Auto Biography

by Earl Swift

  But Ricketts was asking just seven hundred dollars, and the men were in the market for an old car: Wilson and Seely had fallen in with an antique car club, had forged friendships with its members, and had developed a yen for a car of their own.

  The pair represented the rare fifth stage of car ownership—appreciation. A scant few automobiles surmount the effects of time and changing fashion to earn such a place in their owners’ hearts. Few merit the expense and hassle the relationship almost always requires. A machine that’s endured to this point is usually, though not always, considered a classic, rather than just an old car—a classic being a paragon of styling and/or engineering that both captures the era in which it was constructed and transcends the public’s fickle tastes to achieve a kind of timelessness.

  The wagon certainly met that standard. Even in its neglected state, the Chevy inspired optimism, even glee: To Wilson and Seely, it promised a party wherever it went. It was getting to be a rarity, too. Fixed up, it would be a keeper.

  So they cast their lot with VB57B239191. They did so as a couple; it was merely to satisfy the Department of Motor Vehicles’ requirement that the title bear one name that Dr. Alan D. Wilson, M.D., became the Chevy’s seventh official owner on April 28, 1994.

  With that, for the first time in its long history the car came into the hands of owners who didn’t depend on it for their transportation, who valued it solely for its style. The wagon’s status thus changed from daily driver to weekend plaything, from beast of burden to accessory.

  That Wilson and Seely were so charmed by the Chevy isn’t much of a surprise, in retrospect, because most of Detroit’s fare had devolved into miserable junk in the decades since the car rolled off the assembly line. The exciting future promised by the wagon’s styling hadn’t panned out. BusinessWeek’s prediction that sixty thousand jet-powered cars would be on U.S. roads by 1960 was wrong. Cars driven by solar power or tiny nuclear reactors hadn’t been built. Instead, Harvey Earl’s genius for repackaging musty and slow-to-change technology had become standard operating procedure not only at Chevrolet, not only at General Motors, but among their American competitors, as well.

  GM executive John DeLorean quit the corporation’s front office in the seventies complaining that “there hadn’t been an important product innovation in the industry since the automatic transmission and power steering in 1949,” and that in place of honest advancement, the industry had gone “on a two-decade marketing binge which generally offered up the same product under the guise of something new and useful.

  “There really was nothing essentially new,” DeLorean advised in 1979’s On a Clear Day You Can See General Motors. “But year in and year out we were urging Americans to sell their cars and buy new ones because the styling had changed.” Each new model, he said, was “a supper warmed over.”

  Perhaps worse, the workmanship of American cars had gone to hell—an inevitable by-product of the industry mind-set that a car need only last a few years before the consumer working hard to pay for it was convinced to trade it in. Whatever: Through the sixties, seventies, and eighties they’d declined into leaky, cheaply appointed, slushy-handling buckets of rattle and rust, on which all manner of little things broke not long after the dealership had faded from the rearview mirror—and major things followed soon after.

  The few advances Detroit managed were of dubious worth. DeLorean, who later earned fame producing his own stainless-steel sports car—and infamy trying to broker a cocaine deal to finance it—is generally credited with having popularized the muscle car. Seven years after joining Pontiac as an engineer, he dropped a big V8 into a midsized Tempest, which until then was an underpowered old lady’s car, and created a screamer called the GTO. Other automakers responded with their own high performance, big-engine machines—GM with Chevy’s Chevelle SS and the Olds 442; Chrysler with the Dodge Charger RT and Plymouth Road Runner; and Ford with the Torino and Mercury Cyclone CJ.

  But fondly remembered and collectible though they are today, the muscle cars of the sixties weren’t all that good. Their steering and suspensions were sloppy, their frames and bodies heavy; they could smoke tires and tear ass down a straightaway, but show them an S-curve and they were hopeless. In any real-world comparison with a European high-performance car, they weren’t even in the running. Besides which, the engineering beneath their pretty skins was every bit as Stone Age as the rest of Detroit’s lineup.

