435-Horsepower Obsession Leads to L.A. : Corvette: First, Michael Hanley rebuilt the 1967 muscle car’s body. Then he went looking for its soul.
Sometimes a man can be driven by a car that rarely leaves its garage.
That helps explain the obsession that led Michael Hanley on a five-year, cross-country odyssey that ended the other day in Los Angeles.
The car is a 1967 Corvette, considered by many to be America’s premier muscle car--something that packs a visceral punch strong enough to drive a guy plain crazy.
Hanley is a St. Louis aerospace technician who painstakingly restored the worn-out 1967 Corvette’s body and engine. Then he set out to reconstruct its soul.
Doggedly playing detective, Hanley followed a trail of faded pink slips across the United States in hopes of identifying each of the car’s previous owners. Before he was finished, Hanley would discover that he is No. 14.
The trail led to Los Angeles, where Hanley was convinced that someone had stepped into a showroom 26 years ago, handed over $5,500 and purchased the sleek blue Stingray convertible.
Hanley, 42, flew here in 1991 in a vain search for the car’s mysterious first owner. This month, he took out newspaper ads that he hoped would help. After that, he even discussed the case with a private eye.
It all ended with the help of a Los Angeles phone book that led to the original owner.
“This is the car I’d always dreamed of having,” Hanley explained. “I’ve restored it from the frame up. I want it to truly be the car it was when it left the factory.”
He was dying to get copies of any snapshots the first owner might have of the Corvette when it was new. He was eager to buy the original owner’s manual or warranty booklet or window sticker, if they were still around. And if there were stories to be told about the car, Hanley wanted to hear them.
He has plenty of his own to share, too.
Hanley saw his first Corvette when, as a 13-year-old, he tagged along while his father went to buy an Impala sedan. The Stingray he fell in love with that day would be part of a 1963-67 model run that has come to be considered a classic of design and engineering.
The 40-year-old sports car line produced its millionth vehicle last year. But Corvette buffs say the car reached its pinnacle in 1967. These days, that model is the most sought-after, said Corvette expert Mike Canfield of Orange.
So Hanley was surprised six years ago when he found an Omaha man willing to sell him a 1967 ‘Vette for $14,000. “It was in good shape, but it was just tired,” Hanley said. “I decided to save up money and start restoring it.”
The deeper he rummaged under the convertible’s hood, the more surprises he found.
Its original California smog control equipment was long-gone. But so was its first, behemoth engine. Not to mention its original color: somewhere along the line, the marina blue car had been covered by “Oldsmobile brown” and then by bright white.
Hanley turned sleuth in hopes of finding out what happened to the car’s first engine--a 427-cubic-inch, 435-horsepower monster with three two-barrel carburetors capable of pushing the car to speeds of 160 m.p.h.
The hunt proved considerably slower.
Hanley worked his way backward, starting with the Nebraska man. For a fee, most states’ motor vehicle departments will perform title searches; a car’s vehicle identification number will reveal all previously registered owners’ names and addresses.
Happily for Hanley, most of the car’s previous owners were in the Midwest, where people live in the same place year after year and are listed in their local telephone books.
“I found out the car had been in Illinois, where it had been owned by the chief of police in Monticello. Then it had been with a few owners in Indiana for a while. Then it had been in Illinois again.
“I stopped in on the fourth owner in Champaign, Ill., and he pulled out some pictures of it from 1971 when it was brown. I got some copies and returned the originals to him. The fifth owner had painted it white.”
Hanley learned that some of the car’s owners had driven it for only a few months--”just enough time to turn around and make $500 by selling it again.”
He continued until he located the car’s second owner, a garage operator in Goldendale, Wash.
The Washington man remembered buying the car in the late 1960s in Bradbury, a community about 20 miles northeast of downtown Los Angeles.
Old paperwork revealed that the seller had been someone named K.M. Patrick. The garage owner explained to Hanley that he had traded the 427 for a 390-horsepower engine owned by a Corvette-driving buddy.
Hanley traced the engine-swapper to Elko, Nev. “He’s an insurance adjuster now. He still had the engine, but he didn’t want to sell. I bugged the guy until he finally sold it to me for $5,000,” he said.
While he was at it, Hanley paid $4,000 for replacement California smog equipment. “In the old days, people were power-hungry, so they took them off and threw them in the trash can,” he said. “But I wanted to be authentic.”
Serious Corvette restorers are that way, experts say. They want all the documentation they can find for their cars.
“We call them ‘Corvette psychos,’ but in a nice way,” said D. Randy Riggs, editor of New Jersey-based Vette magazine. Riggs said he knows of no other 1967 Corvette that has had 14 owners. But he said restorers often go great distances to learn their car’s history.
Such attention to detail can prove that a refurbished muscle car is not some counterfeit being passed off as the real thing.
“In 1967, according to Chevrolet records, 3,745 cars with the optional 435-horsepower engine were produced. We have a joke here at the magazine that out of that 3,745, only 5,800 exist today,” Riggs said with a laugh.
There are practical reasons for tracing a car’s roots, too.
“Each and every Corvette seems to leave the assembly plant with a personal identity of its own,” wrote Michael Antonick in a 1981 book, “Corvette Restoration--State of the Art.”
“When viewing a Corvette 15 years later, a restorer will note certain things he just doesn’t understand, things that don’t make sense. Perhaps a little part isn’t just like the other similar models he’s viewed over the years. Did the factory do it differently on this particular car for some reason? Did the dealer change it? Did an owner change it?”
Hanley’s finished car, which must have special lead additives mixed with the gasoline, gets 12 miles to the gallon on the highway. Although he has put 1,400 miles on the Corvette, Hanley said he has never had the nerve to take it to a deserted stretch of highway and open it up.
Most of the time it sits in the garage of his Lake St. Louis home.
“Our other two cars stay outside,” he said. “I have a deal with my wife: When it snows, I scrape the ice off her Mercury.” And no, he added, she’s never driven the Corvette.
Although California no longer performs car title searches for the public, Hanley’s hunt ended this week when a reporter’s peek into a phone book turned up Kennett M. Patrick, 50, a lawyer who lives in Chatsworth.
Patrick fondly remembered buying the marina blue Corvette and driving it before trading it in “on a yellow one.” Sadly, he said, he did not keep the original paperwork.
“I’m not a good document-keeper,” said Patrick, who drives a 1989 Corvette, his sixth. “I’m lucky if I have the documents you’re supposed to keep in the car when you drive.”
The news was disappointing for Hanley--who recently has come to view his restored car as “insurance”--something he can sell if the wobbly aerospace industry collapses and he loses his job.
He said he has no plans to sell the car, but he calculated that having the original paperwork would boost its potential $75,000 selling price by a few hundred dollars.
It was also disappointing for Los Angeles private detective Lloyd Shulman, who had seen one of Hanley’s newspaper ads and offered to find Patrick for $500.
But Patrick was happier. He was surprised at the route his old car had traveled. And he was delighted to learn that it lives on a quarter-century later--and in showroom-fresh condition. “I loved that car,” he said.
