LAST EDITED ON Apr-15-19 AT 10:18 PM (EDT)
NOTE: This post is adapted from a couple of posts I made to my LiveJournal nearly 10 years ago.There's a small dealer of classic cars down in Freeport, the touristy town where L.L. Bean headquarters is located. For many years now, I've been in the habit of browsing their website (which hasn't changed in all that time, apart from what they have) now and then, just to see what they've got. About ten years ago, while doing that, I developed a mighty love for this car.
Fig. A Delraaaaaaay
Not the 1958 Delray in general, though it was a nice car (I like the 1958 Chevrolet in all its incarnations), but this particular one. It's a perfect example of the sort of classic car I love. It's not a show car, it's not all polished up and dusted with a toothbrush and taken everywhere in a trailer by people who would be horrified at the idea of actually driving it anywhere other than between the trailer and the spot where the judges will look at it. It's not an Art Object, it's a car. It's beat-up and the paint's gone dull and the seat covers are worn out, and it's got that little bit of rust down in the corners that all cars that age have if they've led honest lives. If I close my eyes and concentrate, I can imagine exactly how it smells inside. And I love that smell. For those of you who have never been in an old car and smelled the smell I'm talking about, don't imagine it's like old feet and mold or something disgusting like that. It's the smell of a car that's been out in the world doing its thing for nearly as long as my dad's been alive. It's wonderful and nothing else in the world smells like that.
What's more, that is a classic late-1950s color scheme. Especially today, in an era when everyone seems to be either ashamed of or afraid of everything and cars are available (as James May once noted) in black, silver, silver, and black, it jumps out and says, "I was styled by people who were happy to be alive. They lived in a great country in a prosperous time and they knew it, and they wanted their customers to know it too." The Delray was the base trim level for the Chevy automobile that year—the bottom of the range, the cheapest one you could get—and still they put two shades of bright turquoise paint and all that chrome on it.
(You can imagine, then, how heavily decorated the top-of-the-range Impala was in '58. And if you can't, well, here's one.
Fig. B 1958 Impala convertible. Wikimedia photo by DougW.
The Chevy guys really went nuts with the chrome that year. IIRC you could also get the Impala with gold chrome. Well, gold-colored. Obviously not actually made of element 79.)
GM called that body style Scuplturamic, and how of-its-time is that? The best today's car companies can come up with is Cab Forward.
I wanted that car. I still want it, in an abstract, Platonic-ideal sense (it's long since vanished from the seller's website). I want it very much. I want to get it, put a cheap set of seat covers and a nice radio in it, and drive it everywhere, and not let my father do Restorative Bodywork to it, which cost me the '62 Impala I bought nineteen years ago with a similar ambition in mind (more about this in a minute). I want to do that thing I used to do with the Tempest: get it out on the Interstate and put my foot down, wait four seconds while the bridge crew telegraphs down to the engine room for more power, feel that primitive old two-speed Powerglide automatic kick down into Low, and WAAAAAAAAAAAAA feel like I'm doing a billion miles an hour until I look down at that horizontal speedo and see that, with a great deal of noise and fuss and the expenditure of a gallon or two of gasoline, I've reached the deeply satisfying cruising speed of 72 miles per hour. Then I can let my foot off the gas, the Powerglide will slide on into High, and off we go to the movies, or my grandparents' place, or Canada, in the kind of style and comfort that people pay $60,000 for these days and still don't actually get.
I want to take it to the supermarket and slop over into the striped bit next to the parking space, and not care, and be able to get my shopping in the trunk even with a milk crate full of emergency supplies, a full-size spare tire, a proper hydraulic jack, and basically everything I've ever owned already in there. I want to repair it when it breaks down, and patch it up when it rusts further, which it inevitably will, since it's a car that was made in 1957 and it's in Maine, where even the road itself is corrosive part of the year. I want to take it to a dealership the next time they have one of those "cash for clunkers" deals—and have the man fill it up with gas, and drive away laughing.
Maybe in a year or two, when I get tired of putting lead additive in it every time I fill it up, I'll re-do the cylinder heads with hardened valve seats so that I can just run unleaded gas in it, but I'm not interested in doing some kind of crazy-ass hot rod job. The old Chevy smallblock 283 is a perfectly fine engine, entirely capable of heaving a couple of tons of car around, and if you don't drive it as maniacally as I was describing above, it can be relatively economical, at least compared to some of the gigantic engines people have been stuffing into similar cars since the '60s. I bet it'd be no worse than one of today's full-size pickups. And anyway, turning it into a hot rod would be missing the point.
