The Pace Car
After a Half-Century, the Corvette Is Still in Symbolism's Fast Lane

By Peter Carlson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 22, 2003; Page D01

Gingerly, carefully, painstakingly, Mike Shepherd lifts up the special soft blankets that his mother-in-law
sewed into the custom-crafted car cover and, presto!, there it is, in all its great American glory -- a
turquoise-and-white 1960 Corvette, gleaming like it just rolled off the assembly line.

"That's my baby," he proclaims. "Look at that chrome shine!"

It's not his only baby. Five other Corvettes are parked in the huge 12-car garage he built next to his house
in Stafford, Va. Two more are parked in a smaller garage on the other side of the house. Out back,
there's a battered old Corvette he hasn't finished fixing up yet. And his wife, Bettie, is out driving her
"millennium yellow" 2000 Corvette.

A roofing contractor by trade, Shepherd buys and restores old Corvettes as a hobby. He sells some,
keeps others. Right now, he owns 10. "I got two '59s," he says. "I got three '60s, two '62s, a '67, a '69 and
a 2000."

Shepherd, 53, buys only two varieties of vehicles -- trucks and Corvettes. "Trucks make me money," he
explains. "Corvettes make me love life."

He saunters over to his 1969 Corvette Stingray. It's an eye-popping shade of yellow with a huge engine -- 435 horsepower -- and side pipes,
which are shiny chrome exhaust pipes that start under the hood and end up just behind the doors. He leans in the window and turns the
ignition key.

Vroom! The engine roars. It's a deep growl that sounds like the purr of some giant metallic beast ready to pounce, a noise that's as
distinctively American as the howl of a Harley.

"I can tell a side-pipe Corvette without ever seeing it, just by the noise," Shepherd says.

He leans into the car again and turns the key. The growl subsides.

"The old Mustangs, the old Shelbys -- they all go fast, they all look cool and there's a place for them," he says. "But I like Corvettes."

Why?

He looks perplexed. The question is absurd.

"If there's a red-blooded American boy out there that don't want a Corvette, he ain't being brought up right," Shepherd says, smiling. "That's
like not eating apple pie. Or not wanting to play baseball."

The Golden Standard

The Corvette turns 50 this week. The great American icon of youth, sex and speed is now old enough for AARP.

The first Corvette was driven off the production line in Flint, Mich., on June 30, 1953, by Tony Kleiber, a humble Chevy worker now famous as
the first man to sit behind the wheel of the first Corvette ever made.

Corvette fanatics treasure such trivia. Thousands of them will celebrate this much-ballyhooed birthday by driving in caravans from all over
America to the mecca of the Corvette: Bowling Green, Ky., home of the National Corvette Museum and the Chevy plant where Corvettes are
born.

Most cars don't have museums devoted to their glory, but the Corvette isn't just a car. It's a pop culture icon, a sleek speeding piece of
modern sculpture that roars by, trailing whiffs of sex, rebellion and patriotism along with its exhaust.

"The Corvette has a special place in the American iconology," says Michael Marsden, a professor of English at Eastern Kentucky University
and former columnist for Motor Trend magazine. "It's got a symbology that exceeds any other car. It crystallizes the qualities we associate with
American automobile culture -- speed, freedom and the people who drive fast and live on the edge."

For baby boomers -- particularly male baby boomers -- the symbology can get dicey these days. When the boomers were young, driving a
Corvette meant they were hot and sexy and searching for love and adventure. Now, driving a Corvette might merely mean they're going
through a messy midlife crisis, searching for the long-lost days when they were hot and sexy and searching for love and adventure.

But before the Corvette became a symbol, it was merely a car -- the brainchild of GM's legendary designer Harley Earl, who had created the
landmark 1927 Cadillac LaSalle. Working in a secret studio behind a locked door with a "No Admittance" sign, Earl and his team created an
American version of the European sports cars that thrilled the GIs who saw them after World War II -- MGs, Jaguars, Porsches. The 1953
Corvette -- named after a type of British warship and constructed out of one of the new wartime miracle materials, fiberglass -- was a two-seat
convertible with a wrap-around windshield. Only 300 were made that first year, all of them white with a red vinyl interior. At $3,498, they were
expensive, about what you'd pay for a big Buick. John Wayne bought one.

They were beautiful machines but, if truth be told, they weren't very good. They had an anemic six-cylinder engine and an automatic
transmission. The roof leaked and the suspension was lousy, which made for a rough ride.

"They were rattly hulks," says veteran automotive writer Brock Yates, author of a dozen books on cars. "They had really bad quality problems."

Nobody knows how many of the original Corvettes are still around, but if you've got one and it can still move, you could probably sell it for
$100,000.

