White River Junction
Wimette stood before her truck, a ’48 Willys Jeep coated in green paint and equipped with a wooden flatbed, her arm around her tall, thin, cowboy hat-wearing husband, Rodney Wimette. He had driven here in his built-from-scratch Cobra, stitched together from so many sources he called it his “Frankenstein.”
The Wimettes jumped in on each other’s sentences as they told the story of her truck.
“During the summertime, my Dad said kids would stay out of trouble as long as you give them something to do,” she said. “So we had to go up and clean the trails on Cardigan Mountain.”
“So the ranger would come,” said Rodney Wimette, “and pick up the kids in the truck. And take the kids up, and clear trails.”
Ellie remembered the ranger as a huge, burly man the kids all nicknamed Smokey the Bear. He would stop near the base of the mountain and take his young volunteers the rest of the way by foot, working to improve the community.
Ellie Wimette stopped cleaning trails around 1968, the year she turned 13 and her father died. She didn’t see the truck again for more than 30 years.
Sometime around 2001, Ellie Wimette said, they had an interesting conversation with her husband’s old classmate.
“We were at the alumni dance when she came up to you and said, ‘Do you want to buy this Jeep?’ I bought it at this estate sale two years ago.”
“She needed to get rid of it because she wanted to put a flower bed in,” said Rodney Wimette.
It soon came out that the sale had been from the estate of the forest ranger.
When the Wimette’s went to look at the Jeep, she recognized it immediately. That was the moment Ellie Wimette became a bona fide car enthusiast, said her husband.
“It was a moment of epiphany for her,” he said. “Yeah, I get it, with the cars now. Now she has something that’s very unique and special to her.”
Adam Chandler, of Enfield, who moved to the area six years ago from San Francisco, started the Cars and Coffee Club’s event in September, and said he’s hoping to grow the morning meetings — held the third Saturday of each month — significantly this year. A project manager at TomTom, Chandler discovered cars as a hobby four years ago, and learned how to do car projects by studying YouTube videos. When he started, it took him 15 hours to replace an exhaust system, a two-hour job.
Now he’s thinking about adding slicks (tires with a solid surface) to add a fractional amount of speed to his car, which can already get to a quarter mile in 11.98 seconds.
“I know if I put slicks on there, I can get another .2 seconds,” he said.
Wimette and Chandler have each, for their own reasons, crossed the invisible line that separates those who merely own their vehicle from those who love their vehicle.
“These are classic car lovers,” said Jonas Sabatini, a marketer with White River Toyota who was handing out coffee mugs to people from the back of a truck and footing the bill when they crossed the street to fill them at Tuckerbox Cafe.
Sabatini, 31, said he’s been in love with cars “since puberty.”
“The automobile can either be the utility of going from point A to point B, or it can be like a paintbrush. It is the method of a form of art,” Sabatini said.
“The car in itself can be beautiful. The ride can be beautiful. Some people like a nice comfortable ride, that floats like a couch on the road. Some people like something that’s a little bit stiffer, like what Adam drives, and you can really feel every single bump on the road and it just hugs it. Some people like a lot of torque, like an electric car that just takes off like a rocket ship. There are different flavors for everyone, like wine.”
For Wimette, the beloved green Jeep is a piece of those memories — her father’s work ethic, a ranger named Smokey the Bear, and arrhythmic jouncing along a rough dirt road on the way to clean trails on a hot summer day.
Other car owners were there for other reasons.
Next to Rodney Wimette’s Frankenstein, his friend, Karen Clark, was showing off her Cobra. It was a Factory Five kit car, and has had its guts donated from a ’92 Mustang.
“I like speed. I like adrenaline,” she said.
R.D. Ford, a 61-year-old builder from Canaan, chatted with a couple of younger guys, speculating about whether the latest owner of the Canaan Speedway would replace the bleachers that used to hold spectators, but which have since been removed.
“They took them out. They’re sitting on the other side,” Ford said. “Part of the conversation, sometimes he’s going to build the old-style bleachers. Redo the whole thing like it was, back in the day. But we don’t really know.”
Ford carried a couple of RD Gismos, a small canvas sleeve that he has invented to help deal with the floppiness of a universal joint. Over the past couple of years, he’s sold about 600 of them for about seven bucks each.
“That sleeve goes on and locks in flexible,” he said. “So now you can manage your socket to where you want it to go.”
The Wimettes and Clark cheered when an older man pulled a 1932 Ford Roadster into the parking lot.
“Dino!” shouted Clark.
After backing— very slowly — into a parking space, Dino Vlahakis, a retired pilot from Lebanon, stepped out to show off his modifications. The original fenders have been removed, and in the 1950s, an auto restoration company in Massachusetts painted it in the style of a hotrod, with wide, white-walled wheels, raven black paint and traces of poppy red, a Ford signature from the 1950.
“I’ve had the engine since I was 18 years old,” he said. “It hasn’t been running all those years.”
The conversation was free and easy, the morning often punctuated by laughter.
Vlahakis reminded the attendees of the Carz Car Club, another, larger group that will begin its weekly Tuesday evening gatherings in the Mascoma Savings Bank parking lot in mid-May.
“We suffer through the winter,” said Clark. “We live for the summer.”
Vlahakis and Rodney Wimette said that, though one can spend big money on a car hobby, it can also be done on the cheap.
“If you’re creative, you don’t have to have a big bank account to do this,” said Wimette.
Ellie Wimette bought her Jeep for less than $200, and they spent less than $1,500 to bring it back to life.
“It doesn’t take a classic to come to a car show,” Vlahakis said. “Ownership is not required. Enthusiasm is.”
Matt Hongoltz-Hetling can be reached at mhonghet@vnews.com or 603-727-3211.