I love my '13 Beetle, but sometimes? Gods I miss having a proper car.
(As an aside, can I tell you the one thing I really love about those photos of the Delray? The car is all beat up and faded, and obviously washing it would be a complete waste of time? But those wheels and whitewall tires are immaculate. :)
So one of the ideal-world goals I mentioned for my hypothetical 1958 Delray was that I wanted to "drive it everywhere, and not let my father do Restorative Bodywork to it, which cost me the '62 Impala I bought... with a similar ambition in mind." I promised I'd explain that bit later on, and, well, here goes.
Some years ago, during that golden period when I was hugely overemployed and (like, I daresay, a good many of my peers at the time) diligently wasting money faster than I can even conceive of earning it nowadays, I decided at one point that I was fed up with modern cars. This was toward the tail end of my Neon's unhappy and accident-prone life. Not once but twice that car was wrecked when I wasn't even anywhere near it—in one case, I was three thousand miles away when it happened. I'd bought it nearly new and it had served me well despite its tendency to get bashed into while minding its own business, but I'd gotten tired of the whole modern-cheap-car plastic-and-tin thing. I wanted something substantial in my life.
So, while on a visit back to my ancestral territories in Maine, I chanced upon a car dealership over in Lincoln that, in addition to ordinary everyday used cars, did a little sideline in older machinery. They had a '74 Chevy Caprice convertible, one of the great godawful boat things like Derek Bacon used to have (his was a '75 sedan, I think, but same basic thing), and that was tempting, but it had the 454-cubic-inch truck engine in it and even driven carefully, which I wasn't likely to do, it wasn't going to do better than about 10 miles per gallon. And then I noticed that they had a 1962 Chevy Impala.
I had considered buying a '62 Impala once before, back in high school, but it had needed quite a lot of work and I'd ended up buying the Tempest instead. (I should have mentioned in its own writeup that Truss and I managed to be spectacularly late getting back to Worcester from Maine in that Tempest once, for no reason we could later identify.) The memory of the Impala's lines had stayed with me, though, and I'd made a mental note that I should have one of those later on. For that year, and that year only, the two-door hardtop's roof was shaped so that it looked like a closed convertible top, with ribs and strut lines built into the sheet metal to simulate the tensioning structure inside a convertible roof. I always thought that was brilliant and I wanted one someday.
Well, lo and behold, this dealership in Lincoln had one, and it was in good running order. It was exactly the kind of old car I like—original and unrestored, a bit beat up, the interior a bit worn, but nothing catastrophically wrong with it. I could, without feeling pangs of conscience about someone's long hours of restoration work, drive it every day. The roof was the only problem; it had been stored in a barn and birds had been busily shitting on it for years, so the paint was pretty much gone from the roof. Not the hood or decklid, weirdly enough, but the roof was ruined. Still, sand the roof, lick of paint, how hard can it be? I sold the Neon to the student of Vincent's who wanted it and bought the old Impala straight away.
Which would have been fine, except that I enlisted my father's help in repainting the roof. He had a giant industrial air compressor and had painted cars, including cars of mine, before. I knew he wouldn't do professional body-shop-quality work, but that was okay with me. I just wanted the roof painted so it wouldn't rust.
But ohhhhhhh no. I had hideously miscalculated. I had forgotten, after several years of living apart from him, that my father is constitutionally incapable of leaving a car well enough alone.
Before I go any further, I should employ some visual aids. I happen to have found, last week, a few photos of the car taken before we had done very much to it. Here, have a look.
Figs. C-D The poor thing has no idea what's about to happen.
Because of the camera angle, you can't actually see the roof, but these are good representative shots of the rest of the car. You'll have to take my word for it that the right side is the same, and not all smashed up or something. It's just against the wall because that's the back of Dad's garage and he wanted the space in front to park his actual car.
Anyway, I think you'll agree that that is a well-preserved specimen of a 1962 Chevrolet Impala two-door hardtop. Here's a close-up of the badge, to give you a better idea of what the paint finish was like on the parts of the car that hadn't been shat on by birds:
Fig. E Doesn't look too bad, right?
A bit dusty, and there's a bit of a dent there in the crease line on the quarter panel, but that was what I wanted, a car with some honest wear and tear, that I wouldn't have to tear my hair out if it got dinged in a parking lot or dirty.
