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Show rw f "Miff The Park Record Section A Thursday, September 15, 1994 Page A3 ,1 ' n. 1 v J !' V I 4 i 1,1 3 I,U-m J . I J I I fflifV "A 1 The Corvette caravan made a rest stop at the Route 66 Cafe in Albuquerque, N.M. Six days, 4,000 miles, one Corvette by JIM SCHEFTER Record guest writer It was supposed to be a joy ride, just a few thousand miles across the country with a few thousand other Corvettes. ; It was supposed to be an adventure, a high-speed rock 'n roll danced to the music of the Cult of Corvette. '- It was supposed to be good enough to add another chapter to the book that has kept Simon & Schuster waiting since 1988 and sends me off bi-weekly to spend a confounding chunk of my life in Detroit. It was all that, all right. And it was much, much more. The book was a semi-secret until those 10 Corvette caravans rolled at the end of August, homing jri on Bowling Green, Ky. for the opening of a privately funded National Corvette Museum. (A museum dedicated to a car? Not exactly. A $15 million architectural tour de force and emotional homage dedicated to Corvettel) Folks have wondered what, exactly, I am doing in Detroit. Only a handful knew that I have had full access inside General Motors for the past six years, the freedom to roam the halls, to look over engineers' shoulders, to sit in the design studios while an all-new Corvette takes shape. I'm the fly on the wall at crucial decision points, the guy in the meetings with top 3M executives who's sitting over there taking notes, the watcher whose badge gets me into the secret rooms. ; : Astoundingly to me, and a credit to the courage of GM's highest management, I'm free to write whatever I will. And I shall. ! All that was a secret until Corvettes began homing in on Kentucky, where the icon auto is built, for a Labor Day Weekend celebration. We rolled out of Los Angeles a few days before, me in a '94 Corvette borrowed from Chevrolet's press fleet, the other 80 Corvettes in the pack, some of them more than 30 years old, driven by their owners. We were caravan number nine. Others started from Seattle, San Francisco, Minneapolis, San Antonio, Detroit, and points on the east coast. But we had the plum-driving plum-driving east on Route 66. It only took 90 minutes before a Chevy public relations guy shoved me in front of a TV camera at Barstow, Calif. "This guy's writing a book about the next Corvette," he said. "Ask him about these cars." So in 100-dcgree heat, as a two-mile two-mile long chain of Corvettes rolled by, I talked about a car that inspires more than a hundred thousand people to join Corvette clubs, that has a dozen or more magazines dedicated to it, that draws people every weekend of the year to a Corvette rally somewhere, and that had all these amazing people heading for a party to celebrate the car they love. We repeated the interviews in Kingman, Ariz., where the chief of police escorted us through town in a perfectly restored 1953 Chevy cop car, and in Albuquerque where the guy from the ABC affiliate couldn't believe what he was seeing as the caravan, grown to more than 120 cars, poured into the parking lot of the Route 66 Diner. Along the way, we saw America. Old Route 66, replaced by Interstate 40, was forlorn. We raced past boarded up motels and closed gas stations straight out of the '50s. Somebody's hopes lived there, and died there. ;Now and then, a row of road-dusted road-dusted cabins still courted travelers with an "Open" sign, and people rah outdoors to wave as Americans only sports car rolled by in a caravan of commemoration. ., In the larger towns, Flagstaff, Albuquerque, Fort Smith, Chevy dealers filled their show rooms with soft drinks and chips and tables of food. While some drivers had their cars tended in the service bays, which stayed open until all hours of the night, the rest of us talked with crowds of local people who flooded in to see all these wonderful cars. We put kids, wide-eyed, in driver's seats and left them chattering about the day they'd own a Corvette. We shook hands and shared Cokes with working parents who knew they'd never have one themselves, but came anyway because Corvette isn't a car, it's a dream. We talked to old guys who remembered when the first Corvette came out in 1953 and whispered about wishing they'd just bought one and tucked it away. I got my lines down with each succeeding interview. "It's just a car," the Channel 7 guy said in Albuquerque. "Why are all these people here?" "It's not a car," I said. "It's a Superman suit You don't drive it, you wear it. And when you're wearing a Corvette, you feel invincible." The next morning I put on my Corvette and dashed ahead of the pack, covering 1,060 miles from Tucumcari to the Opryland Hotel in Nashville in just under 15 hours. the confluence of the other caravans and they too were aimed at Bowling Green. The Tennessee Highway Patrol shut down Interstate 65 at their end and the Kentucky Patrol did the same up north. One moment the interstate was clogged with 18-wheelers 18-wheelers and morning travelers. The next, it was empty as far as the eye could see. Every overpass along the way was lined with people, two and three deep, all waving and cheering at a symbol of something America does right. Some of them brought flags to wave and at one overpass, two boys in Scout uniforms saluted