Doomed from the Start-The Development of a Petrolhead

I was doomed from the start. My first word was ‘Tractor’. Wheeled things fascinated me. I don’t remember much about that time, but have been told by numerous relations that I uttered that word after someone (perhaps Dad) had taken us to a tractor pull on the fairgrounds in Washington State. The noise and the flying bits of soil must have made some sort of impression because only later in life did I learn that normal kids spit out ‘mama’ or ‘dada’ as first words. I even had one up on kids who managed to get the word ‘car’ out in some form or other. Not that I was smart, advanced or anything near it, I just knew that I liked machines with wheels. It was certainly an auspicious beginning to a life lived in hopeless devotion to the automobile. Simply put, I am a car guy. A default name given to someone who lives, sleeps, eats and breathes cars. We are born into a state of being naturally predisposed to the love of mechanical objects. Seen as a sickness by many who do not fully understand us, this fanaticism causes those of us so afflicted to become drivers, writers, designers, mechanics and engineers. Some of the more oppressed of our kind are encouraged to find gainful employment in the industries of finance and law but in the end our true nature reigns. Squirreled away within garages around the world are two and four-wheeled mistresses that briefly bring their owners to life for a weekend at a time and back again on Monday where neckties and spreadsheets rule. There are those like myself who from the beginning made our course in life and obvious one.
While I remember virtually no details of that one experience that gave birth to my affinity for machines, small pieces of colorful past do trickle back into memory. I was much too young for small parts (or so the toy companies said) but that didn’t stop my father from encouraging my petrol-headed leanings with a Matchbox car at the tender age of two and a half. That 1957 Chevrolet became my world and I wasted no time driving that machine over Idaho mountain passes weaving over tussled blankets and living room furniture or crossing the living room carpet like I was driving old route 66. From that point forward my imagination burst into a mélange of color, sound and speed! Many other toy cars came to join it in a little blue suitcase car carrier, but that one car is the one I remember most vividly.
My earliest memory of a real sporty car of sorts was my father’s Fiat 124 Spyder. The closest thing to a Ferrari John Valentine ever came to owning, it was green with a removable hard top that he often removed in the spirit of open-air Italian motoring. The car had a wood-paneled dash that invited a three year old to trace the grain to see where it went, flippy toggle switches that operated a myriad of unseen electrical devices and a typically Italian exhaust note I knew from inside the house when he came home. When I was not going for rides in it to the auto parts store (a frequent thing with that car) I was at home spinning the wheels on any toy that had them. From the big yellow, blue and red Fisher-Price ride-on horse to the tiny stamped metal cars that came in the packs hanging in front of the check out stand in the supermarket, most of the miles racked up on them were in the upside down position at the mercy of my index finger.

Dad and Family Trips
One of those odd things that contributed to my love affair with the automobile was my experience washing hubcaps with my father. We would find them hiding on the side of the road or in the center of highway onramps in order to sell to a man who would resell them to the people who lost them. Before we could sell them, we had to wash them. I never used to like doing it, but now looking back, I enjoyed the time spent running my fingers along the details and learning emblems by sight and touch. Scrubbing the grit and grime off the centers was like uncovering ancient artifacts, occasionally finding something I could not identify. My father, ever the endless wealth of information and knowledge would fill in the blanks and send me off to look it up in an encyclopedia. My world broadened. Names like Imperial, SS, Rolls Royce, Hudson and IROC would send my fingers desperately searching for a ‘face’ to go with them
My father taught me to work on cars. To me it was just one more step in a growing intimacy I had with the automobile and a matter of course. Dad was always well manicured and clean but for his forays into shade tree auto repair. Like the alter ego of some super hero, his pressed suits and regularly shined shoes never let on to the gritty weekend truth; donning a bespoke pair of coveralls and lugging his toolbox out to the back yard, he became the family master mechanic. A fastidious keeper of the family fleet, he spun wrenches, changed oil, brakes and clutches. Tune-ups were de rigueur for Saturday mornings after coffee and cereal. Ever since I had been able to understand the concept of ‘righty tighty, lefty loosey’, I would sit on the curb and ask questions while he sweat, trying to wedge his large hands into the impossible places where worn parts live. He would even let me reach in and turn the wrench a while, getting dirty just like he did. He would emerge from under the cars with an even coat of black grease up to his elbows broken in places at his knuckles by small spots of deep crimson from when the wrench had suddenly broken free. It was his weekend repairs that showed me cars could be understood on a deeper level and known beyond what was seen on the outside. They became personal to me through being able to touch them.
