In April of 1964, my mom custom ordered an Ermine White 2-door Malibu coupe with a red bench seat interior. She upped it from the basic six-banger to the slightly warmer 283 with a two-barrel carburetor, backed by a two-speed Powerglide automatic and a 10-bolt peg-leg rear spinning some serious highway gears.

My dad and I starting the tear down on our '64 Chevelle in a single-car garage. I miss having hair.

She bought the car while my dad was in the Navy, stationed in California. He wouldn’t see the car until she came out to visit him a few months after buying it.

My mom and the Chevelle in 1964.

My folks moved to Iowa in 1968 after my dad completed his engineering degree at Kansas State. Unfortunately, the Iowa winters and salt took it’s toll on the Chevelle, and by the time it was 10-years-old, it was a complete wreck.

My dad kept it around as a work car, and he loved the fact that if he left it at an airport for two weeks in subzero temperatures that it always fired up on the first try.

I was born in 1975, and by 1978, I was old enough to be madly in love with the Chevelle. It didn’t bother me a bit that there were 2×4’s holding the front seat in the car (as there was literally no floor to speak of), nor that the trunk pans were long gone or that the body was no longer tied to the frame.

As far as I was concerned, that was all minor stuff that could be fixed, and I dreamed that it would mine the day I turned 16, sparkling and new again.

As dad had stopped driving the Chevelle many years prior, he and mom decided to keep it for me. The plan was always to restore it as a father/son project, but life got in the way.

The Chevelle was still a basket case, so we changed the goal to have it ready by the time I graduated high school. We made it by 3 weeks, just in time for prom.

The Chevelle before restoration. She was in bad shape. Really bad.

We tore the Chevelle down in our overcrowded single car garage, and quite frankly, was worse than we ever could have imagined. The only thing even remotely solid were the front fenders and maybe the horn. That’s it. Any reasonable father would’ve ended the project there and offered up some other car, but my dad never considered it.

Without any discussion, he knew that I needed my car to be this Chevelle, and it needed to be the two of us who put it together. The only problem was that it required far more than we could do on our own, and we were running out of time.

We contacted a local body shop that was desperate enough for work to attempt putting floor pans, trunk pans, and quarters on it. We then bought a ’65 Chevelle for parts and proceeded eviscerate it for everything we needed.

The shop was under strict orders to “get it done on budget,” so a lot of homemade sheetmetal was inserted and a few corners were cut. A councours restoration it was not, but in late April of 1993, it fired up again as an Ermine White ’64 Chevelle. As far as I was concerned, my childhood dream had come true.

This is not a staged photo.

To date, I’ve replaced the entire drivetrain, added better suspension, new wheels, etc. and used the Chevelle as my daily driver, minus winters, until I graduated from college. It’s been a part of every meaningful event since it was rebuilt including driving my wife away from our wedding, bringing each of my three kids home from the hospital, and was even there the day we put my mom into hospice care where she told me she was really glad to get to see her old Chevelle again. She died just a few days later.

Leaving my wedding in the Chevelle. My wife's arm is hanging out the window.

Today, my Chevelle is part of the family. My kids love it. My two-year-old son has already tried to steal it. Truth be told though, the car itself is not all that important to me; that I restored it with my dad is. Whenever I see that car, I think of him and my mom, and I think of the meaningful moments the Chevelle has been there for. It’s a rolling memory box that I would ever part with.

Fathers, build a car with your son. You never know, it may just change him for life. Find the time and the money. I guarantee that you won’t regret it, and neither will he.

-Robert