Karma and Corvettes Converge at Auto Show
In their quest for the meaning of life, anxious intellectuals have paid precious little attention to the philosophy of car lovers.
Poets, professors and deep, deep thinkers might well have found true peace Saturday by attending the Petersen Automotive Museum’s Corvette show. There, the road from ennui to self-actualization was quite clear: Don wraparound sunglasses, climb into a ’58 or ’63 or ’84 Corvette, and scream through Barstow at speeds too high to appear on police radar.
“If you drive fast, you become a better driver,” said Ted Osmundson, owner of an ’88 Corvette that he confessed hit 145 mph near the desert town. “You realize your close calls can be corrected much earlier.”
As the typical weekend crowds gathered around classic roadsters and jet-propelled land rockets throughout the museum, rabid fans of the Chevrolet Corvette gathered on one of the museum’s outdoor parking terraces. There they ogled 300 pristine models, from 1953 convertibles to 1996 hardtops, and traded stories of speed, adolescence and a love deep and true.
“It’s America’s only true sports car,” said Bob Heffley, who has owned as many as four ‘Vettes at a time and now keeps two in his Covina garage. “I drive an ’88 every day to work on the freeway, and I’m sorry when I get to work and have to climb out.”
“That must mean you’re sorry when you get home,” his wife, Barbara, said dryly.
“Well, I mean, I hate to turn it off.”
Rolled out to some fanfare but initially lukewarm sales in 1953, the Corvette holds the reputation--at least among this crowd--of being the one true American sports car.
Ford’s Thunderbird, and a handful of other vehicles, may have been in the running at one time, several fans said, but they changed their designs so often that saying “I drive a Thunderbird” could be interpreted in a variety of ways--not all of them flattering to the car connoisseur.
Not so the Corvette.
With two seats, rear-wheel drive, a front-mounted engine and neo-Baroque curves, virtually every make and model declares the driver’s lust for a very long, very straight stretch of wide open road.
“It’s red, white and blue,” said Michael Yager, who turned his teenage love of hot rods into Mid America Designs Inc., an Effingham, Ill., enterprise that sells everything from custom Corvette headers to Corvette shower curtains. “It’s a car you can have an affair with.”
Indeed. The Corvettes on display were clearly the objects of their owners’ love and adulation. They were supercharged and bored-out, lengthened and shortened and lowered. And they had been bathed in colors as rich and subtle as a thick, clean motor oil.
There was the 1963 classic, with a milk-blue coloring so deep it seemed the car must have been made of glass and filled with the paint. There was the black ’94 that changed to a wet blood red as the sun passed overhead and later to a lighter burgundy. And there amid them all was the car that writer Tom Wolfe must have seen 31 years ago when he titled his first book “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby.”
But it was a tomato-soup red car that held Mike McCloskey’s love for more than three decades.
In 1963, the young college student bought a battered red 1958 model for $1,200. He welded traction bars to the undercarriage for high-speed work and tore out the soft top to make room for “my sleeping bag and a six-pack.”
Three years later, half-broke from paying tuition, he sold the car, again for $1,200. And he lived the next two decades with a strange longing.
In 1984, McCloskey began an intense search for what had become a very rare car. Eighteen months later, he answered an ad for just such a car in Laguna Beach. It was yellow, but the paint was cracked and distinctive red paint could be seen below. The welds and snaps were still in place.
He dropped $8,000 on the spot and has dumped $20,000 more into the car. The latest offer to buy the once-again red sports car came from a Swedish collector at $57,000. Not nearly enough.
“What we use these cars for is to relive our youths,” McCloskey said. “And you can’t relive your youth in the wrong car.”
