By Rachel Sauer
The Palm Beach Post
If we’re being entirely honest, it looks like a shoe, or maybe a roller skate. Considering all points of logical, empirical assessment, it is unlovely. It is a buttless wonder.
But love so rarely is about logic, and this is a love story.
And love, wrote philosopher Robert C. Solomon, “can be understood only ‘from the inside,’ as a language can be understood only by someone who speaks it, as a world can be understood only by someone who lives in it.”
So we’d have to hunker down in the bucket seats, peering through the windshield and out across the snout of a hood, breathing deep the bouquet of auto shop — these days, the interiors always smell of gas and transmission fluid — and still we might not truly understand what it is to love the unlovable car.
A car that gets no respect
Yes, this one’s for the Pintos and Chevettes, the Cimarrons, the Corvairs, the LeCars, the Aspens. Most especially, this one’s for the long-discontinued AMC Gremlin, which celebrated its 38th birthday Tuesday, and which manages to make every ugliest/worst designed/all-around lousiest cars list concocted by — let’s face it — snobs who don’t understand.
No, it takes a special sort of something to gaze at this unusual remnant of AMC’s boundless creativity and feel tenderness. To behold this shoe-looking vehicle and think, “Now that’s a cool car.”
It is not for faint hearts. Fortunately, a strong and steady one beats in Terry Grow’s chest, one that swells with pride when he sees the candy apple-colored beauty nestled in a place of honor in his Greenacres garage.
“American Motors is the Rodney Dangerfield of cars,” he says, laughing.
Just now, his 1974 Gremlin is pulled onto the driveway, and the setting sun burnishes it with bronze and gold. Grow, 62, slowly circles his treasure, rubbing unsightly fingerprints off with a blue chamois. He stops at the rear hatch window, where a white decal proclaims this vehicle “The Misfit.”
“It’s appropriate, don’t you think?” he asks.
Well, yes. Now that you mention it, it’s deeply appropriate for this emblem of every automobile that rolled off assembly lines and landed with a clunk.
There is something unfair about this, about the 20/20 hindsight of it all, looking back and laughing at the out-on-a-limb leaps of engineering derring-do that, with one more twist of the screw, could have resulted in automotive immortality, rather than infamy.
Plus, so many of these cars on the “awful autos” lists were developed with budget-conscious consumers in mind, people not inclined to second-mortgage the house just for the privilege of driving something that interests them.
So is the Gremlin all that bad, then?
No! Bart Mangrum, 31, of Fort Pierce, is emphatic on this point.
“It’s not the prettiest car in the world,” he admits. “You’ve got to have thick skin when you own a Gremlin. But I’ve always voted for the underdogs. Everybody has a Mustang or a Camaro or a GTO, but nobody has an AMC, let alone a Gremlin.”
Right now his ’74 Gremlin is in pieces in his garage. He’s saving his money because he’s got big plans: paint it orange with a black hockey-stick stripe, make it street legal and generally soup it up. He bought it in December 2006, when it became clear that his other Gremlin, a ’73, was beyond redemption.
This one, though …
“I love it,” he says, resting a gentle hand on its blunted rear end. The hatch back glass is leaning against the garage wall, and on it is the inscription “Grem Reaper Racing” because, he explains, “Gremlins get enough abuse. I thought I’d add a little evilness to it.”
A Gremlin with serious kick
A few miles south of Mangrum, in Port St. Lucie, Todd DeJarnette is past the point of justifying his sleek black Gremlin. He bought it 22 years ago in Kentucky, when he was an 18-year-old who could just afford the $300 price tag. With all that he’s put into it, that $300 car is now a $30,000 car, he says.
The engine? Custom. It’s a 401 bored and stroked to 426 (as in cubic inches, and that’s huge) with 840 horsepower. At the dragstrip, where he races it when he has time, making a top speed of 143 mph.
Yep. A Gremlin driving 143 miles per hour.
He shows up at the track with it “and people just start smiling,” he says. “Everybody’s got a story, how they had a Gremlin or their friend had one.”
