Auto Biography

by Earl Swift

  The California car yields little else of use. Paul cuts a section of rain trough from the roof’s right side and welds it to our wagon. He finds that its subfloor braces for the tailgate are good, too. He scavenges both, sandblasts them, primes them, and sets them aside for later. Bobby Tippit removes the car’s chrome trim and labels it, on the off chance that it’s needed, and uses a screwdriver and hammer to chisel loose the chrome retaining rings around the windshield wiper hubs. Otherwise, the California wagon is ready for the crusher.

  While this work’s under way, the new floor pan arrives, boxed in cardboard and strapped to a pallet. It gleams shiny black inside its box, which I notice bears the stamp of Golden Star Classic Auto Parts of Lewisville, Texas.

  Were Painter Paul to rebuild the floor as Fisher Body fashioned the original fifty-four years ago, he’d do it with several separate pieces of sheet metal, reinforced with separate braces that he’d have to weld to their undersides. The Golden Star Classic pan is a single, huge piece, including the central hump down its middle, the braces already attached. It’s an improvement over the original, far stronger than the quiltwork arrangement—and it’s much easier and quicker to install.

  Paul cuts the bolts holding the rear end of the wagon’s body to the chassis, then jacks up the body’s rear with a floor jack that’s five feet long, not counting its handle, and looks more like medieval siege equipment than an automotive tool. When the wagon’s shell hovers more than two feet in the air, he and Tippit carry over the pan, grunting, and slide it between body and frame from the driver’s side. Paul climbs into the car to pull it across. It hangs up on one of the A pillars, but when they grasp the pan’s rear edge and give it a tug, the whole sheet seats itself with a clatter.

  For the first time in thirty years, the wagon’s floor offers no view to the ground. “There, it’s in. We got the son of a bitch in,” Paul says. “Ain’t nobody can say we didn’t.” He and Tippit exchange a high-five.

  I notice a little sticker on the powder-coated floor pan, read its message. I find the same words stamped on the cardboard box: “Made in Taiwan.”

  14

  IF YOU WERE so inclined, you might be able to build an entire ’57 Chevy from scratch, with brand-new parts that have never seen the inside of a GM factory. One American outfit makes beefed-up frames of its own design. A couple of suppliers offer complete convertible bodies, at least one sells a clone of the two-door hardtop, and several peddle doors, trunk lids, hoods, fenders, and complete interiors, all of them fashioned from new materials. Finding a fresh version of virtually every mechanical component is a snap.

  Many of these reproduction parts are built in the States, and a few big pieces are assembled here from steel components produced elsewhere. But a lot of them are Chinese—so many that a hobbyist with a tight budget, political message, or perverse sense of humor could bolt together a reproduction of this American classic that’s more Asian than homegrown. It wouldn’t be real, needless to say, but it would certainly look it. You’d really have to know your vintage Chevys to call it out.

  Odds are, some of the old cars you’ve admired have new muscle and bone beneath their skin, some of it foreign. So Tommy Arney has plenty of company in putting a little bit of Taiwan into his otherwise aged and American car.

  This raises worthwhile questions about what constitutes authenticity in the automotive world, questions such as: How much of an old car can be swapped out for new parts before the whole is no longer old? Strictly speaking, will the wagon still be a vintage Chevy when Arney’s restoration is complete? And: Assuming it’s okay to replace certain worn pieces of an old car, are there particular pieces that must not be replaced, lest the car’s integrity be forever compromised?

  Answering such questions requires a quick look at the factors that influence a classic car’s monetary value, a loose grasp of that subject being necessary to what follows. Stripped to its basics, assigning value to an old car comes down to how you answer four questions about it, of which the first is: Is the car desirable? If you want to get decent money for it, the answer must be yes. That doesn’t mean it has to be a good car, necessarily, just that it be one people want. Mid-fifties Chevys and sixties muscle cars are always sure bets. Ford’s disastrous Edsel now enjoys a contrarian appeal among collectors. A Chevy Vega, on the other hand, won’t ever be worth a dime.