In 1954, Chevy built more than 3,000 Corvettes, but a third went unsold. In 1955, the company scaled production back to 700. It looked as
though the Corvette was dying.

It was saved by good old American competition. In 1955, Ford introduced its own sports car, the Thunderbird. It had a powerful V-8 engine
and was immediately popular, with 15,000 sold that year.

Embarrassed, Chevy fought back, streamlining the Corvette's pudgy body and souping it up with a powerful V-8 engine. The '56 'Vette could
flat-out zoom, and it became the first American sports car clocked at 150 mph at Daytona.

The Corvette caught on. It was hot, it was cool, it was new, it was now. Meanwhile, the Thunderbird devolved to a four-seat touring car, ceding
the sports-car market to its rival.

The Corvette wasn't a practical mode of transportation, it was a pure pleasure machine. It was long, low and sleek, and it looked like a shark
or a stingray (as one species of Corvette was called) or, as some Freudian wise guys suggested, like a *****. With just two seats, it wasn't a
family car. It was designed for a single guy and his lucky girl, and the implicit message was: Buzz off, buddy, two's company, three's a crowd.

Born the same year as Playboy magazine, the Corvette captured the slick, cool style of postwar maleness that was also exemplified by the
Rat Pack, JFK, James Bond, Miles Davis, surfing and rock-and-roll.

In 1962, General Motors gave Corvettes to six of the seven original Mercury astronauts -- John Glenn declined the freebie -- and the implied
association with Space Age speed helped make the Corvette America's favorite sports car. So did its much-publicized success on various
racing circuits.

Over the next four decades, the Corvette went through five redesigns, and Corvette buffs love to argue which one was best. At their
gatherings, some purists wear T-shirts reading: "They made Corvettes after 1967 but who cares?" For the record, the best-selling Corvette in
history was the 1979, with more than 53,000 sold.

By then, the Corvette was ubiquitous in pop culture. In 1960, it became a co-star in a TV show called "Route 66," the story of two young men,
played by George Maharis and Martin Milner, driving aimlessly around America in a Corvette, searching for adventure. "Route 66" was a
respectable middle-class version of the Beat Generation's "On the Road" experience -- except these characters were not, as Beat bard Allen
Ginsberg wrote in "Howl," "dragging themselves through the ***** streets at dawn," they were zooming down the highways in a Corvette,
which seemed like a lot more fun.

"Route 66" aired for four years and turned the Corvette into a potent pop cultural symbol, and since then it has roared through countless songs
in every pop genre from rock to country to rap. The Beach Boys sang about winning a drag race in a "fuel-injected Stingray." Bonnie Tyler
sang, "I want a fine perfume and a powder-blue Corvette." Vanilla Ice sang, "Work them hips like pistons in a Corvette."

The Corvette became such a sex symbol that in several songs the car is indistinguishable from the girl. Prince sang, "Little Red Corvette,
baby you're much too fast. Little Red Corvette, you need to find a love that's gonna last." And in "The Corvette Song," George Jones sang:
"She was the fastest thing around, long and lean, every young man's dream, she turned every head in town."

David Ball's 2001 country hit "Riding With Private Malone" is a different kind of Corvette fantasy:

A guy gets out of the Army and answers an ad for an old Chevy. It turns out to be a mint-condition '66 Corvette with a note in the glove box
from Pvt. Andrew Malone, who wrote it before shipping out to Vietnam: "If you're reading this, then I didn't make it home." The guy buys the
'Vette and soon "all the pretty girls would stop and stare." One rainy night he crashes the 'Vette and it bursts into flame. But he's saved, pulled
from the hellish inferno by the ghost of Pvt. Malone.

Which pretty much says it all: Patriotism! Sex! Speed! Heroism! Salvation! Resurrection! All wrapped up to go in a fast, fuel-injected '66
Corvette!

All Revved Up

"Pound for pound, dollar for dollar, there is no better pure performance car than a Corvette," says Tom Allen. "It goes from 0 to 60 in 4.7
seconds. It can cruise at 167. It will exceed 200 miles per hour."

He sounds like a Corvette salesman. That's because he is a Corvette salesman, working out of Ourisman's Rockmont Chevrolet in Rockville
since 1986.

"It's a pure performance car," he says. "Basically, it runs right up there with a Lamborghini, which goes for $200,000."

That sounds like hype, but automotive experts say it's not far from the truth. The latest generation of Corvettes -- the C5s, introduced in 1997 --
are widely considered excellent sports cars.

"It's a world-class automobile," says Yates, the auto writer. "In its latest iteration, it's a very, very well-done automobile."

