Drive
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A thirty-five-year-old auto-damage appraiser for an insurance company who spends six to ten hours a week on his three Camaros, Blumfelder wore a white golf shirt with chequered trim and the club logo (an arch and a blue Chevrolet cross with “Camaro” written in it). His 2002 Camaro ZL1 has just eighteen miles on the odometer—it is, in car-guy jargon, a “trailer queen.” He’d bought the fourth-generation Camaro as a collector’s item, figuring that as one of the last ones ever made, it would only become more valuable. (GM’s decision to relaunch the old classic with a fifth generation that will go on sale in 2009 may threaten the value of Blumfelder’s investment, but he’s excited about the car’s return.) As he was listing his vehicles, including a Chevy 454 pickup, he sheepishly warned me that one of them was from a different manufacturer. Here it is, I thought, a Japanese car. But no, his idea of stepping out was to buy a diesel truck from Dodge.
Many people assume that the current fascination with Camaros, Mustangs and other popular cars from the 1960s is little more than a bunch of aging baby boomers wanting to relive their youth and finally having enough money to do something about it. But Blumfelder’s affection for Camaros has nothing to do with nostalgia; after all, his first one was built before he was born. And he believes the car’s appeal cuts across all generations: “The other day I was at the gas station with my ’69 and a kid—maybe thirteen, fourteen—rode up on his skateboard. He had a camera phone and he was snapping pictures. That was pretty cool and it was good to see that from someone younger.”
Blumfelder joined the club a few months after it started in 1989 and later did a five-year stint as president. The spring and fall cruises are the events he enjoys the most. “It’s not so much the drive,” he told me, though he loves the drive, “it’s more the camaraderie because the car brought us all together.”
THAT CAMARADERIE is fitting given that camaro is an old French slang term for friend, pal or comrade. (There’s also a story, perhaps apocryphal, that some Chevrolet executives initially tried to convince people that a Camaro was a “small, vicious animal that eats Mustangs.”) Scott Settlemire, a thirty-year GM veteran, is now manager of shows and exhibits for Chevrolet, but he was the product manager and assistant brand manager for the Camaro before the company stopped production. The decision was so unpopular that Settlemire received obscene phone calls as well as threatening letters and emails. “People were really up in arms,” he said. “But they were preaching to the choir with me.” Indeed, the Camaro has been a passion of his since he first saw one. His father and uncle owned Chevy dealerships in the Pittsburgh area, so the twelve-year-old got a sneak peak at a bolero-red convertible Rally Sport nearly three weeks before the official launch. “I thought that was the most beautiful car I’d ever seen.” Since then, he’s bought a dozen of them and still owns two. “I’ve just always been crazy about the car. It’s performance American-style. On a really bad day at work you go out there at nine o’clock at night and you feel really bad and you crank over that V8 engine and you hear that sound and you take off down that street and it can’t help but put a smile on your face.”
Despite his new job, he keeps in touch with enthusiasts of the Camaro and its F-body cousin, the Pontiac Firebird. Also produced from 1967 until 2002, the Firebird still has its fans— many of whom are bummed their car isn’t also returning. While it may not be as iconic as the Camaro, the Firebird has its own place in popular culture. In American Beauty, Lester Burnham, played by Kevin Spacey, is a middle-aged guy stuck in a soulless marriage to an unpleasant wife. He quits his job and embraces his mid-life crisis. After he sells his Toyota, his wife comes home and asks: “Uh, whose car is that out front?”
“Mine,” he says. “1970 Pontiac Firebird. The car I’ve always wanted and now I have it. I rule!”
Settlemire keeps about a thousand names on an email list so he can send updates to club presidents and webmasters—including some in Sweden, Germany and Australia—who forward the messages or post them on their websites. Settlemire believes club members are the company’s best ambassadors: “And, frankly, I think the letters we got from them over the years are one of the reasons the Camaro is coming back off hiatus.” When he visits a city, he’ll invite local clubs to meet him in a hotel lobby for a drink and some car talk; sometimes three people show up, sometimes fifty do. He also arranged for 250 club members and other enthusiasts to attend the unveiling of the fifth-generation Camaro in January 2006. Some people within the company worried the move might backfire if the response was underwhelming, but his confidence proved well founded. “We had full-grown men in tears,” he said. “People get emotional over this car.”
