Purchase of 1957ford.com website

`57 Fords International is a free internet based car club, devoted to one year of one make of automobile, The 1957 Ford passenger car.  The club was formed in 1996, as an Excite Community, later moving to Yahoo!, then onto its own webspace and domain.  As the owner of the site, I have, over the years, covered the costs of the website out of my own pocket, and during the past 5 or 6 years, donations from some members have helped cover the costs.  Another site devoted to this automobile was coming online about the same time, owned by a good friend.  Now, this year, he has decided to move on, as he has been retired for a while, and does not wish to maintain his site.  The site has reams of valuable information and data, and it is the wish of `57 Fords International to purchase the website from its owner.  The purchase would include digital and hard copy data, information, production figures, old brochures, ads,, in addition to the several domain names he has purchased to tag onto his site.  The purpose of this purchase is to preserve and maintain this valuable information resource, not to profit from it, but to archive and to continue to make it available.  After the purchase is complete, the club will remain free to its members, as well as to the general public seeking information on these beautiful automobiles.  

As we are trying to make this purchase as quickly as possible, we would need to see these funds by New Years.

This has been a labor of love for over 20 years for me, and I plan to continue on whether or not we are able to raise the needed funds.  I believe we can do this without the need to resort to charging membership fees.  I prefer the site to re main free, and free of advertisers.  We have managed to go these 20-odd years without ever having ads on any of our sites.  We did paid membership for a few years, but changed several years ago, and do not wish to revert to that.  

When we are able to make this transaction and transition, we as a club will be grateful for keeping a valuable resource alive on the internet.  It has been a great source of information, and our intention is to take it to the next level.