as we rolled by. Closer to Bowling Green, the crowds overflowed onto the roadside and some hearty fools even ran out to the median with cameras and grins. On the other side of the interstate, a steady stream of trucks crawled south with horns blaring and lights flashing. Truckers slowed to watch and their schedules be damned, this was a sight they'd never seen before and never would again. Corvettes old and new, brightly colored and prancing, owned the road that morning. "Amazing," Will said more than once. "I didn't know...I didn't know." Being up front had its advantages. We were in the still-closed still-closed museum for almost two hours before the last Corvettes iaf pi ' l t ' ' J T L ... t --iMti,mh i .!..... When the caravan rolled into Nashville, Will Schefter (right) had a chance to meet country singer Doug Stone. So good is the latest Corvette that I made only two stops and felt great when I joined a Chevy press party that night. The miles weren't empty. Five times I passed motorhomcs towing old Corvettes toward Kentucky. Their owners waved and honked, grinning at the satisfaction they'd have from putting their 'Vette into the final caravan on Friday morning. Thursday was a blur of preliminaries, a Chevy press preview of 1995 cars, then a quick run up the final 60 miles to Bowling Green in my borrowed Corvette to check out the museum. More than a thousand guests showed up for the museum preview and party, complete with a private George Jones concert. The Beach Boys would do two more concerts for the Corvette faithful in days to come. Good Morning America was filming. So was CNN. Film crews from all the networks were there, along with a documentary team that brought its own satellite uplink. Dawn Friday was misty in the Opryland parking lot. My son Will flew in from Portland to make the last leR and help drive back to Park City. When the caravan finally began to roll just before 8 a.m., there were more than 1,800 Corvettes in the giant lot, the merge of four caravans west and south. Up north in Louisville, another 2,000 Corvettes staged. They were rolled off Interstate 65 and into the surrounding fields. Three truck-loads of new Corvettes sat by the road. On one truck, the corvettes were all red. On the second, all white. And the third load was blue. Sky divers streaming smoke carried the American flag into the middle of the crowd as the National Anthem played and the dedication speakers had their say. Then the doors opened and the luckiest of 118,000 people to enter the museum on its first weekend crowded inside. A half hour later I found Paul Zazarine, editor of Corvette Fever magazine and one of the museum's directors, with a stunned look on his face as he watched the crush of cultists clogging the exhibit-lined halls. "A proud day, Paul." "Yeah," he said, "but it's not what I expected. For five years, this has been our dream, just a few of us. Now it's not ours anymore. It belongs to them." A teenager jostled Paul and yelled out. "Hey Dad, look at this. It's the one millionth Corvette!" The look of sadness went away and Paul Zazarine grinned. "Yeah, it belongs to them. I guess we did good." (Schefter' s book on the inside story of the next Corvette, and his view of GM's travails and triumphs since 1988, will be published by Simon & Schuster in late 1996. An all-new Corvette will appear at about the same time.) As the sun goes down, so do our dinner prices Fresh Fish 4:00 to 6:00 p.m. Nightly Relax and enjoy our daily selection of the freshest fish or a delicious rib-eye steak charbroiled the way you like it. Or if you preferv enjoy savory breast of chicken. C Q95 Includes vegetable and potato dishes and salad. Enjoy our other featured items: Prime Rib Buffet $14 5:00 to 10:30 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays Lunch Break $3n 1 1 :30 p.m' to 4:00 p.m. Monday - Saturday Sunday Brunch $14 10:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. 1S00 PaA cuznuz Cafz &PJj 1800 Park Avenue 649-7000 Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner daily Park City's Gathering Place Prices and items are subject to change. State Liquor Licensee For Park City and Deer Valley Real Estate... Turn to the people who know Park City best! 1029 SNOW COUNTRY Roger Stephens cm, CRS, GRl V-1 4 Roger Stephens Principal Broker 1054 SNOW COUNTRY Roger Stephens cm, CRS, GRI film in ii BEST JEREMY LOT Tom Buranek Pick your view. 10 Tee. 16 & 9 Associate Broker green with stream below!! Tom Buranek, Associate Broker 364-3226 $79,000 L 1 '.- t J PARK AVENUE CONDO 2 Bedroom 2.5 Bath - Upgrades include gas conversion, new carpet, car-pet, sliding door to patio, tnnmn 1991, 1992, 1993 q, Morris Q GRI 549.3447 - ; Mobile 640-0549 Carlyle Morris CRS, GRI Professional Achievement Award SUMMIT PARK LOT Great building lot just off Parkview Dr. $30,000 Roger Stephens CRB, CRS, GRI 649-9377 ROSSI HELL Duplex Lot Fabulous view of old town. Tom Buranek, Assoc. Broker 364-3226 AERIE LOT Great view lot on Eagle Way. Views of Park City, Park Meadows, and Deer Valley. $110,000 Roger Stephens CRB, CRS, GRI 649-9377 28S EAST STAR VIEW DRIVF. Marilyn RoskeUey 6 3 34 m2 ft Saks Associate 2 barn, mother-in-law apt. $179,000 Roger Stephens 649-9377 John Herrmann Sales Associate Robert Morris & Associates Selling Park City Since 1975 801-649-8601 1-800-846-0169 Located in the Holiday Village Shopping Mall |