Published: August 09, 2008 08:27 pm      

High gas prices kept some classic cars home

By Mannix Porterfield

REGISTER-HERALD REPORTER

Back when the muscle cars jockeyed for elbow room on the blacktops and coveted slots at drive-in hamburger joints, gas ran about 29.9 cents per gallon.

That meant a measly $5 could get a guy easily through a weekend of drag racing and romance.

Not any more.

With fuel teetering at the $4-a-gallon level, and those hungry, eight cylinders only good for about a dozen or so miles to the gallon, fewer cars from the heavy metal era bothered to make long-distance trips into Beckley for Shade Tree Car Club’s summer run.

“We’re down on attendance,” Club President Harold Barker lamented, as he prepared to wind up the 2008 season with back-to-back shows next weekend.

“I guess that’s what it was. There were plenty of spectators, as usual. But we didn’t have as many cars this year as we’ve been having. In our last show, I think we had 105 cars. Usually, we have around 150. If you pay to get into the show, get something to eat and buy a tank of gas, that runs quite a bit.”

Especially if you live a couple of hundred miles away, and those cars are accustomed to feeding on cheap gas in the days of their youth.

“Everyone is cutting back, I imagine,” Barker said. “You can’t spend that much money going to a car show every weekend.”

Which explains why many in this time of expensive gas car aficionados tend to take part in car shows as close to home as possible, Barker figures.

Barker expects a bigger turnout by exhibitors the weekend of Aug. 16-17, since the season at Rally’s ends the first day, a Saturday, then winds up on Sunday with the popular Nationals Event.

This is the 17th edition of the Nationals, one that has been staged in recent years on the spacious greenery of Pinecrest Hospital.

Typically, the Nationals features a morning church service, and some gospel music intertwined with the period rock classics.

“We have more trophies and better prizes, and usually we try to have enough so everyone gets a door prize,” he said. “We have several U.S. Savings Bonds to give away.”

In recent summers, Shade Tree has expanded its repertoire with shows at Lester Square to launch the season, and a Memorial Day special at Blue Ridge Cemetery. Barker feels the two will become permanent.

“I think seven shows is enough,” he said. “It just takes about all summer fooling with it. I think that’s plenty.”

Club member Wayne Lewis, a retired builder living in Crab Orchard, plans to exhibit his 1964 Ford Fairlane but, under club rules, cannot compete for trophies.

Yet, at the recent Friends of Coal car show at the YMCA Sports Complex, attendees picked his car as the best in compiling a list of Top Ten.

A 10-year soldier, Lewis bought the car when his old one broke down with a collapsed water pump on a weekend pass while he was stationed at Fort Benning, Ga.

The sticker price was $3,412.08, about $1,000 below the going price for Ford’s new sports car, the Mustang.

“I had three kids when I bought it,” he said. “They wouldn’t fit in a Mustang.”

Lewis used his new vehicle as a family car, even shipping it to Germany during an Army tour there, where he once caught a glimpse of Elvis Presley, but, after a fender-bender in 1973, wheeled it into a garage where it sat until 2003 the next three decades.

A sergeant with an Army rifle team, Lewis recently switched the Fairlane’s 411 rear end to a 350 version, upping his mileage from 12 or 13 mpg to 17 — still too low for use as a family car.

“I liked the Army,” he said. “I really had it made on the rifle team. I was on special duty all the time. Now that I got out, I wished I had stayed in.”

Lewis also has a 1967 Chrysler station wagon with 54,000 actual miles on it and is working on restoring a 1956 Ford club sedan. He spent three years putting the Fairlane back into floor room shape, leaving the original engine, a 289 high-performance, intact.

“It’s a fine club,” he says of Shade Tree, of which he has been a member since 2003. “It’s the best one around.”

— E-mail: mannix@register-herald.com