IN MEMORIAM: VAN GO

Amid the dull, uniform flow of Volkswagen Rabbits and Chrysler K sedans during the 1970s, of Toyota Corollas and Honda Preludes during the 1980s, of Jeep Cherokees and Ford Tauruses during the early 1990s, Ernie Steingold’s van could be depended on to bulldoze the monotony. His ride was an encrusted reef of originality, a shimmering profusion of cast-brass steer heads and sombreros, tragedy and comedy masks, semi-sacred images of Buddha, Confucius, Queen Nefertiti--and so on. Beneath the trinkets, he had boosted the van’s cash value, riveting as much as $15,000 worth of brass-plated silver dollars to its flanks. Throughout two decades in his Burbank driveway, he had transformed this assembly-line GMC vehicle into one man’s victory of self-expression over mass production.

The 1976 van had served him in his job as a traveling vacuum cleaner salesman and repairman. He could tool around in a wild purple shirt unbuttoned to the navel, with no offense meant to his customers, and none taken. Yet any shirt was as much a discredit to Steingold as a garage would have been to his van. For he had honed his physique into such an epic of bursting pecs, flat abs and rock-hard calves that, well into his 60s, only his trademark black bikini-cut swim briefs could do it justice.

A week before his death from a heart condition last November, he was still grafting brass onto his masterwork. As usual, he dragged his daughter off to take a gander. “Come here, Tracy. I have to show you what I put on. It’s incredible.”

“I’m like, ‘OK, OK,’ ” Tracy Bouvier recalls. “He’d always ask me to go look, for years, when I’d visit.” Steingold’s family is considering placing his van in a museum.