THOUGH IT WAS a little too early for much colour in the trees, the drive through the country outside St. Louis featured enough hills and curves to make it fun for the drivers, who cruised at a leisurely pace. I was surprised at how slowly the procession moved until I learned that the club’s unofficial motto is, “Drive slow, stop often and eat a lot.” Judging by the girth of many of the club members, it’s appropriate. Jim Hairston drove a white 1996 Brickyard pace car and joked about his “porn-sized clothes—triple XL.” But it’s also an indication that while the members are serious about their cars, they don’t take themselves too seriously. “If you can’t take a joke,” Bill Robison warned me, “you don’t need to be in this club. I’ll tell you that right now.”
The first stop was a parking lot at Meramec State Park. According to Hoefel’s route map, they had an hour to “explore the park,” but everyone just got out of their cars to gab and tease each other. After a while, we drove up to another parking lot that was empty, and the drivers lined their cars up in four rows of five for a picture-taking session. I rode with Robison in a Z28 pace car that was black and white with a T-top and automatic transmission. (Auto races use a pace car to limit speed after a collision or because of an obstruction on the track. The Indianapolis 500 has selected the Camaro as the pace car four times, giving Chevrolet an opportunity to produce a limited run of highly prized replicas.)
A fifty-two-year-old maintenance mechanic and truck driver for an asphalt construction company, Robison had dirt under his fingernails and a bushy moustache and goatee (having only recently shaved a beard that made him look like Uncle Jesse on The Dukes of Hazzard).
“How many Camaros do you own?” I asked.
“More than I need, less than I want.”
In the past, to make some extra dough, he would buy one, drive it for six months while fixing it up, then sell it and buy another one. Today, he owns a 1993 pace car; a 1969 pace car that he bought in 1974 and still drives; an original, unrestored 1967 Coupe that he hasn’t driven in about ten years; and a 1967 pace car he just acquired that also needs restoring. Another past president of the Gateway club and a member since 1989, he spends ten to fifteen hours a week on his cars, often with his thirty-year-old son, Derrick, who owns three Camaros of his own.
Robison is also a Corvair collector, though he’s now down to just one, a 1964 Monza Coupe that still needs a lot of work. The Chevrolet Corvair became one of the most controversial cars in automobile history after Ralph Nader wrote Unsafe at Any Speed, his attack on automakers for selling deathtraps. The 1965 book, which uses the Corvair as Exhibit A, made Nader a household name and began a long march of safety improvements. But Robison believes the Corvair was unfairly maligned. While he conceded that they leaked oil and some of the materials weren’t the best quality, a lot of owners didn’t follow the owner’s manual; many people, for example, over-inflated the tires. As for Nader’s campaign, Robison believes the consumer advocate used film that Ford had cooked up to misrepresent the competition. “People have taken the film footage that Ralph Nader used to show the poor handling of the Corvair and slowed it down and you can see that the rear shocks were removed,” he contended, making me imagine Monza lovers scrutinizing the footage the way conspiracy theorists obsess over the Zapruder film. “The Ford Motor Company wanted to show how much better their Mustang handled comp
ared to the Corvair, and Nader took the film without researching it.” Robison doesn’t hold a grudge against Mustangs, but he doesn’t own any. “I actually think they’re cheaper-built, but they’re all cars,” he said. “They’re just like people—they’re all different, you know.”
We stopped for lunch at Buffalo’s Southwest Cafe, a chain restaurant located beside a Wal-Mart in Sullivan, Missouri. There were forty of us sitting at the tables arranged in a big U in a private room. The club has sixty-nine members, and the core group plus a few others showed up at the Fall Colors Tour. The oldest was seventy-eight-year-old Charlie Rothweiler; the youngest was a baby that a young couple had brought along. Bob Lance, a tugboat captain with a red 2000 convertible hails from Scott City, 120 miles away in the southeastern part of the state, but he tried a Camaro club closer to home and after one year, didn’t renew his membership.