  Even the good American cars hadn’t stayed that way. No example better demonstrates this sad fact than Ford’s once-vaunted Thunderbird. Hurried into production as Ford’s answer to Chevy’s Corvette, the T-Bird was a sprightly, beautifully understated two-seat convertible at its unveiling in 1955. It blended an elegant body, a snug, 102-inch wheelbase, and V8 power into—well, not a sports car, exactly, what with the skirts over its rear wheels and the design’s restraint; “personal car” was the dignified label Ford came up with. It resonated, apparently—16,155 T-Birds sold that year, twenty-three times the number of Corvettes that dribbled out of Chevy showrooms.

  Over the next couple of years it got more powerful engines and a few cosmetic tweaks but didn’t stray far from the original. Then, for the 1958 model year, came a fundamental thematic shift. Ford bosses surmised that two seats limited the T-Bird’s sales. Double the seating and the car would fly. The suits were right—the four-seat second generation was wildly popular. But it was a very different car, almost a thousand pounds heavier than its parent and bigger in every respect. Its wheelbase was eleven inches longer. Its doors were nearly forty-nine inches wide.

  Three years later came a makeover that seemed an improvement, at least from a distance: The T-Bird of 1961 was bullet-nosed, sleeker, sportier; open to the sky, the convertible was dazzling. Sidle up next to the car, however, and it dawned on you it was no closer to the nimble original than the last iteration; the car was more than seventeen feet long—five inches longer than the ’57 Chevy wagon—and in its most popular trim weighed 4,200 pounds, a tonnage that even a three-hundred-horsepower engine couldn’t propel with much urgency.

  The car’s fourth generation, introduced in 1964, traded the bullet nose for a blockier body that was even bigger: It was longer than a modern Cadillac Escalade, and every version topped 4,500 pounds, a full ton more than today’s Honda Civic. And that was nothing compared to what came next, because Ford realized that its popular new Mustang occupied a similar niche at a lower price, and chose to reinvent the T-Bird as an even vaster, full-on luxury car. The convertible was dropped. A four-door option was added, on a bargelike 117-inch wheelbase. Over at Chevy, the Corvette had gone through a few changes but remained a two-seat paean to testosterone. The T-Bird, it seemed, had lost its way and damn near ballooned into a Lincoln.

  Come 1972, the transition was complete: Now it stretched 214 inches, bumper to bumper, more than three feet longer than the ’55 T-Bird and fourteen inches longer than the ’57 Chevy wagon. And here’s the really crazy thing: Ford stopped offering the four-door; you could buy this tectonic plate of a car only as a “sporty” two-door hardtop. The company equipped it with gargantuan engines—a 429-cubic-inch V8 and a 460-incher, both with four-barrel carbs—but for all their size, they were anemic, robbed of muscle by primitive antipollution gear: The 460 managed only 224 horsepower, a fraction of what was needed in a craft of this magnitude to achieve what you could call acceleration with a straight face.

  It was at this juncture—when the T-Bird was at its most bloated, when with three average passengers, a set of golf clubs, and a bag of dog food aboard it topped five thousand pounds, when it limped along on some of the biggest engines ever put into American cars—that the Arab oil embargo of 1973 arrived.

  And the ’73 T-Bird did not do well in the gas mileage department.

  Change was coming, forced on the industry not only by the oil crises of the seventies, but by challengers that played the tortoise to Detroit’s hare. In 1957, when Chevy sold more than 1.5 million cars, an automaker unknown t
o most Americans was struggling to gain a toehold in the U.S. market. It had a single stateside dealership in Los Angeles, from which it sold 288 cars that year. Its showpiece was called the Toyopet, which might partly explain its poor showing. It didn’t help that the car was Japanese, which at the time was listed in most Americans’ mental dictionaries as a synonym for cheap.

  That’d be Toyota.

  A few years before, the slow, noisy, and cramped Volkswagen Type 1, soon to be known the world over as the Beetle, had enjoyed an American debut even less auspicious: The company sold only two cars in its first year on these shores. Two cars. Two.