The thing is, where most people let their Gremlins — which were produced from 1970 to 1983 — deteriorate to rust, DeJarnette kept his up.
“I could have tossed it,” he muses, “I could have thrown it away 1,000 times. But I just couldn’t do it. It never crossed my mind to sell it in 22 years.”
Which gets at the heart of this love — this often unreasonable, generally unexplainable love for what is commonly viewed as an unlovable thing.
In his book Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things, Donald A. Norman wrote, “If something is to give lifelong pleasure, two components are required: the skill of the designer in providing a powerful, rich experience, and the skill of the perceiver …
“The real trick — and where most products fail — is in maintaining the relationship after that initial burst of enthusiasm.”
Maintaining that relationship, feeding that love, involves a rich, complicated mixture of memories and pleasure and deeply personal notions of beauty. When DeJarnette looks at his Gremlin, he doesn’t just see a car — he sees who he was at 18, 19, 20, racing around Kentucky, sometimes with a girl in the bucket seat beside him, owning the road.
Likewise, that inexplicable love is why Sam Tsai of Boynton Beach hates to part with his red 1980 Pinto, which is for sale. The long-discontinued Ford Pinto, infamous for its flammability, is another deeply unloved car. But Tsai looks at the turtle-shaped thing parked in his garage and remembers the time he drove from Florida to Massachusetts and forgot to put water in the radiator.
“But it still kept driving,” he marvels. “There was smoke coming out and it still kept going.”
About 15 years ago, his Pinto couldn’t pass an emissions test, so it’s been hunkered in his garage ever since. He couldn’t get rid of it. The only reason it’s for sale now is because he may move back to Taiwan.
El Camino still wins raves
Perhaps the attachment to a now-unpopular, discontinued car is made stronger because it’s not easy. Easy is loving the slick, sleek, fast cars, the obviously pretty ones, the show-offs. Not so easy is loving the ones whose beauties aren’t obvious, or that have certain … connotations. Like, say, the discontinued Chevrolet El Camino.
Culturally, it has certain ’70s-centric, groovy good times, gold chain-and-leisure suit associations. It has a reputation. But gently mention this to Neil Stringer of West Palm Beach and he is genuinely surprised. His response, in essence, is, “A reputation for what? Excellence?”
A retired master mechanic, he found a 1984 El Camino on eBay last year and is rebuilding it in his garage — ripping out the guts and making it faster and more powerful and just generally sweeter.
“I’ve been a fan of El Caminos for a long, long time,” he says. “They’re unique. You’ve got the carrying and towing of a small pickup and the ride of a small car.”
When it is done, it will be cherry — although, he admits, when you’re rebuilding a car, it’s never done. But regardless, he loves it and sees nothing but beauty when he looks at it.
“The seductive power of the design of certain material and virtual objects can transcend issues of price and performance for buyers and users alike,” wrote designers Julie Khaslavsky and Nathan Sherdroff. “To many an engineer’s dismay, the appearance of a product can sometimes make or break the product’s market reaction. What they have in common is the ability to create an emotional bond with their audiences, almost a need for them.”
So this inexplicable connection with the unconventional car: Greg Lawrence, 24, of Lantana, has a 1980 Chevrolet Chevette that, admittedly, “isn’t doing so well right now,” but still he hangs on to it, attached to it.
‘Blob of grease’ now roars
Attached like Terry Grow is to his Gremlin, his pride and joy. He’s always been into AMC products, and about a year ago, after taking a few years off from fixing up cars, told himself, “I have got to build another car.”
It would be an AMC, of course. And then the stars and eBay aligned, and he found a Gremlin for sale in DeBary. The transmission was blown and the engine was a big blob of grease, but he was smitten.
Hundreds of hours in the garage later, and the Gremlin is shiny and strong and spit-polished. The engine roars when he turns it on. It got a lot of notice at the car show in Daytona Beach last weekend.
The critical eye might still see a car that resembles a roller skate, but to look at Grow as he looks at his car is to see unconditional and absolute love.