Memoirs Of A Confirmed Corvette Freak

I was into it from the beginning, you know. Right from the beginning. I saw the first Corvette, the first one, the show car. I was nine years old at the time and already four years into being a car nut. My Uncle Jimmy took me to a General Motors Motorama in the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in 1953 and it was there. The first one, sitting there under a brace of floodlights with its white paint gleaming and reflecting and twinkling like crazy. There was some model standing next to it with a pageboy haircut and a low cut gown and I kept wishing she would get out of the way. She was saying that this is a show car only, not slated for immediate production. She said it was one-off styling exercise by the General Motors Styling Staff just to test public reaction. She repeated that it was not for production.

How wrong she was.

That first show car was the start of something big, as Steve Allen's song goes, both for Chevrolet and for me. The Chevrolet story is told elsewhere in this issue. My story, a melodrama of 20 years of experiences in and around Corvettes, probably has about as much interest to you as the morning line on hogs. Be that as it may, your intrepid reporter will attempt to carry on anyway with as little dozing as possible.

Because most of our antiquated state motor vehicle laws don't allow 10-, 11-, or 12-year-old boys to drive legally, my next several Corvette years were spent as an observer only. I watched the '53 production model grow out of that show car. I saw the '54 and the '55 at the Motoramas of those years. I read the magazines diligently. I knew that the Vette now packed a V-8 and stick shift. I did a lot of daydreaming.

The cars got bigger in the late '50s. They got four-speeds and bigger engines and multiple carburetors and they went racing. I followed all and patiently built plastic models of each model year.

This continued until I was 16. Then a miraculous thing happened. An older friend of mine bought a Corvette. His name was George Vincent and his Corvette was a black '60 roadster with four-speed transmission, dual four-barrel 283 engine rated 245 horsepower, and even Positraction.

I have to tell you about George Vincent. He was a couple of years older than me and something of a folk hero on the block. He lived in Tarrytown, New York, and was the first guy I ever knew who had actually competed in a drag race. He was also the first guy I knew who went a hundred miles an hour in a car and the first guy I knew who went street racing and the first guy I knew who took me street racing. Like I said, he was my hero.

George had done all this in a '59 Pontiac Star Chief sedan, his family car. It was George who turned me on to Pontiacs, too. My first real car, not counting the '47 Buick Century and the '50 Chevy Torpedo-back sedan, was a '59 Pontiac Bonneville convertible, because of George Vincent.

Read the entire article

Source: Joe Oldham, Hagerty

Posted 9/20/19