Auto Biography

by Earl Swift

  Right off, I got some unwelcome news: Virginia’s Department of Motor Vehicles, like its counterparts in many states, destroyed its car ownership records after a few years. If I were to trace a car’s history, I could rely on no official paper trail; instead, I’d have to find a chain of owners with exceptional memories. Each one would have to remember from whom he’d bought the car, and to whom he’d sold it. Were I looking for a car that had been owned by two, three, or four people, this might be reasonably easy to pull off, but to make the story work, I reckoned I needed a car that had passed through many more lives—seven seemed a reasonable minimum, spread out over thirty-five, forty years. I’d have to get lucky.

  That spring I went through my newspaper’s classified ads, circling cars in the “antiques and classics” columns that seemed interesting. I came away with a dozen, most dating from the late sixties and early seventies, and called the numbers advertised with each. Within an hour, four fell off the list. One was still with its original owner; the sellers of the other three couldn’t remember where they’d obtained them. So I called the previous owners of the other eight cars. Five could not recall who they’d bought from.

  Two rounds of calls, and already I was down to just three cars. One was a 1965 Plymouth Satellite, which an older couple in town had just sold to a fellow in Texas. They’d bought the car from a sailor raised in Kansas and remembered his name down to the middle initial, but I could find no trace of the man in Virginia, Kansas, or anywhere else. Next up was a ’65 Ford Galaxie convertible that had been owned back-to-back by navy fighter pilots—ideal for a newspaper story in a navy town. Unfortunately, the pilot who owned it first blanked on who’d sold it to him.

  Last candidate: a 1970 Olds Cutlass wagon. I was encouraged about this one, because the current owner said he knew the car’s history going back to the seventies. So I drove out to his little Craftsman cottage, and there met Dave Marcincuk. He was soft-spoken, clad in a T-shirt smeared with axle grease and motor oil, and eager to show off the Olds, which was in fine shape for its age: Its glove box contained the original owner’s manual, and he had a build sheet for the car—a slip of paper secreted in the rear seat, on which all of the car’s variations were recorded: the fabric, pattern, and color of its upholstery, the grade of carpet, the gauge package in its dash, the type of column supporting its steering wheel.

  But it became clear, as Marcincuk related what he knew of the car’s history, that it had passed through just four owners in its thirty-five years. We talked briefly about the decrepit Impala parked beside his garage, from which he said he’d pulled an engine; it had been abandoned on a farm for several years, and thus hadn’t had many owners, either. I closed my notebook and was saying a disappointed good-bye when he offered, almost as an afterthought: Well, I do have another car that might interest you.

  Yeah? What is it?

  A ’57 Chevy wagon, he said. It’s in the shop right now, getting a new exhaust. As a matter of fact, I need to go over there to pick it up, and if you wouldn’t mind giving me a lift, I’ll show it to you.

  I drove him to Big Al’s Mufflers. The wagon was parked out front, and we circled it for a few minutes, Marcincuk describing the work he’d already completed, what he planned to do next. Rusted and crumpled and sun-bleached though it was, it was an arresting piece of machinery. Still, I couldn’t imagine that I’d be able to trace the ownership of a forty-seven-year-old car, seeing as how I’d struck out on so many newer models. Mostly as a courtesy to Marcincuk I jotted its VIN into my notebook, and that evening wrote to the DMV requesting their records on VB57B239191.

  A few days later, an envelope arrived from the agency with the paperwork from two title transfers. Per the state’s privacy act, all the names and addresses had been blotted out; the only useful information was the dates of the transfers—or would have been, had a clerk at DMV used a decent marker to redact the documents. When I held the papers at an angle, I could make out typed names through the ink: Alan D. Wilson. Mary E. Ricketts. After that, breaks started coming my way at such a pace that I don’t believe it’s cutesy or coy or too poetical a flourish to say that I didn’t choose this particular Chevy as the subject of my research and the story you hold in your hands.

  It chose me.