(As an aside, note the twin radio aerials. One of them is fake - it's not connected to anything, just there to balance the look of the car. I love that.)
While we're taking a closer look, here's a nice shot of the interior from the driver's position:
Fig. F Or, as we land yachtsmen call it, the quarterdeck.
Again, worn but nicely serviceable. The fabric on the bench seat has split, as has the vinyl on the armrest—that happens—and the carpets are a bit dingy. (That's not the original steering wheel; we put that in because the stock Impala steering wheel is huge—they didn't fit a smaller one to the cars that had power steering, even though the massive diameter wasn't necessary—and that one allows for more wheel-to-arse clearance.) The sharp-eyed viewer may notice an oddity here: The car has the steering-column lever for an automatic transmission, but three pedals on the floor. This is because, even at this early stage, Dad had already started meddling. He was in the process of installing a manual transmission—because They're Better—when it occurred to him that he ought to take a photo of what it was like before he cut a hole in the floor to accommodate the shift lever.
(And here's another little detail about this car that I love: Notice the smaller second window crank? That's to open the quarterlight, that separate part at the front of the window, which was for ventilation in the days before air conditioning was commonplace. Most cars expected you to touch the quarterlight to open it, but the Impala was more genteel than that. :)
With the buildup I've given it, I'm sure you can expect what happened next: Dad got carried away. Big-time. Before I knew it—I still lived on the outskirts of Boston, remember, and was driving around in a borrowed vehicle of his while he prepped the Impala, which I was assured would be a matter of only a week or three —he had not only sanded the roof, but stripped almost the entire car of paint, for reasons I still cannot adequately get him to articulate. Only the driver's side front fender and a swathe of the passenger side still has paint on it today, apart from some scrids and scraps in the little hard-to-sand areas like those complex curves around the taillights. Moreover, to facilitate that process he had removed all the chrome and exterior trim, including the bumpers and grille, and stashed them in the trunk or elsewhere in his workshop. He'd also removed the seats, carpets, interior door trim, and I think the headliner (ED. NOTE I was wrong about this when I wrote the original version, the headliner is still in place), as part of some grandiose plan to turn it into an Impala Super Sport clone by fitting bucket seats and God only knows what else. He even bought Cragar Super Sport wheels and a set of white-letter performance tires for it.
Fig. G Passenger side front wheel, photographed last month. Note the holes where the trim used to be, and the uncovered but as-yet-unrepaired damage to the door and rocker panel. The paint's still mostly there on this bit, but you just wait.
This was completely not what his mission spec called for when he set off, and believe me, we had some words. He insisted that we had to put in bucket seats because there was no suitable provision for seat belts with the stock arrangement (they weren't standard in GM's full-size cars until 1964) and there was no way he was going to stand for the idea of me driving around in a car that didn't have any. And that it was a good thing that he'd gone completely berserk and stripped off all the paint because he'd found some repair work that had been done to the rear quarter panels that was not up to his standard (despite the fact that it had gone undetected until he'd stripped the whole damn body of the car). Those bits would have to be cut out and new panels welded in, and then the whole thing professionally refinished, and you know, that would be a lot easier if we just took the body right off the frame! Then we could have the frame reconditioned and powder coated while we were at it, and overhauling the suspension and brakes—because you want those to be Modern and Better, of course—would be so much easier, and...
Which is why, nineteen years later, my 1962 Impala is still sitting in my father's garage, up on wooden blocks, with practically no paint on it. It sat there because neither of us had the money to do anything like all that to it, nor did he have the time, since he was still working; and it's so far gone at this point that we couldn't possibly just put it back the way it was. If nothing else, the whole body's speckled with surface rust now that it's been sitting unpainted in a garage for two decades.
Completely stymied a month after purchasing the Impala, I satiated my need for a Large Car (and indeed any car at all) by buying an old Ford Crown Vic, because Dad doesn't like Fords and I knew he wouldn't start screwing with it.
Let me just make that clear: I had to go and get another car because my plan to use this one as my everyday vehicle foundered on the rocks of Dad's sudden decision to Restore the Impala.
When I wrote the original version of this on my LiveJournal in 2009, Dad predicted that he'd have the time, the energy, and the free cash to finish this project... after he retired.
Well, he did that two years ago, and nothing's happened. Instead of any of that, what he did when he retired was buy a gigantic camper trailer and a pickup to haul it with, then started spending summers up in Presque Isle to be near the old folks' home where my grandfather lives. To be fair, Gramp has Alzheimer's and turned 89 a couple of weeks ago, so it's hard to fault Dad for that last part, but... well.
