This is just a little more background to my story...so far.
I was raised a Yankee and as such, on American muscle and was turning a wrench with my dads direction as early as age five. I can't remember a time that there was not a project in my dad's shop, for tuning, re-building or the coup-de-gras, a full restoration. When my friends and their families were going out to the cape, the mountains or the Jersey shore, we were going to Danbury, Lime Rock, Riverside or any number of tracks that have now fallen into disuse or been developed into something else, or we were going all over the place for some type of car shows. You see, my father built and raced cars before Vietnam. When he came back he married my mom and had me. His friends, the ones who had come home with him and that were once his closest buddies, all went their separate ways and he never raced again, but he never stopped working on cars. I appreciate that all the more now and am so sorry I did not understand it then.
I actually remember being quite the jerk (PG13 version) when the 1969 Pontiac we had been working on, more him than me (I had my thoughts on foreign exotics like the Lamborghini already) was given to me on my 16th birthday in 1985. I was into scale trains, R/C airplanes, playing guitar, fast bikes and girls, so cars were just a second thought. I'm still kicking myself for this, but I sold that car a month later for $11,462-one penny and a quarter (all the money “that guy” (still the PG13 version) had in his pocket at the time). I went to the local car dealer, cash in hand and bought the showroom car I had been drooling over forever(that's three weeks to a month in 16yo terms). It was a 1985 Turbo Z. That's a Dodge Daytona, the 80's version of a muscle car, ho-hum.
That was not my first faux-pas, nor by any means, would that be my last. But that was the moment that my dad and I had the first major divergence in our relationship. Oh, That 1969 Pontiac, the Gran Turismo Omologato (GTO), with that ugly Judge sticker on the side and a ton of options, well...it is still running, still winning car shows, sold for over $80,000 as of the last time I checked and it is still making me cry every time I think on it. Anyway, I left home for a perpetual student career and fell even deeper out of favor with my dad. It seemed at the time that this would be the story of my life, even from the second I was born. If I only knew then, what I know now.
In the 90's I was finishing up my first stint of degrees and playing with imports for a short time, until I entered the wonderful world of off-road and 4x4'ing. I transplanted myself to the bay area in California to pursue still another avenue and even more school. I now owned a 1993 Toyota Celica GT (3S-GTE), was re-building an off-road Nissan AWD pick-up truck (stump jumper) I got for free with a disintegrated timing chain and going to school full-time, all the while finishing my internship. It was a busy, but wild time and any problems I had, I had to research and find solutions for myself. My father had already Ostracized me, and even if he had not, he would never stoop to working on, never mind near an import, so I was on my own here. There was no internet as there is today. Much of the research was via phone, Chiltons, auto shops and the occasional guy I met out and about. I think around the third Nissan truck, I got the hang of it, but after finishing my degree, I departed the West Coast, the off-road faze, gave up a partnership with this guy I knew designing some wind turbine things and settled in North Carolina for a short while.
From the last part of the 90's to around 2003, I must have moved Twelve times back and forth between CT, MA, NY and NC. Besides having a paint and bodywork shop in Connecticut, a car club based in the Hudson Valley of NY, including partnership in its performance parts center, to show with on a regular basis and the weekly cycle get together, I spent a lot of time on the road. In 2000 I was 31 years old and a lot older than the kids putting fart-pipes and oversized wings on their cars and calling them custom, so I got a ton of business from the more serious adventurers. I quickly grew to hate Honda, Toyota, Mitsubishi and even some of the more modern domestics. I began spending more and more of my time working with ¼ scale replicas of historic R/C planes and playing a long time with epoxy-glass.
The last move in the winter of 2003 was just after a buddy and I created our own firm in Kingston, NY and chose to relocate to Raleigh, NC., as construction was booming in that area at that time and a lot of our friends and colleagues were still there. We had just passed on a partnership with a modulated cellular site design team, as it was way to new and did not look promising. Anyway, I already owned a house in Chapel Hill, so the move was not a big deal. I just drove my newly acquired black 3.4L V6 automatic 2004 Pontiac Grand-Am GT with ram-air, supercharger (Ecotec/Vortec RSM version that looked and acted like a small 55hp turbo) and my own modified hood (no...not a real muscle car. ie. P.O.S.) down, picked up a U-Haul to take back up, loaded it with my few things, including a TJ Jeep I had just received as payment for a side job now attached to the back of the truck and headed back down again. I can't even begin to inventory everything that I either sold off or gave away at that time, but I know I wish I had most of it back or realized that being in my 30's did not mean that life was almost over.
For a long time, I just gave up working on cars. I even went so far as to gave up riding bikes, I sold the GT, garaged the Jeep and settled on a more respectable mode of transportation. In the summer of 2006, I broke down and bought a new Pontiac GTO. Disappointed, I traded it in for an M3 with a nice sport package that same winter. Work took over my life at this point. My family had move to NC sometime, while I wasn't paying any attention and now took every opportunity they could to share their newly achieved retirement time with me. My mom insists that they moved down there in early '99, but I have no recollection of that time. There were too many micro-brews and so little time, not to mention the hectic pace I ran. I kept that pace until the bottom fell out in the autumn of 2009 and the building market collapsed. I was still playing music then, but NC is a country or disco state, so my group fell apart and we all moved on.
As things would have it, I was contacted by my high-school sweetheart just about that time. I sold the house, my part of the partnership, my BMW, everything that was not tied down, packed up the Jeep and was swooshed back off to Connecticut. I can tell you that I had high expectations for my return, but the only thing high, besides the left-over hippies, were the gas prices. Building and development were almost dead. Places that used to be here are long gone. I guess that it just took me that long to noticed how much has changed here and in me. My dad passed away shortly after I left and I never got the chance to thank him for all he taught me early on. My mom says that he always knew. In my thoughts still, I had the presence of mind to start up a model design/fabrication company for some of the local model R/C guys. How did it go from slide-rule and pencil to AutoCAD and plotters so fast? I bought a nice 3D printer to help out in fab. and once again I was playing with epoxy-glass and balsa. It took off at first, but became more of an airplane hospital and detail center, rather quickly.
All of a sudden I had a baby on the way and my plans changed from running the shop, to taking care of the baby. Yes, I got nominated to be the “stay at home dad” (“the mom” in my day). My son was born in July of 2011, I got rid of the Jeep (after engine, interior, bars, lift, tow, dress up, thousands in wheel/tires and a lot of begging) in August. I bought a 2012 Dodge Grand Caravan that, except for the addition of roof-racks and my driving time, I am not allowed to touch. In a few weeks, I will have another baby at home to keep me company and have been offered a once in a lifetime opportunity, that I will not pass up. My wife told me, “when the children are a little more manageable, next year, you need to find something to do with your spare time.” That's my favorite part, Spare time. Like I ever really have any.
After a way too short talk and a little reading behind my back, she is the one who mentioned building the car.
The preceding has been the “nuts and bolts version”, you understand, but it shows just what kind of strange trip it actually took to get to this point. For anyone who took the time to read it all, I am so sorry to have taken up your time.
