Up to the Challenge

My father has always been mathematically inclined and has a penchant for working on cars. He's done it since he was a kid. Since then, he spent years restoring a 1972 Corvette to the pristine condition it is now. He has taken his 'Vette to many car shows and has come home with quite a few trophies. He thought it would be a great idea to restore a car for me (so he says at least) to drive when I turned sixteen. My father owned an old '70 Dodge Challenger back in the day and saw it fit to restore a Challenger and re-live his teenager days yet again. As you would expect, I accepted the offer and we began working. We found an old 1971 Challenger sitting in an old man's garage that was perfect. We bought the rusty old frame, took it home and began cutting off the rust it had acquired over the years. It was a lot of work getting the old pile of junk into good shape. Over the course of three years we had put the car's frame back into mint condition, primed and painted it, built a numbers-matching engine and transmission to drop into it, wired up the car, cut the carpet and filled in the interior and finally painted the Challenger a beautiful shade of orange. She was all finished after years of hard work. All of the hard work was worth it, though. For it was all quality time I got to spend with my father. We have had a rocky relationship over the course of my life, but for those moments where we would lay our backs on the cold concrete and work underneath that car and appreciate the work we were doing, all of our past could be forgotten. Working on that Challenger really brought us together. We both had very different interests before, but working on that car developed a common interest we could both appreciate. To this day that '71 Challenger (pictured below) represents the years of bonding that happened underneath the hood on those hot summer days.

Back to my Family Discourse page