As president, Steitz made sure to go around the table at lunch and say a few words to everyone. A mechanic with Saturn, he wore a white golf shirt with the club logo, a club cap and a name tag. He has four Camaros—all from 1970, the first year of the second generation—including one he’s restoring and a brown Z28 trailer queen.
The lunchtime conversation was dominated by talk about engines, paint jobs and bodywork—and lots of ribbing. Blumfelder took good-natured grief over his trailer queen, his model Camaros that are still in their original boxes and when he was going to get married. As Hairston and Al Rothweiler mugged for a camera, Hairston rammed a finger into one of his nostrils. By the end of lunch, at least one bun had been tossed and several more had been stashed away for later use.
While there was no alcohol on the table, there was a lot of fried food. At least one person ordered and ate twenty-four chicken wings and some people had dessert. Briann Hoefel, who drives a Honda and teaches dietetics at a local junior collage, sat across from me. In a departure from all the car chatter, we discussed the obesity epidemic in America, but she didn’t mention anything about the role our addiction to the automobile plays in that problem.
After lunch, I rode with Al Rothweiler, while his friend Mark Campbell moved to the back seat. A club member even though he doesn’t own a Camaro, Campbell owns a Gremlin, which is a source of great mirth for Rothweiler. An American Motors subcompact introduced in 1970, the Gremlin sold well but developed a reputation for being poorly made and eventually became ironic shorthand for the wacky futility of the 1970s. The Camaro, in contrast, reeked of cool back then.
We were riding in a 1969 Camaro SS-427 that belongs to Rothweiler’s dad. Restored in 1983, the car is Daytona Yellow, which makes it stand out even in a group of Camaros. “I get a lot of thumbs up from people,” said Rothweiler, who wore his club name tag—he was, after all, the one who’d suggested members get them in the first place—and has close-cropped, thinning hair, oversized aviator glasses and a big gut. I’d been told he came up with the club motto, though when I asked him about it, he assured me it was a group effort. Just then, Steve Blumfelder drove up beside us and we saw three buns from the restaurant stuck on his antenna.
Like a lot of car lovers, Rothweiler has trouble explaining what it is about the Camaro that appeals to him so much. He’s always been around specialty cars because his father has owned a 1930 Auburn since 1952. “And when I was in high school, a friend had a ’69 Camaro and I kinda lusted for one,” he explained. “I guess I was young and at that impressionable point that that’s what I noticed.” A car crush, it seems, just isn’t that complex.
The next, and final, stop was just a few minutes away at the Antique Toy Museum on Route 66 in Stanton. The collection included many toy cars and trucks, some dating from the 1920s. I remembered owning a few, including Dinky Toys, Matchbox cars, Tonka trucks and, especially, Hot Wheels. Mattel released the toy cars in 1968 and I spent hours and hours racing them on the loops, jumps and curves of the set’s plastic orange track. Among the first sixteen models, all made of die-cast metal, were the Camaro, the Mustang and the Corvette.
Outside the museum, I chatted with Charlie Connoyer, the club’s secretary, treasurer and newsletter editor. The former Anheuser-Busch project engineer took early retirement thirteen years ago, which means that unlike the others, he has time for golf as well as cars. He joined the club in 2000 after Steitz, his son-in-law, convinced him to buy a Camaro. He now owns three: his original 1972 Rally Sport; a 1973 Z28, which he bought in 2004; and a Z28 30th Anniversary Edition, which he bought last year. “It’s like an addiction,” he admitted. “One’s not enough.”
He has a basement full of trophies from car shows, but the hardware offers just a few seconds of ego gratification. “I go to shows to BS with other club members and to watch people come up and ogle my car.” He particularly enjoys it when an ogler says, “I had one like that,” or “My dad had one.” He’s been to shows that have forty cars in a class and others that have three (and if there’s first-, second- and third-place trophies, everybody wins one). “If you’re going for a trophy, you’re going for the wrong reason,” he told me the next day when I called him to continue our chat. “I’ve got a basement full of trophies that my wife says I’ve got to give to the Boy Scouts.” The shows are often charity fundraisers and many have good food, which he admits is part of the attraction. He has another son-in-law who is a Mustang guy. “We don’t hold it against him and we let him come with us.”
