Revved by retro: Gearheads share how they fell in love with classic vehicles

It’s said that you always remember your first car. Perhaps that’s why owning a classic vehicle is so popular.

UNIQUE DESIGN, BEAUTY OF CLASSICS IS LURE FOR COLLECTOR IN THE LAKES

Mike Hazard lives in the The Lakes. His job in construction means he works four 10-hour days, leaving plenty of time to indulge in his hobby, working on old vehicles. At one point, he had five but now owns two — a 1955 Chevy 210 and a 1948 Chevy pickup truck. He bought the latter in 2008, paying about $3,000 for it and stripping it down to the frame and pulling off every nut and bolt to have it sandblasted. Then he set about rebuilding it piece by piece by himself.

“I take apart a lot of things. I’ve always been mechanically inclined,” he said when View contacted him this spring.

He took out the straight axle and added other underbelly parts from a 1978 Camaro to make the ride smooth. It used to have a six-cylinder engine, now it has a V8. Seven years and roughly $10,000 later, and the car is closer to completion.

Hazard grew up in Olympia, Wash., where his father owned an Atlantic Richfield Co. gas station and worked on vehicles there.

Hazard’s first car, acquired in the late 1960s, was a 1955 Chevrolet Bel Air. He told how, at 16, when he was “itching to start driving” he found a foreign car for sale, but his dad nixed the idea and said he had a better deal. He steered his son to the Bel Air, which cost $150. Trouble was, the wiring under the dash was shot, and without it, the car wouldn’t run. His dad found a replacement wiring harness at a junkyard and told Hazard that once he had the car running again, he’d be free to drive it.

“There was a method to his madness,” Hazard said of his father. “I think he figured it would take me a while. I had school each day, of course, but I worked on it when I could, and I … had it fixed in three weeks.”

The Chevy 210 he owns today is a similar vehicle and a reminder of a simpler time. The V8’s cylinders were bored out from 260 to 270 to increase the power.

“Does it sound like a brand new car? No, it doesn’t,” he said of the engine. “But it’s got the glasspack mufflers, so it sounds pretty tough.”

The pickup truck is his main project these days. He has an old family photograph, taken when he was 6 or 7, where his family is standing near their latest acquisition, a brand new 1949 Chevy pickup. It’s similar to the one he’s rebuilding. Hazard estimated his rebuilt pickup could fetch $25,000 — if he were willing to part with it.

“At the last car show I was at, a guy looked at the car (the 210) and said, ‘That’s (worth) about $15,000,’ ” Hazard said. “But the pickup, I’ve taken my time on this one. … I had this one guy come up to me — I don’t know if he was sober or drunk — but he said he’d give me $20,000 for (the pickup), and I said, ‘I don’t think so.’ ”

He said when he came home from a stint in the Coast Guard as a young man, his car was gone and the desire to have it back again never went away. Hazard said finding a similar one on Craigslist was a no-brainer. He drove to the Salt Lake City area where the owner was and bought it.

“The appeal is the historical design of these vehicles,” he said. “In 1955, Chevrolet hired a specific designer and told him, ‘Look, change the image of Chevrolet vehicles because we want to take over the market. We’re tired of being behind Ford. We’re tired of being behind Chrysler or Plymouth or whatever. But redesign the vehicles so we (dominate) the market.’ So, this guy did — he and their designers came up with these cars, and for three years, they dominated the market: 1955, ‘56 and ‘57. They’re called the Tri-Five cars. It’s the unique design and beauty that they came up with — that’s the appeal, for me, as a collector.”

FATHER WORKED IN HENRY FORD’S OFFICE AS A TEEN

Kent Carmichael of Desert Shores can claim a special lineage with his current classic, a 1968 Ford Shelby Mustang GT500KR. The KR stands for “King of the Road.”

“My father, believe it or not, was Henry Ford’s office boy,” he said. “We actually have a write-up in Ford Motor News about him.”

Carmichael’s grandfather, Benton, worked as a mechanic for Ford before it was formally named Ford Motors, which is how Carmichael’s father, Stuart, started working there as a teen in Henry Ford’s office. After Benton died in a factory accident, the owner asked his secretary how much the elder Carmichael earned. The answer: $5 a day, a decent wage during the Great Depression.

Ford told the secretary that 16-year-old Stuart’s wage was now $5 a day, and he further directed her to see that the teen got a full bag of groceries to take home each Friday. Stuart went on to become a mechanic at Ford, and Kent worked alongside him on the family vehicle, starting when he was 12.

Kent and his wife, Karen, have collected, refurbished and traded classic cars for the past 25 years. Once located, some cars are in need of a lot of work, while others have been partially restored before the owner ran out of money, patience or both.

“Any time you get somebody else’s restored car, you get somebody else’s headache,” Kent said.

The couple owned a Mustang GT40 up until a couple of years ago.

“It was 40 inches tall. You had to get into it by standing on the seat,” Kent said. “Then you’d slide down to (access) the pedals.”

He used a handheld model replica to help demonstrate and showed how the doors cut into the roof. Now 82 years old, he said it got too difficult to extract himself from it. He traded it for the 1968 GT500KR, which he found in Texas.

“It’s a very sought-after car,” he said. “They say it’s the top of the line for Mustangs.”

That vehicle was one of the 50 Mustangs chosen by Ford for its 50th anniversary celebration of the Mustang at the 2014 Specialty Equipment Market Association Show last year at the Las Vegas Convention Center.