  I FOUND RICKETTS in the phone book. She recalled that she bought the car from Picot Savage, who now lived in Smithfield, twenty-five miles west of town. I called Savage, who remembered that he bought it from Frank DeSimone. I found DeSimone at his auto body shop. He remembered the car well, he said, but couldn’t come up with a name. “I can picture him,” he told me. “Give me a couple weeks to think about it. I’ll call you.”

  That was in August. I went on vacation and returned to find that I’d received no call. I got caught up in other assignments, and still, DeSimone did not get in touch. Convinced that I’d hit another wall, I telephoned DeSimone in early September to formally let him off the hook: “I haven’t heard from you,” I said, “so I’m guessing you couldn’t remember.”

  “No, I did remember,” he replied. “I just lost your number.”

  That took me to Sid Pollard, who couldn’t remember the name of the man who’d sold him the car, but did recall that he was a veterinarian with an office on U.S. 17, and that his surname began with a T. It took only minutes to narrow the hunt to Dr. Bruce Thornhill Jr., who told me that why, yes, he had owned the car, and knew who’d owned it before him: his grandfather, the car’s original owner, whom he’d accompanied to Colonial Chevrolet to buy it.

  I now had the car’s provenance from 1957 to 1994, and the names of two later owners. I called Chris Simon first, learning that he’d acquired the car in 1997. It took a lot longer to reach Alan Wilson, who’d all but vanished; I tracked him to Georgia through Al Seely, whose name I’d found linked to the doctor’s in newspaper coverage of a 1992 political fund-raiser they’d thrown for Bill Clinton at their downtown loft.

  Wilson recalled having owned the car for two or three years, and having sold it at about the time he’d had his professional troubles. That placed the sale in 1996 or 1997. Voilà: I figured that Wilson sold to the Simons, and that I had an unbroken chain of nine owners.

  But there were details that caused me doubt. Wilson remembered selling the car for a lot less than the nine hundred dollars Dave Simon told me he’d paid. And when I pressed Simon for details of his purchase, he said it had occurred at a house in central Norfolk, nowhere near any home Wilson and Seely kept. Simon also said that the sellers were a married couple, by which he meant a man and a woman. That was problematic.

  I had Simon walk me through the purchase in further detail. He recalled that he’d been headed for dinner at a cheesesteak place, turned onto a side street assuming it would allow him entry into the parking lot, and discovered that it did not. He wound up driving the street a short ways and taking a right onto a dead-end to turn around. The wagon had been sitting in a yard on the cul-de-sac.

  I asked whether he remembered anything about the seller.

  Not really, he said.

  Nothing? Nothing at all that stood out?

  Well, there was one thing, he said. The guy drove a big red pickup, one of those tandem-axle jobs.

  I headed for the newspaper’s library, the shelves of which held long rows of hardbound city directories, one for each year, going back decades. These weren’t the regular white pages—city directories list residents alphabetically, as expected, but often they include their occupations, along with their addresses; in addition, they feature a second section listing addresses by street and number, and a third of phone numbers in sequence. If you want to know who lives in a particular house, you can find that—along with the occupant’s job and phone number—with the turn of a few pages. If you want to talk to that person’s neighbors, you’ll find them listed under the heading for the same street.

  Companies produced the books for every major American city through the late nineteenth century and all of the twentieth. As quaint and labor
ious they might seem next to today’s computer search engines, they remain valuable to researchers for an attribute that digital sources can’t match. Because a new edition came out every year, each amounts to a snapshot of a community at a precise point in time. You can track people’s movements around town by consulting consecutive directories, just as you can estimate when they switched jobs, or how long a business operated at a particular address, or when a fire wiped out a downtown block.

  Dave Simon had given me the approximate location of the cheesesteak place. I found it in the 1996 city directory, along with the street onto which Simon had made his wrong turn. I used MapQuest to find the cul-de-sac where he’d encountered the car: Tyndale Court. Then it was back to the directories. Four of the people listed as living on the street in the 1996 edition were still there in the 2004 book.

  None of the four was a past owner of a Chevy station wagon. None of them remembered seeing such a car in any of their neighbors’ yards, either. But one recalled that a former neighbor drove a big red pickup: His name was Jeff Simmons, and he moved away a few years before, to a place called “Savages” that was somewhere near Ahoskie, North Carolina, about fifty miles to the south.