When I was little, Dad and I would go for trips to New York to see my Great-Grandparents in his old Fiat. I remember little about the actual preparation to go, being far too excited for a two or three year old to care and not much about the actual traveling because I was busy listening to the engine while dad shifted gears. The fact that we went in the green Fiat was enough for me. There was only room for two: just Dad and I. The car spoke Italian, and so did Dad’s Grandparents. Once there, I knew big, whole body hugs from Great-Grandma, firm head rubs from Great-Grandpa, hearty meals and playing the long hours away with my Hotwheels cars on the bedroom floor of their modest dwelling. I spent hours with those toy cars immersed in an imagined world of motors and tires making noises like the ones I heard outside on the street.
Later it was family trips across the country to visit extended family. I would spend a miniature eternity making sure the Matchbox and Hotwheels cars were packed neatly in their little blue suitcase and Dad would make sure everything we needed was packed neatly into our ’76 Dodge Sportsman for the journey. After loading up the van we’d launch into a long haul adventure to other states eventually finding the right one with our extended family residing in one of its cities. Along the way, we’d find Mom and Pop cafés miles off the interstate that offered piles of home-cooked food for a small stack of change. The road never seemed to get old either. We chugged along our merry way with a can of pop on the dash, munching away at a sourdough pretzel like it was the only nourishment for the next thousand miles. All the while in the back of our heads was the knowledge that there was a huge cache of food hiding in the big green cooler reserved for the occasion when we couldn’t find one of those Mom and Pop places. The rattle of grapefruit juice cans muffled by loose, rank smelling socks piling up in the side door wells and the hum of the tires on the road seemed more welcome than the silence of the night air that we cut through. It always amazed me how this country could change in landscape and with such drama so rapidly. From Utah into Nevada, you go from the blindingly boring white stretches of parched earth to rolling black mounds that melt into steep wooded grades all in a matter of hours driving time. In Kansas, you pass fields of smiling sunflowers that wake up still facing west as if they were expecting the sun to come back that way. They never learn though. So if you catch the fields just at the right time in the morning, you see them for a few hours along the highway and it’s like one big drawn-out movie about the way flowers find the sun. The same sun we always tried to beat to the other side of the country. Just like the sunflowers, we never learned. It was always a good race though. These extended travels gave birth to another aspect of my marriage to the automobile. Like my body needed the air in my lungs, my conscious mind needed the loneliness and the romance of the road and the silence that comfortingly accompanies the symphony of tire noise and engine whine. I had to have the surface of the road pass beneath me. It’s like I’m never happy until I know that what I’m seeing before me is soon to become a dot in the mirrors at the same time hungering for what’s over the horizon hiding just beyond the reach of the breaking sun.

The Awakening
I remember at age nine or ten my mother asked me what my favorite car was. She said to think about it and write it down. The choice was obvious, to a ten-year-old. THE car to have on your wall at age ten was the Lamborghini Countach. That car was the automobile equivalent to hard-core pornography! It oozed attitude and was perhaps on every boys’ wall in the eighties as if hanging a poster of that car on a wall spoke the thoughts that young minds could not yet turn into words. At the time it was hard to imagine how an image could capture the passion that lived inside a young mind and possess him to embrace it as real. Equally hard to imagine at the time was, despite being deeply moved by such a car, how I would forget it and embrace the next outrageous thing to roll off an Italian assembly line. Like a first love, it was a fleeting and young emotion. More in line with the seedy emotions of lust and envy than the true devotion of unrequited love, it was no less impressing. Years later my mother found that paper in cleaning out an old drawer. She asked me again with a knowing grin. The answer I gave was different, but she knew.
