The Past

Before I get to my first experience with this vehicle I'd like to look at the past.

The past is often forgotten it seems. We tend to spend so much time focused on the future very little on the present and lesser more on the past. More of people's time seems to me to be on how and what the future will hold for them, "that garden is gonna look great when it blooms this spring!"

People spend so much time focused on how great things are gonna be tomorrow, that they seem to not notice how beautiful it is today. I'm not gonna say I'm not guilty myself,  I surely am. 

It's only when something reminds you of the ones you have loved and lost do you take the time to sit back and reflect on how your life has been effected by having that person or car or whatever it may be there for that time. 

I've recently had cause for reflection for several reasons myself. As the Pearl Inches closer to turning the big six zero I've thought about the history it has seen. I don't know where it was sold, how long they had it originally or even how many miles it has.

I do however know who owned it last and that at some point during the early eighties it was hugger orange and completely disassembled in that Seattle backyard. I never met the man that last had the heart to take the heart out of her, I have however spent time with his family and I continue to ensure that the car makes the annual car show in the neighborhood it spent so much time in.

Even with all the dust collected from conversations and stories you hear,  they just come short of saying the same things as the scratches and dings that litter the paint. The ladder bars where a first clue but after some cleaning and digging under the seat the vintage time sheets from Bremerton raceway circa nineteen eighty-seven told a much greater story. With a healthy cam and a quarter mile pass just over one hundred miles per hour it's clear what the agenda was.

I keep those cards on the heater box to remind me that I am only the current car taker of this vehicle and it will out live me like it's outlived many before me.

The Day

It was a  sunny, a day like any other day, that's how these things are supposed to start right? Actually it was a sunny day, however that day would prove not to be like any other day.

To begin again, I guess that would sorta make this the second beginning? I had only a few months earlier loaded up my life's belongings and moved across the state, love is pretty powerful like that. With a new environment and surroundings came new stories of cars wasting away in garages.

I'll admit I was slow to respond as I didn't have much to offer if the story turned out to be true. After some time I felt I was in the position to investigate these wispers.

I had been told repeatedly that the fable I was being told was nothing of the sort. That although I had been to this house on numerous occasions having not seen anything to indicate that what lies beneath my feet.

The teller of the story was unquestionably dependable, also the resident was without question in nature. Two people I still find as important parts of my life to this day.

However I just couldn't bring myself to believe that my "white wale" quietly lurks beneath me. I finally brought myself to build the courage to find out for certain if this story would have a happy ending or continue to be the one that got away.

So in the middle of the afternoon I stood in a dark garage in the basement of a Seattle home in one of it's more vintage neighborhoods. As the car cover was pulled back and the dust lingered in the air I stood wobbling on weakened knees trying to catch my breath.

Lying at rest in beautifully checkered black lacquer sat "the Black Pearl" as it's come to be known. A real steel fifty five Chevrolet two door had top, with a messaged three fifty and a four speed.

After several years of sitting it took some coaxing and a little smoking of the clutch to get it out on the street. Once the hands stopped shaking and the clutch cooled down, it was time for our maiden voyage.

The Beginning

In the beginning of this adventure is the most likely place to start this conversation.
It really began as any good bench racing fable starts out, "I know of this little old lady down the block that parked her '32 Vicky when her husband didn't come back from the war and the car hasn't been out of the garage since!" It even sounds like a fable when you read it.

Growing  up at my father's knee listening to specifications of the years highest-rated cars and recounts of the exploits of the god's of speed. These stories where just stories, something to capture to child's imagination, bedtime stories. However as adultecance gave way to the nightmare of teenagerizm,  those stories grew from a fable to a wisper of truth. Somebody knows somebody that has actually had the experience, or so I was told.

The first fable I remember was actually of a '32 Ford, then I saw it, it was real. The possibilities that those stories could actually be true where almost more than this mans teenage boyish mind could handle. In the flesh, real 70 or more year old steel, I could touch, smell it, taste it, that would have been going to far. It was my first, and I won't soon forget it, an original flathead in it's original packaging. It's long moved onto to new homes, new ride height and other boys dreams, but it's still in that garage for me.

As my own maturity arrived and I began and failed at my first restorations and modifications of the automotive industry. ny knowledge has always been best garnered the most difficult ways possible, it's far easier for some to buy a custom opposed to building it. No eighteen year old  has the mental capacity to think far enough ahaed. That experience was a black 1958 VW bug that I crammed into my parents garage with visions of a full custom restoration project dancing in my head like sugarplums on Christmas eve. It's one thing to disassemble a bug down to every nut and bolt, it's all together something else to put it back together again.

For years I had heard stories of an acre field next to a farmhouse that was packed with cars and trucks, not a one newer than 1942. I  believed it in the since that I'm sure it was there, forty years ago. However this was the new millennium, a new century, they are running out of dinosaurs to dig up, surely that field had been pillaged ages before I was even bore. One sunny Saturday afternoon I saw it just out of the corner of my eye,  buzzing down a rural back road on my way out camping. The craziest thing about it is the fact that it really was right where everyone had said it was all along. Sometimes when someone tells you about something, it might just be worth your time to go take a look. Find a good place along the way for a greasy burger and a few pints, that way you win either way.

My experience is to be continued....

The Pearl

This is the Pearl thought, it's a blog or a babble and possibly a little bit of an enjoyable thing to read.

Your author lacks everything required for someone to be a writer that people will read. I as the aforementioned author lack all training, most social awareness and certainly any sort of public decorum.  However what I lack, I'll try and make up for in passion. And that's really what this is all about, passion. 

I have a passion for cars, craftsmanship and creativity, really anything that requires great skill to build, operate and maintain. 

So I would like to invite anyone that comes along this corner of the world to take a moment and enjoy these trials and tribulations as they are encountered along my journey to achieve some form of craft with my 1955 Chevrolet Bel-Air. Along the way I hope to meet and interview with other craftsman and get the opportunity to share their stories also and the passion that drives them into there own obsession.