“It was a big deal, and (the GT500) got lots of … attention,” Karen said. “Ford had a drone do a flyover of the 50 cars parked in the lot in front of the center in the shape of a 50. Cool video and photos from that.”

When they went out to dinner one night at Nittaya’s Secret Kitchen, 2110 N. Rampart Blvd., actor Nicolas Cage was there with his wife. Cage, who drove a GT500 in the film “Gone in 60 Seconds,” signed the dashboard of the Carmichaels’ GT500 for them. Henry Ford’s great-grandson Edsel Ford II and retired race car driver Mario Andretti also have signed cars for the Carmichaels.

“Kids saw the movie; they’ll see our car and go, ‘Is that the Eleanor?’ ” Karen said.

The couple joined the Mustang and Classic Ford Club of Las Vegas about six years ago. It meets once a month at various locations. May’s meeting was at Sonic Drive-In, 3431 N. Rancho Drive.

“Our car club does cool charity events like the one we just did at UMC,” said Karen. “We did the Make-A-Wish thing last year for a young boy with cancer, and he rode in every Mustang the club had there. … He had a ball that day.”

CAR COLLECTION OFTEN FEATURED IN HOLLYWOOD FILMS

Howard Dunn is another collector. He was born in New York in 1944 but moved to Los Angeles at 15. A typical teen, he fawned over the cars of the day.

“Every year, I waited for the new models to come out — the chrome, the glitter — every model was different. It was a beautiful time to appreciate cars, and it never stopped.”

He began collecting in 1964. His first vehicle was a 1933 Ford pickup truck that “sounded better than it ran,” he said, adding that it had a mere 60 horsepower.

By the mid-1980s, he had three or four cars that he parked along the street. Once a week, he had to move them to the other side to avoid having them towed.

As his printing business took off and he got contracts with record companies, Dunn was able to afford more cars. The main problem was securing a location where he could store them. He had the idea to rent garage space at retirement homes. The residents didn’t drive anymore, he said, so the garages were virtually empty. One such place had space for 63 cars. Dunn and his friend, a fellow collector, filled them up. He kept collecting, traveling up and down the California coast and going as far east as Oklahoma to find more cars.

He said the chase was as much fun as owning the vehicle.

“Every time you drove one down the street, it (attracted attention),” he said. “About that time, Hollywood found us. The movie ‘La Bamba’ was mostly our cars.”

He said he became the “go-to” person whenever the entertainment industry needed vehicles from specific decades. Besides the 63-garage retirement home, Dunn contracted with two more multiple-garage spaces. He filled them and hired two full-time mechanics to keep the vehicles in top shape and others to manage things.

Terminology used by car buffs is distinctive. A “survivor” means the car has all of its original equipment, straight off the assembly line. A “driver” is a car that saw regular, day-to-day use. Dunn kept collecting and, with his ties to Hollywood, often bought cars that had belonged to TV and movie stars such as Clark Gable, Hal Linden and Lisa Hartman.

“It was a hobby that turned into a business that was still a hobby,” he said. “My partner used to say that he didn’t go to work, he just played with his toys.”

When that business partner wanted to dissolve the company in 1995, they sold off all 144 cars. Dunn, a Summerlin resident since 2013, kept his favorite, which he still has, a red and white 1956 Corvette convertible.

RETIREE’S LOVE AFFAIR WITH CLASSIC CARS BEGAN WHEN HE WAS 13

Summerlin retiree Dennis Nicpon has been a car buff since his teens. He began collecting at age 40 and is a member of a car club in Chicago. He owns a 1973 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am with a 455 cubic-inch engine, which he bought 11 years ago. The car had only one owner and is in pristine condition.

To keep it that way, it gets the prime spot in his garage, relegating his regular vehicle, a Honda Odyssey, to the driveway. If there’s a hint of rain, he never takes it out. When he does drive it, he said, he’s extremely cautious of bad drivers and hits the 215 Beltway about every two weeks to “blow out the engine.”

When he and his wife, Gloria, had the car trailored to arid Las Vegas last year, the July temperatures were in the triple digits. Nicpon bought an air conditioner for the garage.

“I didn’t want the interior to crack,” he said.

The Trans Am, with 83,000 miles, is entered into car shows now and then. In 2012 in Chicago, it took first place out of 1,000 entries in a national car show.

Nicpon recalled how his love of cars began.

“I was a kid, just 13, and my uncle would come over with his car, a ‘51 Pontiac, and I’d wax it. I loved waxing it,” he said.

Collecting cars began for him in 1994, when he bought a 1970 Oldsmobile 442. He would also own a 1972 Cutlass Supreme, another Oldsmobile. As the owner of a printing business, he bought and sold cars as another caught his eye. About 2004-05, he owned four classic cars at one time but kept only two. Both are Trans Ams, one of which he owns with his son, Duane, who lives in the Chicago area. The other is a 1979 Trans Am with “four on the floor” (a four-speed transmission with floor-mounted shifters) and 23,000 miles on it. That one is in Chicago.

But it’s the red ‘73 Trans Am that he keeps here, which he estimated is worth $75,000. It would be considered a “survivor” except that he had to have it repainted.

“It’s a rare car because it’s got a red interior, and nine out of 10 made were either white or black interiors,” he said. “It’s a rare car … It’s a thrill to drive it; that sound, it’s distinctive. People see you and give you a thumbs up.”

To reach Summerlin Area View reporter Jan Hogan, email jhogan@viewnews.com or call 702-387-2949.