Around the time I was twelve, I was finally allowed to ride about town freely on my bicycle. My friends and I would find our way to the toy store to check out the latest in 8-bit gaming technology or we would shoot on over to the local convenience store to indulge in slushies to cap off a summer day before going home and pretending we had been behaving. It was at that convenience store I discovered Hot Rod, CarToons, Petersen’s 4-Wheel and Off Road and Road and Track. Inside the pages of those hallowed volumes lay a veritable treasure of mechanized wonder! I poured over the pages of each periodical soaking up the sensuous curves and volumes of the latest machinery from Europe and the wild creations emerging from people’s garages around the world. These publications caused the scales to fall from my eyes and the heavens to open up! A new language was being spoken to me through the pages and for the first time it became apparent to me that the love of automobiles could be turned into a life. I knew that someone somewhere was getting paid to embrace and perpetuate the same deep seeded love I had borne from infancy!

Sketchbooks
Early on in school, I had trouble paying attention to what was said. The teachers wanted us to look up and see what was being written on the board. It was expected of us to stay on task and be able to regurgitate at will the material being taught. To whittle away the time I used the pencils and paper intended for practicing handwriting and spelling for drawing wheeled vehicles and various other machines. I found that I was able to focus on what was being said. Although, much to my teachers’ distress, the margins of my books led them to believe that nothing was sinking in. I spent many afternoons inside redoing class work while my friends played after lunch. What helped even less was the fact that we had to cover our books in elementary school. Other kids saw to it that they used pretty pre-packaged designs on their books. Most were store-bought plastic or paper covers that were supposed to look as neat as the cover of the book itself. I got ugly brown grocery store bags folded into dust jackets. Given my predisposition for illuminating blank spaces with cars and trucks, it was only too obvious what I had to do. Too soon my books were covered with vehicles in various states like an active scene was unfolding in living pencil. Car wrecks, tank battles and motorcycle races all took place on the blank space of my book covers. When I filled one up, I would rip it so my mother would have to fold me another one. While the margins of my notebooks started clearing up as a result, the drawing during class did not stop and I spent more time in during lunch for not paying attention. It was during this period in life my mother bought me a book that had nothing in it. Not blank like the marble notebooks we had to have for class with the lines on each page to keep everything straight, but truly blank! She said it was for drawing and keeping my books clean and me out of trouble at school. I didn’t entirely buy that explanation but I now had leaves of pure unsullied space intended for the expressed purpose of spilling the creative scratchings of my pencil. I felt as a new landowner might, staring at an expanse of virgin hillside, images of the house he has always dreamt of materializing before him. There were no houses before my eyes, only cars. For a while I spent time drawing the same things I had always drawn; nineteen thirties and forties style cars missing hoods and sporting larger than life engines and massive rear tires of steamroller proportions. I created imaginary scenes involving silly petrol heads grinning maniacally working eight ball shift knobs atop stalks piercing the cars roofs while the tires worked up impossible clouds of smoke. Fire belched from the exhausts and the front wheels lifted off the ground, as might the hooves of a spooked horse. Despite the outpouring of sketches filling the pages, I realized that sameness existed and never wavered. I needed something of substance. An imagination is good for calling into being something that has not existed before, but I needed something I could touch and memorialize permanently within my personal volume. This led me to the local car shows held every Friday night across town. The local shows were a way to chat it up with the local folks who held similar emotional feelings about cars and the life we lead with them. After perusing the array of machinery, book in hand, I would approach an owner and humbly suggest that I might like to draw his car. The first time was awkward, but soon found myself tuning out the passers by and the over-the-shoulder glances to focus on my goal. That was to create my own personal view of a machine that interested me and perhaps to have something to show off at school the next day. What this ultimately led to was a shelf full of sketching books that catalogued my progress and interests spanning years of recorded automotive lust. Through the encouragement of family and the random people I met at shows, I began to clue in to the possibility of turning this into something worthwhile.