  Question two: Is the car original? Is it just as it was when it left the factory? Does it include all of its original components—the genuine articles, not replacements? An original is more prized than one laced with modern parts or pieces scavenged from other cars, for two reasons. First, it offers an unadulterated view of the past, and thus a lesson on the state of technology and the car culture and America in whatever year it was built. It gives testimony. It has archaeological value.

  The second reason, perhaps more compelling, is the improbability of an old original’s very existence. “Use is the road to destruction in a car,” points out Richard Todd, author of The Thing Itself, a wonderful rumination on authenticity published in 2008. “It starts falling apart the minute you get it. The idea that it’s mechanical means that everything—every action, every bit of use—is threatening to its integrity.”

  Question three: Is the car correct? Does it feature only gear that was available on that make and model, in that year? This is not a repeat of the last question, for while an all-original car is by definition correct, a correct car is not necessarily original—a ’57 Chevy that has replacement fenders from another ’57, for instance, might be correct, but it isn’t exactly as it was when new.

  This was demonstrated to an extreme degree in January 2013, when a 1971 Plymouth Hemi ’Cuda convertible rolled onto an auction block in Scottsdale, Arizona, with a history that included the car’s theft in the seventies, its disassembly and the scattering of its parts, and the abandonment of the biggest chunk on a weedy field in British Columbia, where it reportedly came within days of being taken to the scrapper.

  An American car enthusiast rescued this piece, which consisted of the firewall, inner front fenders, and radiator support strut, in 2001. It bore a numbered tag, proving its pedigree, and from that acorn grew a complete car, fashioned from original pieces tracked down with the help of detectives and others scavenged from another Plymouth. The result was only fractionally original, but because the Hemi ’Cuda is prized among muscle cars, and because only eleven Hemi ’Cuda convertibles were produced in 1971, and because only this one bore Plymouth’s Plum Crazy purple paint that year, its correctness proved to be worth $1.2 million.

  Final question: What is the car’s condition? Is it pristine, ready for show, a museum piece? A good-looking daily driver with the light wear and muddy floor mats that suggests? A rusted-out beater?

  The answer to each question blends fact and opinion. Some cars are more desirable than others, at least to most people, but not so to the exceptions. Some originals are in such compromised shape that their originality might not matter so much. But as a rule of thumb, the highest monetary value is assigned to cars that are extremely desirable, original, and in great condition.

  Again, that’s monetary value, which is not the only measure of worth, for old cars always involve trade-offs. An entirely correct showpiece—its mechanical guts polished to a gloss brighter than the factory’s imagining, its interior spotless, its paint shielded from ultraviolet rays and extremes of humidity—might serve as impressive art, but you can’t take it for a spin, as driving will destroy what sets it apart. An original car with “fair wear and tear,” as Todd put it, must be used gently if its originality is to prove long-term. On the other hand, a car that falls well short of original and isn’t correct in every respect might get you to work and back every day, and there’s obvious value in that. We’re talking about automobiles, after all, machines designed to provide transportation, and as the conventional wisdom goes, the worst thing you can do to a car is not drive it.

  Point being, any restoration has to start with
a clear objective as to what kind of car it’ll produce, and that decision will inform hundreds of smaller decisions that follow. In the case of VB57B239191, Arney had no hope of achieving an original car. The wagon was already on its fourth engine and second set of fenders when he bought it. The floor was unsalvageable. The interior was chewed to bits.

  His next option was to attempt a correct restoration. Much of the Chevy will qualify—it will have an engine identical to that which sent Nicholas Thornhill on his way in 1957. Its exterior will be restored to its good factory looks with replacement panels, as needed, from other ’57s. Its seats will be rebuilt using the original frames or those from another Chevy of the same year. If he wished, he could go all the way and hunt down genuine Fisher Body floor pans for the wagon, either from a wreck or from the factory in the form of “new old stock,” or NOS—parts produced in 1957 but never used, and available at a premium today, often in their original boxes and bearing their original tags.