"The current Corvette is really very good," says Csaba Csere, editor in chief of Car and Driver.

Csere says the Corvette, which sells for about $50,000, is in the same class as a Porsche 911, which costs about $70,000 -- a statement
Porsche aficionados would regard as blasphemy.

"On a performance level, they're comparable," Csere says, "although the Porsche 911 buyer would tend to regard the Corvette as beneath his
dignity."

These days, the difference between a Porsche and a Corvette is mostly image, say Csere and Yates. The German Porsche symbolizes
European sophistication, elegance and snobbery, while the Corvette is the all-American Everyman's sports car.

"There's a blue-collar quality to the Corvette," Yates says. "It's a symbol of self-made success in the American idiom."

This difference in what Porsche drivers might call Weltanschauung -- but Corvette drivers probably wouldn't -- was illustrated a couple of
weeks ago when Jesse Ventura appeared on Jay Leno's "Tonight Show" and announced that he'd just bought a Porsche.

"My Corvette could blow the doors off your Porsche," Leno responded.

"Really?" Ventura said, his voice dripping sarcasm.

"Yeah," Leno said.

"Now, why would anyone buy a car in the same dealership where they sell a Vega?" Ventura asked.

"Because it's made in the United States of America!" Leno thundered back.

In terms of sales, Corvette is easily the winner. Americans buy about 35,000 new Corvettes a year, more than three times what Porsche -- or
any other foreign sports car -- sells in the United States. Roughly 85 percent of Corvette buyers are men, according to industry surveys, and
three-quarters of them are over 40.

Corvette fanatics also buy lots of Corvette knickknacks: Corvette shoes, Corvette shower curtains, Corvette pinball machines, Corvette
underwear. The Corvette has become the focus of a cult of devoted followers who make pilgrimages to the sacred shrines in Bowling Green
and gather by the thousands at conventions where parts from old Corvettes are treated like pieces of the True Cross.

"There is a level of collectors' fetishism that is really over the top," Yates says. "They will look for authentic door gaskets and rubber molding."

While cultists were turning the Corvette into an object of worship, many Americans had come to regard it as vaguely laughable. The car that
once symbolized youth and sex is now associated with the comic pathos of the male midlife crisis.

"People always say the average Corvette owner is a recently divorced orthodontist," says Csere. "I guess what they mean is a kind of boring
person with money who is looking for his lost youth and his second or third wife."

"It's a social amulet in some circles, like a gold Rolex," says Yates. "It identifies you as a hot, flashy guy who drives fast. It's a ***** extender in
a lot of ways."

But Marsden, the English professor, argues that the Corvette still possesses a special resonance for Americans of all ages.

"We wear cars like we wear clothing -- they're extensions of ourselves," he says. "When you buy a Corvette, you're saying that you're
successful and that you're living on the edge. It's the same reason that people buy motorcycles."

Marsden doesn't expect the Corvette's symbolic power to diminish even after the boomer generation passes from the scene.

"The Corvette will have a very, very long history in the American love affair with the car," he says. "When you want to have a fling, you'll go with
the Corvette."

The Roar of Approval

Mike Shepherd steps on the gas, and his bright yellow '69 Corvette Stingray shoots forward.

"Hey, does it get any better than this?" he asks. "Don't you feel sort of like 'Route 66?' You got a credit card? Let's go!"

He remembers watching "Route 66" on an old black-and-white TV as a kid and longing for the day when he could buy a Corvette. His family
was poor, he says, so poor he wore shirts and shoes from the Salvation Army. He dropped out of school after the eighth grade to work as a
roofer. Now, after decades of hard labor, he owns his own roofing company and he invests his extra money in vintage 'Vettes.

"What little money I had, I bought what I love -- Corvettes," he says. "And I have to say, I've done better than most people in the stock market."

Now, he's got the Stingray out past the suburban strip malls near his house and he's cruising down a windy country road. He presses the gas
pedal and the Stingray rockets around a curve, the purr of the motor escalating into a throaty growl.

"You hear that sound?" he says. "Where else have you heard that sound? Is that, 'Oh, say can you see?' " He starts laughing. "That sound
should be the background music for the national anthem."

 

Thanks for the post, was good reading

:cheers:
Pat Kunz

 

Yep -- thanks for the post.

I really love the quote....

 

I have a short attention span.......

:lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: MJ

 

That was great :thumbs: :thumbs: :thumbs: :thumbs:

 

Mr. Vette

Thank you for this post, it was good reading. Loved the part about Jesse and his Porsche. Seems to me that Mr. Motion aka Joel Rosen created several Vegas that would, to this day, blow the doors off Gov. Venturas Porsche.

Regards

Mark Donnally