The ‘Vette Cult : Countless worshipers aren’t content to drive one; they simply have to <i> own</i> one.
On a lonely stretch of highway in Central California, Mike McCloskey lives an American dream.
He’s doing 55 m.p.h.--and minding his own business, thank you--at the wheel of his 1985 Corvette, resplendent in all its fiberglass-and-fuel-injected fury.
Suddenly, a Volkswagen whooshes past him, doing about 80 (and spoiling not only Corvette’s image but VW’s).
It’s also enough to turn McCloskey’s face as red as his car. After all, he’s an erstwhile national drag-racing champion and a Vietnam-era fighter pilot. There’s a high-performance ego at stake here.
As McCloskey rapidly sneaks up on the VW, he asks his passenger to watch the speedometer. Then he stomps on the accelerator pedal and--just like that--swerves by in a blur.
Take that , VW!
“What did you see on the speedometer?” McCloskey asks his passenger.
“I saw 131,” she says.
Later, McCloskey savors the moment, reminiscing at home in the Santa Clarita Valley, where he keeps seven other Corvettes--some vintage models that he has fully restored, others still works-in-progress, ranging from the years 1954 to 1967.
“I shouldn’t be going that fast out on the highway,” he says, recalling his impromptu duel with the VW, “but you’ve got to do it once .”
So it is with motorists who, like McCloskey, are incurably smitten by the Corvette’s muscle and charm--”the ultimate middle-class expression of sex on four wheels,” as it’s been called--in this, the 40th-anniversary year of America’s first assembly-line sports car.
It’s not enough for countless Corvette worshipers to drive one; they simply have to buy one, though many Corvettes from the 1950s and early 1960s that sold brand new for only $3,000 and $4,000 now sell for upward of $50,000 (equal to the sticker price on many of today’s Corvettes).
And Corvette love affairs seem to be an epidemic in the San Fernando, Santa Clarita and Antelope valleys.
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Kathy Hosler, 33, of Lancaster--owner of a 1974 Corvette that she and her husband are restoring--first fell head over wheels at a carwash she participated in during high school. “I was the only one who could drive a stick-shift car. And in came this white Corvette with white interior. I drove it 50 feet. That was it. I said, ‘I’ve got to have one!’ ”
Why do so many fawn over the Corvette? What is it about a car that inspires an almost cult-like fanaticism--especially among the estimated 20,000 in Corvette clubs nationwide?
And why do antique cars in general (Corvettes included) spawn a subculture--similar to baseball card and comic book collectors--at car shows, rallies and cruise nights such as those at Rudy’s Bean Pot in Tujunga (Wednesdays), Bob’s Big Boy in Toluca Lake (Fridays) and Carney’s Restaurant in Studio City (Saturdays)?
“It’s a way to relive our youth,” McCloskey says. “Every time I turn another bolt on one of these cars, I’m reminded of something I did as a kid. And you have to love these older cars. I don’t know anybody who’s working on them for a living who’s making a dime.
“But, with these cars, you feel like an artist or a craftsman. You have to want to restore them to the way they were.”
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A Granada Hills banker, Tom McArdle, 46--owner of two 1958 silver-and-white Corvettes--agrees.
“We tend to focus on cars from the most impressionable years of our lives,” he says, pointing out that a popular T-shirt is inscribed: “Yeah, they made Corvettes after ‘67, but who cares?”
The first time Dave Ferguson, 54, of Quartz Hill saw a Corvette, he was watching Dinah Shore’s TV show as a teen-ager when a commercial rolled out the original ’53 model. “I wondered what it was--I’d never seen anything like it,” says Ferguson, a test pilot who is director of flight operations for Lockheed’s Advanced Development Co.
As an adult, Ferguson has owned as many as 12 to 14 Corvettes at a time (“I restore them as a hobby”), including the ’65 model he purchased new in December, 1964, and has kept since. “It’s still in great shape,” he says. “Better shape than I’m in.”
For her part, Kathy Hosler says she’s “exhilarated,” not so much by the Corvette’s speed but by its style and what she believes it does for her self-esteem.