  But Arney is not gunning for a show car: He intends to return the wagon to the street, in keeping with the philosophy that a car undriven has ceased to be a car at all—and if modern technology offers a better way to achieve that aim, he’s not averse to tapping it. He’d have no qualms about trading the drum brakes for disks, though in this case he won’t, or updating the car’s electrical components, which he will. He plans to swap out the brake and fuel lines for modern incarnations. He’ll trade the old windows for up-to-date safety glass. He’ll have Paul sheath the body in incorrect but durable modern paint. And a one-piece floor pan seems to make good sense, in that it’s stronger than the original patchwork arrangement, and certainly easier to install—and its Chinese origin makes it affordable.

  Outside the automotive world we’re surrounded by such hybrids of old and new, some of them celebrated around the globe. I give you the Statue of Liberty, which beneath its skin has few parts in common with the colossus dedicated at the mouth of New York Harbor in October 1886. Supporting the statue’s copper cladding is an armature of some 1,800 ribbonlike bars, originally made of iron, many of which were swapped out for steel in the late thirties and virtually all of which were again replaced, this time with stainless steel, in the mid-eighties.

  A visit to Independence Hall would be a gloomy, uncomfortable affair without lights and climate control. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater might be in the water, if it hadn’t been reinforced in 2002. Some overseas landmarks revered for their age sometimes aren’t what they seem: St. Mark’s Campanile, the most familiar feature of Venice’s skyline, dates back centuries—or did, before the original collapsed in 1902; the current tower is a clone. Milan’s La Scala opera house was bomb-damaged in World War II; it’s a reconstruction. On the Athenian Acropolis, one of the Erechtheion’s six maiden-shaped columns was looted and another broken by a British nobleman in the nineteenth century. When I visited the temple as a kid, in the late sixties, unconvincing concrete statues had replaced them. The other four have been removed and replaced with concrete since.

  Finally, the famous Hollywood sign in Los Angeles dates not from 1923, when its first incarnation appeared as a billboard for a nearby housing development (“Hollywoodland”), but from 1978—when the original, rusted and broken, its third O toppled, was removed from its mountainside perch and rebuilt from scratch with new concrete and steel.

  It remains beloved because it succeeds as a visual reminder of the movie capital’s past; its spirit is true to the original, even if its metal is not. Likewise, to a buyer seeking practical transportation dressed in high fashion, the wagon will be a good fit—a far more suitable choice than a car restored with slavish devotion to originality or correctness. And Arney’s restoration will be truer to the wagon’s spirit than a perfect show car, because it’ll keep the Chevy doing what Chevys are built to do.

  A RELATED LINE of inquiry presents itself in mid-July 2011, when Arney tows a ’57 Bel Air four-door hardtop onto the lot and deposits it outside Painter Paul’s body shop. It’s not in terrible shape; fact is, it’s in better condition than the wagon in virtually every respect. The body is fairly straight and rust-free. The seats are intact. The engine is clean, its exhaust manifolds freshly painted, its valve covers and air cleaner plated in bright chrome.

  Even so, the hardtop is to be sacrificed. It’s to serve as a donor car, a rolling inventory of parts that’ll be put to use in the wagon. In the name of saving one car with a known history, Arney will destroy another with a past of equal length, but of unknown shape and texture; the only part of its resume that can be related with certainty is stamped into its tags—that its body was built at the Fisher Body plant in Flint, that the car was assembled in the same town, and that it was originally painted Inca Silver.

  Arney plans to harvest the car’s front fenders, which are rust-free and very nearly perfect. He’ll take the engine and transmission, for sure. Its seats, almost certainly. Its suspension, its brakes—any number of components might prove useful. As I circle the doomed hardtop, I find myself wondering how many pieces of the wagon Arney can replace before it’s no longer this particular wagon. Is there a limit?

  As debates associated with restoration go, this might be the oldest, because it predates the first horseless carriage by thousands of years. The Greek historian Plutarch wrote that a ship used by Theseus, the fellow credited with killing the dreaded Minotaur, was preserved as a memorial for centuries after, during which its curators “took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their place,” until so much of it had been replaced that it “became a standing example among the philosophers,” one side “holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.”

