1931 CHEVROLET “When I was 14 years old, my dad and I were going to a drag race in Richmond, Va. We stopped to
get gas, I looked out and beside the service station was this primer coupe sitting there. I thought, ‘Man, that’s a Chevrolet.’ I’d never seen a ’31 Chevrolet or a car that looked a little bit like a Model A. So I went in and tried to get the guy to sell it. I think I was 14. My dad, when we worked on the farm, would give us a quarter of an acre of tobacco. And when he sold it at the warehouse, we’d get our money for the summer, which was about $500. “Te guy said, ‘$250, take it or leave it.’ I went back home and gave him, I think, a $10 deposit. It
might have been $25 but it was no more than that. We went back and I got one of the guys on the farm on a farm truck, which had no tag on it because you weren’t supposed to drive over 10 miles from the farm. We drove it all the way back 75 miles and loaded this car on it. I built this car in my granddad’s general store, which is this store building here, with my dad. I’ve got a picture there in the store of me working on it in auto mechanics class in high school. “My dad and I built it together. I’d help where I could. He taught me how to weld, use a cutting
torch, how to wire. I learned all of that on this car. “I built this car to drive on the street but then I started having all these buddies going to drag race
and decided we’d go over to Person County Drag Strip. I drove it on the street for about six months and then raced it. When I left home and put it in one of the warehouse buildings, I was about 19-20 years old. I didn’t see it again until I was about 40. My dad had restored it with some of his buddies and drove it into City Chevrolet on my birthday with my wife and my two kids in the rumble seat. “So it’s my first car. We’re probably gonna sell 125,000 cars this year but that was the first one I ever owned. And it’s neat that it stayed in the family. I didn’t have to go find it.”
OCTOBER 2011 55
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