“I couldn’t care less if anybody looks at that car and says, ‘Wow! She’s driving a Corvette!’ ” she says, relaxing at work (as a Pacific Bell broadcast video services manager), her office cubicle adorned with color photos of vintage Corvettes, including a midnight-blue ’53 convertible. “It’s just something that I like. It’s something that I feel good in. It makes me feel good about myself. And nobody gave me that car. Nobody else maintains that car. It’s something that represents me .”
What’s more, Hosler met her husband, Skip, 39, now a retired Air Force mechanic, at a meeting of the Antelope Valley Corvette Club. They both owned ’75 Corvettes and, by chance, attended a club outing at a movie together.
“Until then, I didn’t know him from Adam,” she recalls. Then she smiles, adding, “It didn’t make sense for us to go in two cars.”
Similarly, Donna Yerman Ward, 41, of Sherman Oaks says the 1965 Corvette she has owned since high school helped her conquer shyness.
“It brought me out,” says Ward, now a Los Angeles chiropractor. “It was always fun to drive up to a place in a car like that. Yes, there have been a lot of downsides to it. It’s expensive, paying for the insurance and the top-grade fuel.
“I never talk to strangers on the street, but when I’m in that car, somebody will start up a conversation. You know what they’re going to talk about--the car. Men are crazy about it. When I was 19 and 20, I loved it because all these guys were always dying to drive it.”
Back then, Ward adds, “Police used to follow me and stop me a lot. They wanted to discuss the car.”
Burbank’s chief of police, David Newsham, does more than discuss Corvettes. He owns a ‘66--painted blue, of course. He says the 14 Corvettes (ranging from ’58 to ’69 models) he has owned since the mid-1960s, when he was an Air Force pilot, have fulfilled a dream.
“Every car magazine I read while I was stationed in Europe talked about the Corvette as a strong performance car,” he says, “and, of course, there’s always a little status attached to them too.”
Newsham sometimes drives his ‘Vette to Bob’s Big Boy in Toluca Lake on those Friday cruise nights, which are organized by car buff Leon Beauchemin and crammed with customized antique cars and hot rods. Their middle-aged owners gather in the parking lot to relive their yesterdays, many clad in T-shirts bearing the logo of Burbank’s Road Kings car club, formed in 1952 by some who then attended high school.
“I’ve got nothing against Corvettes,” says Beauchemin, who’s restoring a ’49 Chevy truck, “but they’re the closest thing to a factory-built hot rod you can get.”
Just as Corvettes themselves vary, so does their owners’ passion about the cars--depending on how much they spend toward upkeep and restoration, whether they drive for pleasure or competitively, whether they give them a showroom-new look again or simply keep them on life support.
There seem to be as many levels of enthusiasm as there are body styles, compression ratios and all those other appointments that Chevrolet has cranked out since 1953. (The car originated in Detroit, with only 300 inaugural Corvettes--a trademark wire mesh shielding each headlight. They were assembled later at a plant in St. Louis and are now built in Bowling Green, Ky., not far from where a Corvette museum is under construction.)
McCloskey, for instance, is a glib, retired 52-year-old businessman who restores Corvettes (for both himself and for others) with the painstaking zeal of a brain surgeon, often at $20,000 to $35,000 per car. Each car is “not correct,” in his words, unless each of its 4,600 or so parts satisfies every criteria for show-class authenticity, right down to the inscriptions and other markings on each nut and bolt.
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His workplace is so meticulous that his cars under restoration sit on red carpeting. “I spend a lot of time on my back under these cars,” he says. “It keeps me a little warmer in the winter, and it keeps the tools from rolling away.”
It’s not unusual, either, to find mousetraps on the carpeting inside McCloskey’s cars. “I don’t think I have mice in this garage,” he says, “but I can’t afford to have mice get into the cars because they eat the upholstery.”
Meanwhile, Noel Milovic, who owns two ’61 Corvettes he has restored (as well as an ‘89), works as a land surveyor by day in the foothill communities of Sun Valley, Sunland, Tujunga and La Crescenta, then revitalizes Corvettes during his spare time.
“You get caught up in it,” he says. “I bought a ’72 for my ex-wife and gave a ’79 to my ex-girlfriend.”
