History The Summer of 2007

Ryan submitted a new blog post:

The Summer of 2007

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A few more... None of these photos would be keepers these days, but it's fun for me to go back and look at them. Sadly the last few shots of this roll are pretty much destroyed.













I learned so much from that motor... Vern did not hand me a manual. He did not give me a pep talk. He tossed me a bag of rusty truck stop tools, pointed at the truck, and said, "pull that motor and rebuild it."

I remember being scared out of my mind. Not the dramatic kind of fear. The quiet kind. The kind where you are too intimidated to even ask a question because you are afraid it will confirm what you suspect, that you have no business being there. So I kept my mouth shut and tried to look competent while internally unraveling.

The strange thing is, Vern always seemed to know. I would hit a wall, second guess something in my head, and before I could spiral too far he would drift over. No lecture. No grand correction. Just a quiet adjustment. A soft explanation. A nudge in the right direction. Then he would disappear again and let me struggle my way forward until the next crisis.

When that flathead finally fired, I lost it. I was giggling like a damn fool. I half expected balloons to fall from the rafters. I wanted to declare a holiday. Vern and Keith? They barely flinched. Just a subtle smirk, maybe a nod, and then right back to whatever they were doing.

To them, it was just another engine... a regular old Tuesday... To me, it was proof I could do something real and a holiday.

The truck lives in Texas now with a hot little small block stuffed between the rails. I have no idea how long my flathead survived in the wild. But it did what it needed to do. It taught me what it was supposed to teach.

 

Vern’s place is the kind of environment that scrambles your senses if you are not careful. There is so much history stacked into every corner that your brain starts short circuiting trying to process it all.

One summer he decided it was time to pour a concrete floor in one of the lean tos. A simple idea in theory. In reality it meant moving what felt like a billion pounds of parts that had been resting there since the Eisenhower administration. And yes, I drew that ***ignment.

What looked at first glance like piles of useless **** started revealing itself as I dug in. An Ardun overhead conversion kit sitting in its original crate like it had been shipped yesterday. Halibrand parts stashed away who knows how many years earlier by Kent Fuller. Boxes within boxes of things that would make grown men weak in the knees. It took me days to catalog the chaos, each layer peeling back another chapter of speed.

By the following summer the concrete was poured. Clean. Smooth. Probably beautiful.

And completely invisible.

 

I don’t know if I have ever had stages with this stuff. Some people drift in and out, flirt with it, leave for a few years and come back older and wiser. That was never me.

There was no moment where I “discovered” hot rods. They were just there. In the air. In the background noise of my life. By the time most people are figuring out what they want to be into, I was already in too deep to consider anything else.

These photos were taken in 2007… By then, TJJ was pushing 13 years old…

 

I feel like writing this morning... So excuse all the steam....

My first word as a baby was “car.” Not mama. Not dada. Car. You can pin that one squarely on my old man. The man treated gasoline like holy water and I grew up baptized in it. Sincerely.

In fact, my first self induced car accident came at four years old.

My dad’s best pal at the time was Don Kizziar, a serious car guy with a liver that occasionally wrote checks his better judgment could not cash. One night Don tied one on at the bar and not wanting to drive under the influence, he called my dad for extraction. My mom was out with her friends and Dad did not want to leave me home alone, so he did the only logical thing a man like him would do. He strapped me into his turbocharged 1975 Corvette race car and we went to pick up Don.

We got there. Don took the p***enger seat. Which meant I got bumped to the console.

I was thrilled.

From that perch I could straddle the shifter like a throne and “help” Dad change gears. I can still remember the feel of it, both hands wrapped around the knob, pulling with everything I had to drag it into second and fourth. I did not have the strength to push it forward into first or third. So I specialized.

That was not enough for me. Somewhere on the ride home, I decided shifting was entry level work. I wanted to steer. So I leaned over and grabbed the wheel.

The car darted. The ditch came fast. We rolled eleven times. Eleven. I went out through the shattered driver’s side T top like a rag doll shot from a cannon. That, according to the doctors later, is probably what saved my life. Escaped with only a broken leg to show for it.

Dad and Don got knocked around hard. Broken bones. Blood everywhere. The kind of wreckage that makes a tow truck driver shake his head. But they pulled through. A few months later they were back on their feet like nothing had happened. My dad still had a shard of GM fibergl*** buried in his shoulder when he died. Never bothered to dig it out. Just carried it around like a souvenir.

But they lived. And in that kind of story, that is what counts.

The Corvette did not.

There was not much left of it after that night. Just the turbocharger, which still sits in a box in my shop like a relic from a previous life. And the fuel filler flap, framed on my wall, a small circle of fibergl*** and memory.

 

Was that the year of the first Hot Rod Revolution?

 

Yeah... My summer went as follows:

Started with manual labor for Vern. Essentially, whatever odd job or ******** task he didn't want to do, I did for about a month. After he was satisfied, he tossed me the bag of tools and pointed me towards the motor. Once that was done, we set up and ran the Revolution... And then after all that, Kieth and I headed to Kauai with the wives for about a week.

And not to be risqué about it, but our son arrived nine months later. Funny how timing works out when you stack that kind of summer together.

 

I had fun..... I will never forget it.

 

I've pee'd on your pee.