Fourteen football fields' worth of bare floor, wall to wall, greeted Steve Freeman when he arrived at the Anaheim Convention Center last Thursday to start setting up the Orange County Auto Show. The sight was nothing new for him; as show manager for Motor Trend Auto Shows, he has done similar work plenty of times in convention centers across the country.

Within 12 hours, workers had put trusses and hung extra lighting. On Friday morning, they began laying 500,000 square feet of carpeting. Hours later, 2 million pounds of freight began to arrive at the rear loading docks. All weekend, workers hustled to set up displays such as huge turntables and fountains leaping with water. Freeman has seen it all before in many locales.

You would think he's be used to it, but you could tell my the excitement in his voice that he wasn't. The event in Anaheim is special for him. It's the first major auto show of the season in North America out of 24 that Motor Trend will put together.

By Tuesday, with less than 48 hours before today's opening, Freeman was confident and excited. Automakers have a lot of design shops in Southern California, so "this is really a hometown show for them," he said. "They come down from their offices just to see how things are coming along."

That puts pressure on the workers that they don't often have at other shows. Add the fact that many of the exhibits are going up for the first time -- the equivalent of a season premiere -- and you're talking about after-midnight, madness. At the Anaheim show, worktables are set up on the floor and saws are humming into the wee hours, Freeman said. What happens here could determine an exhibit's success for the rest of the season. Yet Freeman has done enough shows to have cool confidence in the crews.

"These guys are craftsman," he said. "There's pride in their workmanship, from a straight carpet cut to a drape hung just right to all the pieces fitting perfectly in a display, with no chips or flaws. I see people here at 3 in the morning with toothbrushes polishing things just so or fixing a little piece of dinged wood. There's a lot of attention to detail."

During setup, Freeman has to be "essentially a traffic cop, just helping everybody get to where they're going." That's a lot of traffic -- some 400 individuals on any given day.

The day before the show's opening, the concept cars roll in. That's when the fun really starts, Freeman said.

"They need real kid-glove treatment," he said. "They come in on special carriers, they're signed for about six times, and every time they change hands along the process, they're inspected, buffed up and cleaned up. They're the pride and joy of the manufacturers."

They're also irreplaceable and priceless. Freeman said insurance forms don't even list a price. They're one-offs, unique, the embodiment of thousands of hours and millions of dollars' worth of cutting-edge ideas.

The concept cars are always a challenge, but it's more profound this year because there will be 11 at the show. Freeman said that's a pretty hight number; usually there are six or seven.

Also the day before the opening, 2 million pounds of freight boxed up at the rear of the Convention Center was to be dispersed into the displays inside, and five dozen dump trucks filled with dirt and sand were to convert the loading-dock area into the Toyota Trucks Off Road On Site Adventure, where convention-goers can test-drive Toyotas in tougher-than-city conditions.

"And then at the other end, after the show closes on Sunday, all of that sand and dirt goes away in about eight hours, fast enough to get the 2 millions pounds of freight loaded out and on to the next show," Freeman said. "Everybody will be out by noon on Tuesday."

Freeman sighed and concluded, "It's quite a logistical enterprise."