  But the fattening American auto left many buyers cold, and seeking a sensible alternative to the overweight, overdecorated, and technologically ancient offerings from Detroit, they soon turned in shocking numbers to imports. VW’s U.S. sales went from a paltry 390 in 1951 to 177,308 vehicles a decade later, then shot sky-high from there, to half a million cars a year in the United States by the time of the embargo. Lowly Toyota surged in the sixties; by 1970 its U.S. sales were topping 300,000 vehicles a year. The first Honda microcars chipped further at Detroit’s sales and appeal. By 1989, the company’s Accord was the bestselling car in the country.

  The initial American response wasn’t stellar. Ford offered up the Pinto, of which the less is said the better. Chevrolet produced the Vega, which proved itself a nightmare faster than it covered a quarter mile. American Motors unveiled the half-baked Gremlin, its name—also a manufacturing term for an elusive flaw in a piece of machinery—all too prophetic.

  Otherwise, the Big Four kept cranking out outsized and sloppily constructed junk: the Mustang II; the Ford Granada; the Chevy Caprice, Monte Carlo, and Lumina; Chrysler’s lumbering LeBaron, New Yorker, and Cordoba (with its seats of “rich Corinthian leather”). It took more than a decade for the industry to come to its senses, and to recognize that it could not hope to attract buyers solely on the strength of homegrown provenance or the suavity of Ricardo Montalban. It took years more before those buyers again viewed Detroit’s products with anything resembling trust.

  The turnaround was still under way when Alan Wilson and Al Seely rolled up on the wagon that first time. It grabbed their attention even before they understood what they were looking at. Among the econoboxes and rusting land yachts that crowded Norfolk’s streets, its styling and sheer size set it apart, but its appeal went deeper than good looks or attitude. Here was a throwback to an America that had been a world leader in quality goods. An America that kept its promises, in which hard work and diligence paid off. That was as solid and dependable and honest as the heavy-gauge steel that girded the Chevy’s flanks.

  IN MOST RESPECTS, the new owners hewed close to the Ozzie and Harriet model. They lived in one of the region’s trendiest homes. They threw smart parties. Seely’s teenage daughter, Amanda, a high school student, lived with them. They figured prominently in newspaper stories about family values and Father’s Day. Only the fact that they were gay set them apart from the model American family of the Chevy’s infancy.

  In fact, it was family values that had brought the men together. Wilson had passed most of his childhood in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where his father helped manage a textiles company and his mother oversaw a noisy, active household in the middle-class suburb of Brainerd. Keith and Madge Wilson had been attentive, encouraging parents, and the third of their five children enjoyed a successful youth. Smart, funny, and sweet-natured, Alan did well in his classes, attracted a succession of cute girlfriends, took a date to the prom. Brainerd High School’s Class of 1972 voted him its wittiest member.

  Privately, however, he’d been tormented: At fifteen or sixteen he’d realized, in what was less a revelation than a culmination, that he found boys more attractive than girls. The knowledge had alarmed him. He’d had no thoughts on how he might act on it; rather, he’d wondered how to survive it. Few answers had come to him at the University of Tennessee, where he majored in biology. Fewer still had come on his return to Chattanooga, where, while applying to medical schools, he earned a second bachelor’s degree, in chemistry. Lonely, depressed, he’d kept his sexuality a secret while pondering what the future might look like without marriage and a family.

  His first visits to gay bars had filled him with panic; they were smoky, loud, decidedly blue-collar, and didn’t square a bit with the Marcus Welby role he’d imagined for himself. In 1983, he’d finished his classroom training and moved to Norfolk to begin his residency in family practice. He immersed himself in his work and managed to achieve a wistful contentment.

  Then, in February 1988, a friend had invited him to a Valentine’s Day brunch at a home in Portsmouth. Wilson didn’t know the host, who was two years his senior and a fellow transplant from the Deep South, but on a trip to the bathroom he found much to like about the man: The walls were covered with pictures of children, of family, of the middle-class ideal.

