward to search on. The internet on the other hand has opened new avenues of search, until everyone decided to make money with their information.
The catalyst for the search and successful identification of these cars started with Ray Harwood, who lived on Vancouver Island. His chance encounter with a mostly stripped purple frame, and his knowledge of Cougars was the real beginning of where we are today. That frame has undergone reassembly, and again in 2018 a full restoration, calling on the nine lives of a cat to survive.
Robert's involvement with his car in near complete condition, was to seek out information about the company who brought them into existence. He also spent many hours searching for other cars that had also survived, part of that search was to visit as many as possible to collect data and verify them. Not all cars survived, at least three were written off as indicated in a limited assisted search, where the Insurance Corporation of British Columbia sent letters to the last known owners, but were not legally allowed to share any of the data with me. One unfortunate truth in this whole search process, Robert would follow all leads, most of them ended in dead ends that produced no new or valuable information.