For Connoyer, the Camaro club is all about the people: “Without the folks, you don’t have a club.” Still, getting members out to events is one thing; convincing them to become officers is another. The treasurer position isn’t onerous (he writes about a dozen cheques a year) and as secretary he checks the post office box occasionally, but as editor of the monthly newsletter, he finds filling six pages in the winter tough (summer’s not so bad because there are so many shows and other events). Though an email newsletter would be less time-consuming, he thinks hard copy is better because then the whole family reads it. When he joined, no wives ever showed up at events, but at the Fall Colours Tour, several wives, including Mary Connoyer, showed up. So did several sons, including Tim Steitz, who’d just turned sixteen and is into cars in general and Camaros in particular, though he’s not likely to get his hands on his dad’s treasures any time soon. “Unfortunately, he’s going to end up driving a Saturn for a while,” Connoyer said. “He has a better chance of driving one of his granddad’s Camaros.”
THE IDEA that people’s social lives could revolve around a car seems so American to me—right up there with high-school football on Friday evenings and Sunday mornings at church. But as I discovered in Argentina, the car club is an international phenomenon, and though the nature of the relationship with the car may vary in other countries, the passion is just as strong.
At 7:30 in the evening, the traffic was still heavy in Buenos Aires and on the highway, so the travel time to the old suburb of Monte Grande was about an hour, double the return drive. Our destination was a massive old building that was once a linen factory but is now home to about two hundred cars owned by the 350-member Club de Automóviles Clásicos de Esteban Echeverría. Ruben Ferro, the vice-president, showed Carmen Merrifield—my wife and translator—and me around the chilly site, which had large ads for local businesses on the walls.
A tall, leonine man with a grey goatee and a twinkle in his eye, Ferro’s two loves are women and cars. And, as if to prove it, he shamelessly flirted with Carmen while he enthusiastically showed us the cars. Four Model Ts, a Ford V8, a Second World War Jeep, a beautiful blue 1958 Impala and a 1973 Dodge racing car were among the vehicles in the large rooms at the front of the club. We moved along and Ferro pointed across a cavernous room to the parilla. He explained that it was the most important part of the club: the place where they eat and drink. Then he hailed a man named Alberto and asked him to get a key.
As we waited, our tour guide explained that we were about to enter a private room with a special collection. Once Alberto appeared and unlocked the door, we saw a row of cars d
raped with sheets and tarps. Ferro removed the covers slowly and dramatically, revealing one immaculate car after another: a yellow 1976 Mini Cooper; a silver 1985 Porsche; three Fiats, including a limited edition 1972 Sorpasso 1300 Series; a mustard Peugeot 404; and two Alfa Romeos. As he and Carmen replaced the sheet on one of them, he joked that he makes the bed at the club more than he does at home.
Actually, he probably wasn’t joking. His charm had more than a dash of machismo in it. “The bigger the car, the more powerful the engine, the more manly the man is,” he assured us. “It’s the man’s personality.” But he added that as a man ages, his attraction to cars grows more sophisticated: “What do young people want? To feel the speed and power. And so they fall in love with cars. When the years go by they look for a more classic one, more sumptuous, with a softer line.”
Just before we reached the final car in the room, club secretary Norberto Coelho joined us. His reading glasses dangled on a cord around his neck and he wore white running shoes and a tan flat cap with car pins on it. He was less refined and courtly than Ferro, but just as passionate. An expectant hush fell over all of us as they unveiled the highlight of the collection: a brick-coloured Torino 380, a legendary racing car made by Industrias Kaiser Argentina. Some people consider it the country’s national car, noted Coelho, adding proudly, “It represents us.”
As we left the collection, three younger men joined us and we all walked through a room with several BMW micro coupes on our way to a big room in the back that housed dozens of covered cars, including some of Ferro’s own collection. He acquired his first set of wheels, a 1959 Chevrolet Impala, when he was fifteen. Since then he’s owned, at one time or another, about a hundred cars and trucks, as well as company vehicles at his crane manufacturing business. He can’t pick a favourite because he loved them all like they were his children. As I wondered if I should read anything into the fact that he has three daughters and seven cars, he admitted that he takes some grief at home. “My daughters tell me that I have too many cars,” he said. “They question me as a father.”