Since 1986

Me & Ern
Originally uploaded by The Put-Man.

Ok, so most of you know I’m a little “bent” when it comes to certain things, right?

I’m a Jeep-driving former-Marine with the battle-stained flag from my Grandfather’s WWII destroyer hanging in my living room.

“Ooh-Rah”, and “Semper Fi, Mac”!

Less known about me is my affection for Italian Sports cars. I bought my first one, a 1972 “Competition Orange” Fiat Spider way back in 1986. I was a young, dumb 20 year-old Marine stationed in Twentynine Palms, and just to keep the car running, I had to buy a $20 set of tools from Wal-Mart & check out a repair manual from the base library.

It’s been a love affair ever since.

That first Spider will always have a special place in my heart. After an accident, it got sold to another Marine, who has shockingly remained one of my best friends to this day! I then had a brief, and very expensive, romance with a lipstick-red 1979 Alfa Romeo Spider. Once I got out of the Corps to try my hand at college, another Fiat found me. This one was a dark metallic silver. She didn’t survive the turmoil of my mid-twenties, but she’d been a good, beautiful, and temperamental beauty. These cars each left indelible marks on my soul, and then in 1998, I found myself in a different place in my life.

At long last, I had a good, and decent paying job that gave me a long-awaited stability in my life. I had a good set of friends at my new job, and I got invited to The Pocono’s for a weekend car show. With no idea what it really was, or where I was going, I had accidentally wandered into something called a “Fiat Freak Out”. I spent the weekend in a daze, open mouthed, I wandered through a collection of beautiful cars that each brought me my very favorite memories from my younger days in the Corps. I had so much fun, and met some truly great people, and I vowed to get myself another Fiat Spider, and return to Freak Out.

In 1999, I found my third Fiat Spider. Almost a mythical “barn find”, she was 100% complete and original, and had been stored untouched in a New Jersey garage for 10 years. 80,000 original miles. I dragged it home from Jersey that summer, and in my Dad’s front yard he showed my brother and I some old school wrenching – how to adjust the points and so forth. Sadly, Leukemia took him from us a short time later, but that car remained close to me heart because of that connection.

The “rush of life” pushed me downstream for a few years, and that Spider had a few years of slight driving, then a few years relegated to the garage, and each spring I told myself “This year I will fix her up, and make it back to a Freak Out”. In 2007, the year I’m 40, I decided to put it off no longer. Back in April I began wrenching. I got her back on the road. I made it to my first club event...

...and found out my beloved Spider had terminal bone cancer. I was distraught. She was sold as a parts car, and I had a hole in my heart.

The Fiat club came through for me though. Less than a month later I had an ‘83 Spider...I began to figure out what it needed, and how I wanted to modify it to me “mine”. Since then, I have been madly wrenching, desperately trying to get ready to at LONG LAST make it back to a Freak Out!