True Love
Out of my love for automobiles of all kinds grew a special affinity for Volvos. A young male mind is commonly concerned with the fast, sleek and mind-blowingly sexy forms sent from overseas to grace magazine covers and bedroom walls. But for some reason, a car company that embodied everything at odds with that paradigm religiously held to by my generation became an obsession for me. ‘My’ first Volvo came to us when I was heading into seventh grade. My father had purchased a 1973 Volvo from a colleague. To this day I still don’t know why he wanted this particular car. It had a broken odometer, flaking paint, and a crooked front bumper attached on one side by what looked like a bent coat hanger or fencing wire. Despite all the physical flaws that might otherwise classify the car as a jalopy, it oozed with character and attitude. My sister Resa drove the car through college where it earned various nicknames like ‘The Wooden Car’ and ‘Trooper’. She hated it and that is perhaps the reason I liked it so much. Anything that could get on my sister’s nerves that much was worthy of my affection. There may have been a gremlin living in it that seemed to have a marked dislike for the women in my family or perhaps the machine itself was manufactured with misogynistic leanings. The fact remained, he never ran well for my sister or my mother. When I came of driving age, I inherited ‘Trooper’ and took him for my own. The bond was that of a boy and his dog. Like Red and Rover or Billy and his hounds Ol’ Dan and Li’l Ann, there was no place we could not go where the world didn’t change colors and leaves would not fall a bit slower. Life was sweet. I would roll down the windows (because his a/c didn’t work) turn up the radio (because his engine was loud) drop a ratio and blast down to southern Virginia. Rattles emanated from every joint and if you looked closely, his badly oxidized paint wore off at the edges in a stiff wind but he was ‘my’ car! It could have been the character of that car coupled with the sound of its exhaust, the visceral life energy I felt through the shifter each time I let out the clutch or the loyalty I experienced from each twist of the key, but I loved that car. Eventually, like all good things, he came to his end in a tearful and anticlimactic towing off. He never stopped working, but he became the one extra car we could not keep anymore. Despite my pleadings, my father’s mind was made up and he had to go. It was like the Viking burials where the fallen king is laid in a boat and sent off shore. I stood at the curbside shoreline of my block and watched him roll away on the back of a truck. There is no red fern, just a box of old parts in my basement. I miss him.
All was not lost. Several family cars later and well into a steady job, I had decided to look for another Volvo. I found her in the Post. She belonged to a lady who was heading off to a foreign country and would have to leave the car behind. Rife with traditional Scandinavian sensibility and bearing that unmistakably quirky box shape that was a far cry from the lusted for Lamborghinis of the past, she screamed, “Buy Me, Drive Me, Love Me!” She was nineteen years Trooper’s junior and just the love that I needed! The relationship was a portal to the sensations of the road transmitted to my hands as the pull of the engine’s torque thrust me along a rolling, twisty welcome mat with my name on it. It has now been seven glorious years and two hundred twenty thousand miles of open road bliss and ‘Annika’ still loves me.

A Final Direction
I finished high school and moved on to college. Still not knowing what to do I began to entertain thoughts of a career in architecture and design. I got my little piece of paper and promptly went to work in retail. I spent four and a half years languishing in an industry that made me feel like a number. At this point in life I had developed the ability to write about my experiences well enough, work on my own car with a semi-advanced understanding of mechanics, I still loved to draw and driving was like walking or riding a bike to me. I could do all these things well but I was faced with the important task of choosing from among them the path to take. I had settled on writing for some kind of automotive journal, master mechanics school or art. Sitting down to read one day, I stumbled across an ad for the Academy in the back pages of Car and Driver. The highlight was on the industrial design program and of course the image was of a sleek clay model done by a recent graduate. Almost as if the angels began to sing, I knew that I needed to do this. A wise man once told me that in order to move ahead with your life and do what you were meant to do, you have to look closely at all the possibilities and dreams you have for your life, choose one then take the rest of the little darlings out behind the shed and put a bullet through each one’s head in order to chase that one thing. Keeping that one door open to another dream means not following the one you have chosen all the way. So in essence that’s what I did! I dropped my stable job, picked up everything and moved three thousand miles away to draw cars. This was by far the most extreme measure I had yet taken to fill a few sketchbooks, but I felt it was the best thing. Where I had been reprimanded in my past for drawing cars in my notebooks, I would now be encouraged to draw in class. The magazines that offered a glimpse into a world previously unknown to me were closer to becoming a place for showcasing my work and my ideas. I was going to make the car that ten-year olds plastered on their bedroom walls and other car guys and gals hide in their garages. Already my knowledge gathered over years of self-searching and research for fun was paying huge dividends and showing me that I had been on the right path all along. It’s all come to this point. All the wheel spinning, traveling and the acres of blank paper covered in pencil marks have conspired to build this hopeless gear head. Here I am doing what I love for an industry that I love.