67 Butternut Build

[sjaroslo]

It started for me some time in the 60's, as a teenager growing up in Northern California. My oldest brother had bought the first of many Corvettes when I was 8 years old, and the bug bit. Fast forward to the 70's and I was reading every Hot Rod or Car Craft magazine that I could get my hands on, when a cover photo one month showed a custom yellow Rally Sport with blacked out trim and American mags and I was in love--the die was cast and I became a Camaro Guy. At the end of the decade, getting ready to head off to college, and a casual conversation with an acquaintance one Friday night at the Jack-in-the-Box reveals that he has a 67 RS/SS without an engine or trans and is looking for some working transportation, and I have a tuna boat of a 69 Galaxie 500 with a 302 that runs OK.... Before you know it, my best friend is towing me 3/4 of the way across Santa Rosa on the end of a stout chain using his Dad's El Camino--a tow which included dragging the car up one of the steepest roads in the area. Stupid things that kids do.... Soon, a machined-but-unassembled 396 finds its way into the family garage, followed by a want ad Turbo 400, and a car is born. "Rat On 1" served me well through my college years, despite my having a complete and utter lack of knowledge about Camaros and despite all of my book-learning. I'll spare you the details of all of the injustices that I perpetrated on that poor car, but will just sum it up by saying that when I started working at my first real job after school, I later discovered that the HR Manager at the firm had thought that someone had left an abandoned vehicle in the parking lot and had begun the preparations to have it towed away (we still occasionally reminisce about that colorful incident as the then-HR-Manager has been my beautiful bride for 20 years now). This is the only photo I have of her, showing how she looked when I dragged her home (there are plenty of future stories about the 66 Corvette also shown--Corvette #2 for my brother, and she also called my house her home for a number of years earlier in this decade):

As is often the case with life, once I got that good job in Silicon Valley and started to have a little bank rolling in, a brand new 83 Volkswagen GTI found its way into the garage, and Rat On 1 sat neglected for a short while, until I realized that it was unlikely that I was going to be able to derive any pleasure from driving a multi-hued, oil-leaking and -burning, rainwater-sieve of a car when I had a nice shiny new car with air conditioning and windows that sealed up, etc., and Rat On 1 was sold off, never to be seen or heard from again. End of Chapter 1--let me post this and see how it looks and I'll let the rest of the story flow.