Milovic smiles as he swigs coffee inside Rudy’s Bean Pot. He nods toward his squeaky-clean, red ’61 Corvette convertible outside, parked among other antique cars and small knots of admirers.
“Now,” he says, “some of my friends tell me that car is an engagement ring.”
Less committed to ground-up restoration--but no less passionate about Corvettes themselves--are owners such as Dave Filson, 45, of Glendale, who owns a rare ’55 hardtop convertible (with personalized license plates: “ORIG 55”), a ’74 and an ’80.
His wife, Fran, also a longtime Corvette fan, says: “It’s almost like ‘Corvette’ is the first word out of his mouth every day.”
Still, Filson says he and other members of the Vintage Corvettes of Southern California tend to keep their cars more for enjoyment than for the emotional rush of competitive shows such as those promoted by the National Corvette Restorers Society.
“Our club has been criticized because our cars aren’t white-glove clean,” says Filson, who works as a senior engineering technician for the city of Burbank. “Well, our cars are both clean and street-driven. You almost can’t drive a show car. You get a little bit of oil or grease on something, and you’ve got to take apart the car to clean it. And there are a few of us who just like to hang onto cars, rather than buy and sell them just to turn a profit.”
As Tom McArdle of Granada Hills says, “These cars are meant to drive, not sit there.”
And don’t expect Ward to spend sleepless nights over what a panel of contest judges--or anyone else--thinks about her ’65 Corvette. She’s too busy taking just-for-fun excursions in it, often with the elder of her two shaggy-haired dogs in the passenger seat. “Most of ‘em are nuts,” she says good-naturedly of other vintage Corvette owners. “I’ve only been to one show. The people who go to them are always cowboy types.”
Whatever they are, these ‘Vette-erans of America’s romance with antique cars tend to share a bond for the way they were, gazing at life through their rear-view mirrors.
McCloskey, for one, responded to a Times classified ad placed by a Laguna Beach man who offered a 1958 Corvette for sale.
For two decades, a gone-but-not-forgotten red ’58 Corvette had occupied a tender spot in McCloskey’s heart--ever since he had to sell it during the mid-1960s to scratch up enough money so he could finish college.
“I had bought it for $1,200, and I sold it for $1,200,” he recalls, adding dryly, “I was a helluva businessman.”
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Now he traveled to Laguna Beach to inspect the ’58 Corvette for sale. “It was yellow and a pile of junk,” McCloskey recalls. “Everything was wrong on the car.”
Routinely, at car shows, McCloskey had crawled beneath every ’58 Corvette to see if maybe, just maybe, his old ’58 had eluded the scrap heap. “Each time,” he says, “I’d look to see if the car had some welding done on it exactly where I’d done some welding years ago.”
Now, McCloskey shimmied beneath this rickety, yellow ’58. Suddenly his eyes widened. He shouted, “That’s my car!” Not just the same year or model, but the very same car .
This time, he bought it for $8,500.
Today, that same ’58 glistens like new--painted a snazzy red and perfectly “correct”--at McCloskey’s house in the Santa Clarita Valley, as if to reassure Corvette keepers (and dreamers) everywhere that they can drive home again.
Going Cruisin’
Cruise nights (regularly scheduled informal car shows) featuring antique cars, including custom cars and hot rods, occur at these times:
Wednesdays: 6 p.m., Rudy’s Bean Pot, 6736 Foothill Blvd., Tujunga. Phone: (818) 352-8787.
Fridays: 6 p.m., Bob’s Big Boy, 4211 Riverside Drive, Toluca Lake. Phone: (818) 843-9334. 6 p.m., Kevin’s II, 8315 De Soto Ave., Canoga Park. Phone: (818) 998-7171.
Saturdays: 5:30 p.m., Carney’s Restaurant, 12601 Ventura Blvd., Studio City. Phone: (818) 761-8300.
Third Saturdays: 6 p.m., A & W Drive-in, 44328 N. 10th St. West, Lancaster. Phone: (805) 948-1191.
Fourth Saturdays (except during winter): 5 p.m., Hudsons Grill, 44695 Valley Central Way, Lancaster. Phone: (805) 945-4119.