  The host was Seely. He was from Albany, Georgia, a factory town 170 miles south of Atlanta, where his family ran an office supply business started by his grandfather. He, too, had realized he was gay as a youngster, but from there his experience diverged from Wilson’s: His parents had committed him to a psychiatric hospital at sixteen to “cure” him of his homosexuality. Unaltered and well aware of it, he’d married young, had a daughter and a son, and attended art school in Florida before joining the family business as an office designer. He’d eventually shifted to residential work. In the early eighties, a client’s brother, impressed by Seely’s designs in Albany, had enlisted him to tackle a job in Norfolk, and the acclaim that greeted the project had encouraged Seely to move his family there. His new business had thrived.

  His marriage had not. Over the next several years, the children had spent summers and alternating holidays with their father. Seely had eventually opened a design store on Colley Avenue, just across the street from Joe Scalco’s garage, and it was there that Wilson left his business card a few days after the party. A few months later, Seely had moved into the doctor’s house on the beach.

  Wilson was already earning a name for himself in the medical community by then. The family practice at which he completed his residency was a free HIV testing site in the first years after scientists isolated the virus that causes AIDS, and before an effective treatment regimen had been developed to keep it in check; to be diagnosed with HIV at the time was tantamount to a death sentence. Wilson recognized that the disease’s young victims too often went without follow-up care after learning they were sick. Doctors might not be able to afford much hope to them, but he believed they could at least help them die well. So he’d started attending to AIDS patients. He was not out of the closet himself, but he was able to offer his patients a shoulder. He’d tell them: Tell me how you want to die. Fantasize about how it would be, if it were the best it could be. And he’d tell them: I’ll make sure it happens.

  Shortly after he and Seely became a couple, he opened a solo practice dedicated primarily to AIDS patients, a venture that both he and Seely knew would not pay as much as general medicine. He’d get up early each morning, grab a shower and some coffee, and head to his office in a Norfolk high-rise, where he saw patients in such numbers that he often skipped lunch. He’d get home late. He and Seely might share a meal together, might not; he was on call every night. So much, they joked, for the hedonistic gay lifestyle.

  The harder he worked, and the more fully immersed he became in the issues surrounding AIDS, the more frustrated he became with the community at large, with what he viewed as his neighbors’ apathy about his patients and their plight. He responded by diving even deeper: He and Seely found their already scarce leisure time increasingly devoted to volunteer work at the city’s oldest AIDS hospice. Wilson became board chairman of the region’s best-known AIDS treatment and education group. He fought insurance companies that balked at awarding benefits to those with AIDS. He battled hospitals and other doctors, some of whom wore surgical masks and gowns while meeting AIDS pati
ents. As time passed, he grew ever more isolated from the medical community. He came to see himself as independent of it.

  Disconnection from colleagues, overwhelming workload, community obligations, the financial pressures of his solo practice—together, they might partly explain why, when his certification by the American Board of Family Practice expired, Wilson didn’t immediately reapply. There were other reasons: The renewal stipulated that he complete one hundred hours of continuing education, some of which would have required time out of town that he felt he could not spare.

  Board certification had no bearing on his ability to practice medicine, but it was a credential the doctor needed to do business with hospitals and insurance companies. He kept putting the paperwork off. It gnawed at him: He’d remind himself, now and then, that he had to get it done. But the time to do so didn’t present itself. He didn’t get around to it.

  In such a pair of crowded and stress-filled lives, the Chevy was a rare self-indulgence. Wilson and Seely tooled it through downtown on weekends and took it to a few meetings of their antique auto club, but it was clear that as beautiful as the wagon remained from a distance, it was becoming unsafe for travel; ignorant though both were on subjects mechanical, they recognized danger when they sensed it, and the Chevy treated them to healthy doses. They could feel the floor give beneath their feet. The brakes lacked urgency, the steering was vague, the body creaky—and that was while they backed it from its parking space outside the swanky, two-story downtown loft they’d bought in the early nineties. On the move the wagon felt as if it might fall to pieces at any second.

  Fixing it themselves was out of the question; this was a project for which they’d have to rely on outside experts. They found one in a friend who owned a Norfolk Chevrolet dealership, who agreed to have his shop give the car a once-over and devise a plan for its restoration. But the commitment necessary for such a venture was driven home to them when he called with the results. The job would run into the tens of thousands of dollars.