And Doc.... I do love me a 68 Charger... Is it a R/T at least?
No, it's a triple-green buddy-seat 318/column automatic car. Investment-wise, virtually worthless. Wanna hear a ghost story?
It's his
very-first car. He bought it when he was 15 with money he saved from washing dishes at a local restaurant. He loved that thing, but it was rough even then. In fact had already been in a yard once, prompting him to immediately nickname the car, "The Ghost". He was forced to sell the car 25 years ago, and it changed hands numerous times. The twin brothers to whom he sold it moved and had to rid themselves of it as well, at which point it became someone's parts car a few times over. A little more was scavenged from it each time. We found the car in May, totally by coincidence. I saw a rotten old "fatback" Mustang sitting along a power line, probably 1/3 mile from the highway. It was on the back end of the property where a guy used to always have Mopars for sale. I insisted we stop, and Kevin was pissed because he was sure we were wasting valuable time--he was here on vacation and had an agenda to follow. We pulled in and I talked to the owner, and schmoozed my way onto the property. Sure enough, the dude has a bunch of old Mopar stuff including a V-code '71 Runner, E5/4-speed car and '70 'Cuda 340 convertible (B5/white interior/top/hockeys) among numerous others. Even further back on the property, I saw this green '68 Charger and thought, "Well, Kev will like that," and nothing more, because we were sure it had been crushed years ago. When we finally made our way back to that one, Kevin recognized some very distinctive quarter-panel damage he'd done to the car in 1987 or '88 at school (as soon as he pointed it out, I knew as well). We talked about where he'd gotten it, and realized that we knew where the car was much later than we thought. I'd lost track of it in the early '90s but Kevin knew where it was up until about 2001, then it vanished. Except, it hid in plain sight. It had been sitting out on a corner lot adjacent to a friend's shop (the friend had nothing to do with it), but the way it was sitting we could only see the front of the car... and somewhere along the way, someone had stuck a '69 grille in it! That '69 grille kept us from ever even looking at the car; it was obviously in bad shape and there was nothing else around it, and no "For Sale" sign so we just drove past it God knows how many times (usually thinking, "I wonder whatever happened to 'The Ghost'"?). So we actually knew where it was up until about 6 or 7 years ago. The guy Kevin bought the car from, Bob, had bought it
on the street on which I live. He was leaving the scrapyard and passed it on a trailer headed in the opposite direction, offered to buy it for more than the scrapyard would give, and dragged it home. The car was less than half a mile from doom when Bob saw and saved it. Kevin paid $550 for the car; the doors (perfect '69s--close enough) were an additional $500.
But it gets better...
Kevin had planned on putting a 383 in The Ghost, that he was going to pull from a '71 Charger 500 that he was driving in the summer/fall of '88. He'd sold the rotting 500 as a parts car around '92 or '93 to a local Mopar enthusiast, who had it for many years. That car, I assured Kevin, was absolutely,
positively crushed in 2001. I knew it, because I'd bought the big-block torsion bars from it after one of the originals in my beige '72 Rallye snapped. To get them out, the guy rolled "the front half" of the car over. :doh: Less than an hour and maybe 40 miles from Bob's place, we stopped out at this other guy's house, and Kevin asked him about it anyhow--only to hear the same tale about it being crushed again. But he wondered aloud, "I guess you don't know what happened to the engine from that car." Amazingly, the guy said, "Oh, sure. It was my race motor for a dozen years. It's sitting over there." Sure enough, in the corner of the shop was the numbers block for the Charger 500, dressed out with its OE steel crank and original rods, capped with 516 closed-chamber heads and, in the words of the owner, "blown up"--which is a term that guy uses if he so much as slings a pushrod. Kevin bought the shortblock for $100 and we loaded it into the truck.
We're not done.
However, when he sold that 500 as a parts car, he'd kept the heads and intake because he was going to use them on The Black Bitch (which I bought from him). He asked me about them, insisting I got them with the car. I knew I didn't take them, because I had the 440 fresh on the stand at the time. I thought about it for awhile, and told him again that I never had them, but now knew where they were. He'd had them in storage at another friend's place the whole time. They'd never left his possession in the first place.
At this point, he'd not yet told his wife about anything. Hell, this all happened in a matter of a few hours on a single day. See, he'd used strictly-forbidden "no touch" money out of the "Mortgage Early Pay-off Fund" without her permission. When he told her, bless her heart, she said, "If I found my 240Z I would've done the same thing. This is awesome."
I hope that by now, you're sitting, because here's the kicker:
When he got back home to Georgia, he started researching and making calls to initiate getting a proper MI title for it, since there wasn't one with the car and he assumed it hadn't been titled after the Grooms Brothers sold it as a parts car. Lo and behold,
the car was still in Kevin's Mom's name, something they'd done way back in '86 so that he could afford insurance on the car. He was the executor of his late mother's estate, so MI sent him a new copy of the 1987 title.
If you have any belief whatsoever in destiny, this should confirm it. At least four people had that Charger as a parts car, and one of them got within spitting distance of the crusher with it. The engine he wanted to put in it almost 30 years ago fell into his lap the same day we found the car. The car is still as close to being in his name as it ever was.
The 383 engine went back to GA with Kevin; the numbers 318 and 904 are still at Bob's (we took them out to keep the car from breaking in half while loading it on the trailer). The Charger itself is in storage here. Kevin recently bought a completely rust-free '70 Coronet 500 that will donate most of the needed structural parts to get the Charger solid again. He also has an extremely-competent, restoration shop that is so in love with this story, they're going to do the work on it even though they don't work for the public. These guys work on heavy-hitter ultra-collector cars for names like Gibson, Badalson, Wellborn, Juliano, etc. It's gonna be gorgeous. It's gonna be right. And it's gonna be
extremely expensive and take a very long time. He
hopes to drive it to his daughter's graduation (she's 8, so I'm thinking Class of '25 or '26 :doh: ) like he drove it to his own graduation in 1989.
He's already got a '71 Charger R/T 440/4-speed, a low-mile '82 Mirada of which he's the first title owner, and a rotisserie-restored '88 IROC... but this is The Ghost. His first true automotive love, and first love dies hard.
