Wednesday afternoon, as my grandson and I waited on milkshakes at Jack’s, a man walked up and started telling us about his ’61 Corvette.
“Yeah, your dad saw mine; I let him take it for a ride, and then he bought one,” the man, George Reed, said.
My father went through a spell in the early ’60s when he owned a Corvette, followed by a Thunderbird and then a Mustang. I don’t think it was too much Beach Boys, or mid-life crisis; he could be obsessive about things, and for a time, he had an interest in muscle cars. Later, he drove a ragtag Buick Electra 225 — “deuce and a quarter” — that had belonged to his mother.
The Corvette — a white ’62 convertible — was the subject of a letter my father wrote while I was at summer camp. He didn’t write many letters, but I guess he thought news of his Corvette being stolen — he’d left it next to the post office with the key in it — merited one.
Mother remembers:
“Those days teenage boys would ask him about the car and he would say, ‘Go try it out sometime.’ … He figured someone had just taken it for a spin,” she said. “They had, only they went to Florida.”
Reed, 75, is a member of one of those groups of retirees who meet at local breakfast places — Hardee’s, McDonald’s, Jack’s and Huddle House — to drink endless cups of coffee while solving the world’s problems.
He arrived in Columbus from his home in Rensselaer, Indiana, in 1960 driving a ’54 Chevy Bel Air. He came to refuel airplanes at CAFB.
During a trip back home the next year, he bought the ‘vette from a Goodland, Indiana, dealership with a one-car showroom. Reed’s fawn beige Corvette was that one car, and it sported a $4,800 price tag. He paid $3,800 for the car.
He still has the car, albeit a bit battered, in the garage of his home in east Columbus.
“It was fun to drive (the Corvette) in Indiana,” he said. “You have flat roads and nothing to watch out for but cows.”
The car shows 140 mph on the speedometer. Reed says 120 is as high as he ever put the needle.
But a beige Corvette?
“They only had four or five colors,” Reed said.
It should come as no surprise the colors and the number of cars Chevrolet made in each color is available on the Internet. According to www.vettefacts.com, of the 10,261 ’61-model Corvettes manufactured, 1,363 were fawn beige. Other colors included Honduras maroon and Roman red. Some cars got two-tone paint jobs (Honduras maroon and white was a possible combination).
Reed said he raced the ‘vette at the Columbus Drag Strip, an old landing strip, off Highway 69.
“Saturday mornings I’d take it up to Hardin’s Chevrolet and let Kenneth Nichols and William Bell tune it up,” he said. “We’d take it out to Old West Point Road and test it.”
A cursory check of eBay shows restored ‘vettes of that era ranging from $37,000 to $95,000. Despite pressure from collectors, Reed says he has no intentions of selling his. Sentimental reasons, he says; plus, son George, who as a young child would sit in the car and pretend to be driving, is against selling.
“He drove it at 4 years old, and it’s part of the family,” Reed said.
Birney Imes III is the immediate past publisher of The Dispatch.
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