A couple of months ago, I was down at his place to build a couple of new bookcases for the ongoing semi-renovation of my house. We did this in the garage, of course, and so sitting there in my field of view the entire time was the Impala.
Fig. H The classic Barn Box Shelf configuration. Many classic cars find themselves serving this purpose.
You can get a sense of what we're up against here. The other side is worse, paint-wise, but it's also against a wall, so I couldn't get to it. You can see that the trunk lid is completely stripped and has started to rust; none of the new rust is serious, but it's all stuff that has to be sanded and dealt with and will generally take up a lot of time and energy (if we do it ourselves) or money (if we have a professional deal with it as part of the prep for painting the car).
Mind you, we have learned a few interesting things. For instance, when he got to sanding off the old paint, it became evident that that medium blue isn't the car's original color.
Fig. I Detail of the sanded paint boundary on the right rear fender.
I'm not sure what's going on here; both of those red layers are primer, but the grey could be primer or body panel filler, and then they seem to have started with pale blue before thinking better of it and going over it with dark blue, without re-priming. And either way, there seems to be no sign of the original color in that spot, unless that's filler that they applied at the factory for some reason. Up on one of the front corners, though, there's a better set of strata that seem to tell a clearer story.
Fig. J Driver's side front corner, sanded down.
Here we can see the original primer, then the factory color, and then the blue that was on it when I bought it. A quick poke around PaintRef.com suggests that the car was originally Silver Blue, like the 1963 example shown here.
Fig. K 1963 Impala Sport Coupe, basically the same car as this one but from the following model year. Photo from PaintRef.com.
That's kind of interesting (doubly so because, by a strange coincidence, when my parents started dating in the late 1960s, Dad had a 1963 Impala in that color, just like the one in Fig. K above), but I'm not convinced it was worth the way we found it out.
Anyway, working on the bookcases with the wreck of the Edmund Impala hovering in the background was getting me down, and I gave Dad a bit of a hassle about it. He's said off and on over the years that he thought he should sell it, but he never got around to it. Now I was the one saying look, I can't stand having it around like this, we're obviously never going to do anything with it, let's... let's just get rid of it. They've appreciated a lot in value since I bought it; even in the condition it's in now, we'd probably at least break even. I said I hated to do it, because that same factor means I'll probably never have another one, but it seemed like the better option. He said he'd look into it, we finished up our work for the day, and I went home with a heavy heart.
A little while after I got home, he called and said he'd rather come back down on the weekends, when I'm off work, and fix it up this summer.
So... we're going to try it.
I'm not convinced it'll work; he's already started mumbling about whether it would be better to pull the frame and do a complete resto, which is what led us down this path in the first place. If we do that, even if and when it is done, the Impala won't be the car I wanted when I bought it. It'll be a Restored Classic with a brand-new paint job for whoever drives it to be paranoid about. But, of course, in that instance it won't be driven, except maybe to the summer classic car show at the Owls Head Transportation Museum and the like. The car will still exist, and has the potential one day to be better than before, but the dream will be gone. I don't know if I want to spend a summer doing that.
But then the next moment he's convinced himself to do it the way I wanted to do it in the first place, modulo the extra work of undoing what he started 19 years ago, and make a driver out of it. We'll probably end up butting heads about this... but at least we're talking about actually doing something, finally. I think watching Gramp's decline over the past few years has made him realize that he's 67 himself, and the clock is ticking on the wherewithal to undertake things like that. (And as for me, well, I could lose the use of any given faculty at any time, or never. It's a crapshoot having a malfunctioning nervous system.)
That got kind of heavy, but the upshot is that for whatever convergence of reasons, it looks like we're actually going to try to do this, possibly starting as early as this weekend. In fact, we've been talking about a long-range plan that sees both of my 1960s Chevys on the road again within a couple-three years, which is an exciting prospect.
I may blog the project, either here, or elsewhere on the site, or somewhere, I dunno. Maybe it'll be kind of a replacement for Gun of the Week (which sort of petered out because I had to buy two cars and a house, and so I'm not really buying new guns for the column any more).
Anyway, that's kind of where the Car Adventures series over on private-mail has been leading to (that, and I've just been in the mood to reminisce in this, my 30th year of licensed driverhood). If there's interest, I may keep mentioning it. Or even if there isn't. My website, after all. :)
--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
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Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.