Digging through old slides

I hurt my back Friday trying to bottle my Jubilale clone, so no working on the Chevelle this week.  Since I'm finally on good drugs for the pain, what better to do than to try to write a blog.  The doctor says it's a bit like truth serum, so I will take no responsibility for the content or coherency of the writing below.  I'll blame Jill since I will ask her to edit this later.

I love looking through old pictures and thinking about how lives intertwine.  I have a lot of old pictures from my family when my sisters were kids back in the late sixties.  My parents had just purchased some farmland outside of Marion and made the statement '100 trees cost the same as five, so why wouldn't we buy 100?'. Or something like that. Anyways, Jill's Mom has been sick the last month (Best wishes and get better soon Min!), so she has been traveling back home to help out.  She brought back some slides and pictures from the late sixties of the Chevelle and one of her Dad's other projects, a Dodge Dart Swinger.  I'm hoping that she can find more pictures later, but here is a preview of what we found.  I find if very cool to see pictures of the Chevelle back when it was nearly new (but wrecked).  Think about the skill it took for Hoss to repair these cars with hand tools and a torch.

This is the only picture I have found so far of the roof repair in progress.  It looks like the new door is on and he is fitting the roof (from a 1965 GTO) in these pictures.

Hoss completely finished the car in 1965, and then someone hit the front fender in 1966, so he had to repair and repaint again.  That must have been maddening after all the work the previous year.  I must say with the manual brakes and manual steering back in those days, it is incredible that any cars survived to today.

 As evidence they drove the Chevelle everywhere - here are a couple pictures along the road and at the Gulf Coast in Louisiana.  This is how it looked after the rebuild.  They dropped the 327 badges off the fender, removed the hood spear, and ran the factory whitewalls with no hubcaps.  It was a sleeper unless you knew what the Malibu SS on the fender meant.  No 283 here, and I think they drove it like a 327 should be driven.  The center bar on the grill was painted black and the center emblem removed.  It was cracked in the first accident, so they never installed it.  I still have this emblem and grill hung in my basement above the bar (Bar and Grille... yes, it's okay to moan).  It's a neat look, although I'm going to leave the center bar stainless as the factory had done originally.

I love this picture of Hoss on his bunk in Viet Nam.  If you look carefully at the pictures you see Min and pictures of the Chevelle above his bunk, including some of those above.  Maybe even the same prints we found that he brought back!  How cool is that?  Hoss served in Viet Nam fighting and repairing vehicles after combat.  That must have been an unending job.

 In the picture below the Chevelle looks like it was just repainted. The date on the picture is 1972, well after the first restoration and before the 1974 lifter problem that led to it's current state.  The garage went in the year before, so the date on the picture must be correct.  I think all of the trim parts I have probably were intended to go back on the car after this repaint.  I don't know the story about why it was being redone in 1972, but it sure does look good.

 In the slides we also came across lots of pictures of the Dodge Dart Swinger that Hoss rebuilt.  It looks like an easy roll with damage to the doors, fenders, quarters, and roof. Ha, easy roll is a misnomer!  I have to admit I don't think I have seen this year of a Dart ('67 or '68?); it is a really good looking car.  I've never really thought that about the Dart, but I would own one like this.  It has the 340, and was a strong runner.  The first two pictures are the before, and two more pictures of the completed car.  I wonder what happened to the Swinger?  Someday it might be fun to see if we can track it down to figure out what happened to it.  Jill doesn't have a lot of memories of the Swinger, so it must have been sold in the early seventies.

And finally a great picture of Jill and her Dad.  She was such a Daddy's girl - after she was born you don't find many pictures of her or Hoss alone.  She was always out helping in the garage; here holding the hose when pressure washing one of the Vega's.  The Chevelle sits lonely in the background.  Hope you enjoy the trip down memory lane as much as I did.  Back to drugs and trying to heal my back so I can get back to my turn at rebuilding the Chevelle.