A Hot Rod Legacy: Chasing My Father's Dream Across America

From a stolen '40 Coupe to a new adventure on the open road

This framed picture in my office shows a young man sitting on the edge of the driver's side of his Honduran Maroon 1940 Ford Deluxe Coupe. On the shelf next to it sits a toy model of a 1940 Ford. The picture was taken around 1962 in Hollywood, Florida. The young man, my (birth) father, drove to Florida from Massachusetts with his buddy Art to visit his grandparents. This wasn’t his first long trip. According to his friends and some family members, my father had driven west across the country to California, stopping in Mexico at least twice in the same Coupe with two different buddies, taking in all the sights, including the Grand Canyon, along the way.

In another photo, my father is standing by the side of the road somewhere near Mexico at night, trying to steal one of the road signs. A former boyfriend who knew him back in the day got to see all the signs my father had “collected” from his trips, which he hung on the walls of his garage at home. My father was a hot rodder; he built that 1940 Deluxe Coupe with its triple carburetors and Pontiac engine in his home garage in Medford, MA. My father didn’t write checks to some “resto guy” like you see on television nowadays. He was a poor second-generation Sicilian kid and like many of his friends, he had to do all the work including making the parts, himself.

It was a sad day for my father when, in the summer of 1963, that 1940 Ford Coupe was stolen down at Revere Beach, where he used to frequent the clubs. He was heartbroken over the loss of it. Growing up, the little I knew about my father was his love for his cars and driving. These were the photos I saw in family albums that stuck with me the most. I imagined that someday I would somehow magically find that 1940 Coupe that was stolen. I envisioned coming across it in some barn or meeting someone who knew someone who had stolen it, like a scene out of a movie. And I imagined that one day I would get to see the country like he did by driving across it.

In 2008, I became involved in the “hot rod scene” to learn about the culture as a way to feel connected to this man I never got to know in real life. I began to forge a connection through the things he loved, and that was hot rods. I never found my father’s 1940 Ford Coupe, although I had a lead in 2013 that I might find it, only for all the roads to lead me to a dead end. However, I did end up with my own 1940 Ford hot rod. It’s a pickup truck, but it’s a hot rod, with a 1957 Corvette motor and lowered suspension.

Five years ago, in August 2019, my husband and I were lucky enough to purchase the truck from a friend who needed to downsize his car collection quickly. We offered him a decent price and he accepted. The truck originally came from California and was built by Marty Moore. Marty was a builder from the Prowlers car club out of San Diego, known for his love of ’40 Fords. He had several of his builds featured in car magazines like Car Craft, Custom Cars, and Hot Rod. My husband, John, is also a hot rod builder. He also does autobody restoration and painting. Before we bought this truck, we were building one from scratch. When I asked him how long it might take us to finish it, he said, “Another five years,” (which in Hot Rod speak means ten). I said, "Let’s sell the project and buy this one already done. None of us are getting any younger." He agreed, and we bought it. (Thank you, Mike C.) My dream was about to come true! Maybe I would finally get to go on a road trip in my very own hot rod, just like my father did.

Now, one of the things John promised me when we got married six years ago was that we would go on a trip in the truck that we were building, for our honeymoon. The truck wasn’t completed when we got married but I agreed to wait. Then me and my ADHD got impatient when I realized I might never get to go on a honeymoon if we waited until the truck was finished. That was part of the reason I encouraged abandoning our “project” and buying this one.

I know this is a very long wind-up to the story at hand, but if you’re not a “hot rod” person, you need the backstory to understand the story. This winter, John and I finally made plans to go on a road trip with our truck. Last summer, my husband spent the entire car show season swapping out the manual 3-speed transmission for an automatic. It wasn’t an easy job, and since the truck wasn’t John’s build originally, he had to retrofit the new transmission to Marty’s handiwork. Not an easy feat when you have to do it on your back without a lift. You see, even though I sort of learned to drive a stick shift, I wasn’t and would never be confident at it. So, John turned it into an automatic for me. (If that’s not love, I don’t know what is.)

I wanted to go to Minnesota to the “Cars of the '50s” car show in June, but the group of guys we were going to convoy with decided not to go. Besides, they wanted to do ten hours of driving nonstop each day, which sounded stressful and not much fun to me. I wanted to stop along the way and see stuff, like The Henry Ford Museum in Detroit, for example.

Anyway, this year the truck is automatic, so I can drive it, and we can go on our road trip, right? I tell John we have to start planning our trip. Where are we going to go? Minnesota was out, but we decided that instead of a car show, we would do what my father did: see some of this country by just driving it and hitting some destinations along the way. John always wanted to visit Gettysburg, PA, and there was this festival in Phoenixville called “Blobfest,” which is a horror con devoted to the 1958 horror film “The Blob.” We agreed, “Okay, that’s it.” We’ll visit PA, drive through the Berkshires, Catskills, and Poconos down to Phoenixville, which is near King of Prussia, and then head west through Amish country to Gettysburg.

At the beginning of the car show season, which is late April here in Massachusetts, John noticed that the truck was running “hot”—too hot. This had happened to us before on our trip to Burlington, VT, in September. If the truck idled at all, it looked like it was going to overheat. Not good. Especially not good if you plan on taking it on a 500-plus-mile trip in the summer. John decided “Marty” needed an electric fan that would continually cool the engine, and with an electric fan, you need an alternator, not a generator, so he had to swap that out. He also felt the truck needed new gauges so he could see the actual water temperature, oil pressure, and voltage instead of the original 1940 gauges that just read “Hot” or “Charging.”

Easy, right? Not so much. Just like the transmission swap last summer, John kept running into one snag after another. First, he had to make up brackets for the electric fan because there weren’t radiator supports to mount it to. Then he had to raise the alternator about an inch from where the generator originally was because it was sitting on top of the valve covers and he couldn’t tighten the fan belt. Next, the new oil pressure gauge pinned itself over 100 lbs. of pressure. Finally, on the day before we were about to leave on our “Road Trip,” the intake manifold where the sending unit for the water temperature was located kept leaking antifreeze. John said he could fix it by bypassing the temperature sending switch and putting a toggle for the fan on the dash, then he could turn it on and off manually without depending on the sending unit. The poor guy had been sweating and swearing in our garage for weeks, and now it was go time for our trip, and everything was a mess.

I was concerned, of course. I had this foreboding sense that we weren’t going to take the trip in the truck, but John kept telling me, “He’d figure it out.” Okay. I trusted him. I asked if I could help, but this was out of the realm of “Can you hold this while I do that” expertise. I still hoped we could take the truck on our trip. I was in the house when I heard John fire up the truck in the garage. It sounded... bad, sick. It didn’t roar and come to life like a hot rod should, and then I knew: the truck wasn’t going anywhere.

Change of plans. John was disappointed after all his hard work. I felt bad, but if there’s anything I’ve learned in my last fifteen years of hanging around “the hot rod scene,” it’s that things often go wrong, or break, and it’s always better to be safe than sorry. We went on the trip anyway, in my 2008 Toyota RAV4 with 240k miles, and did just fine. With the heat and humidity we’ve had in the last couple of weeks, the AC was a blessing—we certainly didn’t have THAT in the 1940 Ford pickup. I still drove and saw some of this country.

My dream of driving across the country in a hot rod, like my father did, remains. I won’t give up on that, even at my advanced age of 58. My father saw more of this country in his twenty-five years than I probably ever will in my lifetime. But one day I will fulfill my dream of seeing this country on the open road in a hot rod like he once did.