  I found no such place, but I did stumble on a Savage Road a considerable ways north of Ahoskie—just across the state line, in fact, maybe twenty miles west of Moyock—and there came upon Jeff Simmons. He’d been so embittered by his experience with Norfolk officials that when he retired after twenty-two years in the navy he sold his house and moved his family to the edge of the Great Dismal Swamp, where they shared a comfortable homestead with horses, peacocks, geese, a donkey, and visiting eagles and bears.

  Yes, he told me, he’d sold the car for nine hundred dollars to a fellow named Simon, and he’d bought it from Jack’s Classic Pawn. I called back Alan Wilson, who when prompted remembered that indeed, he’d sold the Chevy to a pawnshop; the deal had been brokered by the people at Bay Chevrolet. The pawnshop had gone out of business, but I found its owner, Jack Reed Sr., running his plumbing supply store not far away. He remembered getting the car, cleaning it up, and selling it.

  Improbably, almost unbelievably, the chain was complete.

  IT TAKES FAITH to buy an old rust bucket and to embark on a quest for its lost youth—to scour junkyards and catalogs for arcane parts, to spend extravagant sums on improvements not even visible to the eye. Faith, Dave Marcincuk had. But he was also a practical man, with a growing awareness, as we talked in the autumn of 2004, that (a), he had paid too much for the Chevy, and (b), it was going to cost a bundle to address its most desperate needs, let alone its cosmetic flaws. Worse, he would not gain a car that was worth a tremendous sum, it being a four-door station wagon, versus the far more collectible two-door sport coupe or convertible.

  Just as he reached this unhappy reckoning, the Lord provided: Marcincuk got a bead on a 1955 Chevy wagon that lacked an engine but had spent forty-nine years in Southern California, and was thus entirely rust-free. It was selling for less than a third of what he’d paid for the ’57. Marcincuk didn’t care for the ’55’s egg-crate grille as much as he did the later model—its grimace made its “face” somewhat less friendly—and its nubby tail didn’t compare with the ’57’s outlandish meat-cleaver fins. All that said, it was a more realistic proposition on a garbageman’s pay, so he bought it in mid-October, rolled it into his yard, and parked it next to the ’57. When the new engine arrived later in the month, he didn’t drop it into VB57B239191, as planned, but into the older car. He figured he’d pull the transmission out of the ’57, along with the five-hundred-dollar dual exhausts he’d just had installed at Big Al’s, and he’d put those in the ’55, too.

  At long last, Nicholas Thornhill’s wagon had reached that critical juncture at which so many old cars cease to be machines in their own right, and become mere organ donors for vehicles still on the road. Scavenged, it would testify to the impermanence of all things man-made. Parting it out would also cap membership in the fraternity of those who’d owned it, a fraternity whose members were happy and surprised, when I’d called them, to learn that the Chevy had survived the years; all voiced at least a little regret at having parted with it.

  In the years since he’d done so, Bruce Thornhill had retired from his veterinary practice and was now a passionate big-game hunter. He and his wife had raised three children; his youngest, the only boy, was named Nicholas. Sid Pollard, divorced a third time, was the father of three grown girls, and had moved back into his boyhood home to care for his ailing mother. Both were still mourning the loss of his father seventeen years after the fact: In 1987, dying of prostate cancer, the elder Pollard had run a garden hose from tailpipe to cabin of the family’s ’68 Plymouth Fury sedan, started the engine, and settled in the backseat with the Sunday paper. Pollard’s mother found him when she came home from church.

  Frank DeSimone had been busted for selling cocaine out of his auto body shop not long after selling the Chevy. Never in trouble with the law before, he’d pleaded guilty, done his penance, and gone back to work on high-dollar cars. Picot and Debbie Savage had split up in 1989. Picot was living a quiet and solitary existence in the woods near Smithfield, Virginia. His ex had remarried and moved to Florida with her new husband, who’d died in 1998 while the couple operated a motel near Marco Island. She’d married again, then died herself in December 2000.