  The frigate USS Constitution, or “Old Ironsides”—the oldest commissioned warship afloat, and a big tourist draw in Boston Harbor—was the subject of similar musing by architect Edward Ford in a 1997 article in Harvard Design Magazine: The ship, “launched in 1798, still officially exists,” he wrote, “but after the rebuildings of 1840, 1905, 1931, 1976, and 1996—the last of which replaced all of its rigging and sails, ninety percent of its masts and spars, seventy-five percent of the upper deck, and forty percent of its internal knee bracing—how much of the original can be said to remain?”

  The more I ponder the question, the more muddled my thinking becomes. I suspect that intent is important—that the Constitution remains the Constitution because the ship’s identity and purpose have never changed, and new planking does nothing to alter that fact; that likewise, the newer wood in Theseus’s ship simply became part of that ship, his ship, and over centuries of use the distinction between original and replacement became moot.

  In the same vein, I figure you can swap out much of a car as its condition demands—you crunch a fender in an accident, so you get a new one; the other fender rusts out, so you replace that; the bumper gets bent against a lamppost, so another takes its place. You can make repairs in such manner, à la Theseus’s ship, and not compromise the car’s identity. It remains not only that make and model of car, but that individual example.

  But what of that Hemi ’Cuda, its elements scattered and almost entirely lost, its identity reduced to a small portion of skeleton left to rust outside for untold years? Can its essence be said to survive in a re-creation that is 80 or 90 percent new, and that was performed all at once? When I put the question to Patrick Krook, a nationally respected muscle car expert in Illinois, he was of the opinion that yes, it can: “It’s not like the car is a clone, a car that was never a ’71 Hemi ’Cuda,” he said.

  So what makes it that Hemi ’Cuda? The chunk of front end? Does that suffice?

  No, Krook told me. The firewall and inner fenders did not establish the car’s identity; by itself, the sheet metal was practically worthless. What did the trick was the little metal tag on the wreckage. That’s all—a few numbers stamped on a plate that was riveted into the metal. Had the car’s rescuer found the same remains but lacking the tag, he
wouldn’t have bothered. The numbers were worth seven figures.

  Tags are everything. Theoretically, Tommy Arney could replace all of the Chevy but those parts bearing identification tags—the driver’s doorjamb, where the VIN is attached, and the firewall, where the Fisher Body cowl tag identifies the vehicle as a four-door wagon and details its paint colors and interior trim—and there’d be no harm done; the fact that it has acquired a Chinese floor pan, new metal in a multitude of patches large and small, and fenders from a Chevy built a thousand miles from Baltimore—as well as modern primers that safeguard it from rust to a degree unimagined by its original builders—doesn’t count for nearly as much as its alphanumerical tag codes, especially the VIN, which is akin to a birth certificate. The Department of Motor Vehicles and much of the automotive world would consider it one and the same car that Nicholas Thornhill bought in 1957.

  Maybe that’s as it should be. The advantage of any mass-produced machine is its interchangeable parts. They were all designed to be replaced.

  A FEW DAYS after the donor car’s arrival, Painter Paul takes delivery of two new steel rocker panels, which he points out were made in the United States. Before he can weld them to the floor and the B pillars, he has to rehang the doors, so that he can be sure all these parts fit with the appropriate snugness. He temporarily screws the rockers in place, then removes the one-inch steel pipe he’s braced the body with, and which the floor’s replacement has rendered unnecessary.

  Paul uses the whiz wheel to slice the pipe from the right rear door opening, then a pneumatic grinder to smooth away the welds. Sparks fly as he takes on the cross brace under the dash. They pose little hazard to bare skin today: Paul, shirtless, is so soaked in sweat that the sparks simply drown on contact. The heat index, according to the scratchy FM signal of the shop’s dust-caked boom box, is 106 degrees Fahrenheit, and it’s considerably higher within the all-metal building; the humidity hovers just below 100 percent, so that the air feels thick and uncomfortably warm in the throat, like a hit from a foreign cigarette. The floor is littered with sodden paper towels with which he’s wiped himself down.