  Mary Ricketts was still working at a nursery and sharing a co-op apartment with her pet dog, though she bore only passing resemblance to the fun-loving, hard-partying woman who’d owned the wagon: In August 1998, she’d suffered a brain aneurysm that dulled her lightning-fast wit and robbed her of her zany brashness, along with her head for numbers. Now a knot of close friends with whom she met every night at a local saloon was beginning to disperse, its members moving away or dying off, and Ricketts was spending more and more time alone. She rarely saw her son, who surfed and designed T-shirts year-round on North Carolina’s Outer Banks.

  Alan Wilson taught college part-time in Atlanta, commuting to his classes, and Al Seely continued to grow his interior design business. As for Jeff Simmons, he told me that selling the car had been “about the stupidest” thing he’d ever done.

  In the right hands, restored, the car might outlast all of them, might insinuate itself into a host of new lives, witness time’s passage with a new succession of owners experiencing new cycles of lust, love, reliance, heartache. Sold for parts, its story ended here.

  Marcincuk agonized over what to do. In early November he decided that he should keep the Chevy more or less intact—harvest a few items he needed for the ’55, perhaps, but sell what remained as a unit, rather than piece by piece; that strategy, he figured, gave him a better shot at recovering more of the enormous sum he’d sunk into the car. Obtaining top price meant getting the wagon running and rolling. He bolted on replacement front fenders (two different colors, but unperforated by rust) and found an engine, the car’s fourth. It was a 265-cubic-inch V8, not a match for the engine the factory had dropped into that vehicle, but carved from the same block, and an option Chevrolet offered in 1957. Close enough.

  He was looking for a buyer at year’s end, when my newspaper story finally ran. I moved on to others. My assignments sometimes took me out his way, and as I neared his cottage I’d scan his backyard for the wagon. It was there, damn near as big as his garage, all through 2005, looking no better or worse than before, always in the same spot alongside the ruined Impala.

  I’d look for Marcincuk, too, planning to stop for a chat if he was out in the yard, ask him how it was going. I didn’t see him, however, and one day, I didn’t see the car, either. It was still missing from its spot the next time I passed, and the next.

  Then, in the spring of 2007, a friend who taught a college journalism class was called out of town and asked me to sub for him. The subject of my lecture was sourcing—how to use readily available documents, library resources, and such to get information—so I brought along a volume of the city
directory, and by way of describing how useful it was I related how I’d used it to close the chain of ownership on the Chevy. As I packed my papers after class, up walked a student, a fit-looking guy in his mid-twenties with a day’s worth of beard. He somewhat hesitantly said: “You know that car you were talking about?”

  Yeah, I replied.

  “Well, my dad owns it now,” he told me. “And he knows you.”

  “He does?” I asked. “He owns the Chevy? Who is he?”

  And he said: “His name is Tommy Arney.”

  More than thirteen years had passed since I’d spoken with Arney at the Body Shop. I promised myself to reconnect with him, to find out how he and the car were doing, but myriad errands and responsibilities intervened, and better than two more years passed. Then, as I drove in downtown Norfolk one morning in the fall of 2009, a pedestrian stepped into my path without so much as a glance either way. My squealing tires earned his attention; he stared me down, his scowl assuring me that hitting the horn would be a mistake. On the far sidewalk he stepped into a storefront that was piled with lumber, Sheetrock, and other construction supplies, and as I watched I realized I knew him from somewhere.

  A week or so later, I was walking past the same storefront and saw that the door was propped open. I stepped inside to find the space stripped to the bricks; the floor was covered in plaster dust and littered with kitchen equipment and plywood. The same man was standing a few feet from the door. “Tommy?” I asked. “Tommy Arney?”

  He shook his head. “I’m Billy,” he told me. “That’s Tommy.” He pointed to a big fellow who stood with his back to us, speaking on a cell phone. When he turned around, slipping the phone into his pocket, I saw that aside from his mane’s replacement with a thinning flattop, and a belly that had ballooned a bit from its 1993 dimensions, he hadn’t changed much.