Don McLean drove his Chevy to the levee. The Beach Boys made us want our own “Little Deuce Coupe.” Chuck Berry’s motivatin’ V-8 Ford caught the Caddy driven by “Maybellene.”
Who among us hasn’t loved a car enough to sing its praises? Larry Page still feels that way about his first wheels, a 1963 Corvette convertible he bought when he was 18 years old and the Vette was 11. It was on the used-car lot of his father’s dealership, but Larry had to pay for it — $3,200 in monthly installments.
Now 53 and a car dealer himself with 15 dealerships in the Page Auto Group, Page still has the Corvette. It’s the favorite of his 14-car collection, which includes a 1997 911 Turbo Porsche and a couple of 1973 Ferraris.
And it’s the vehicle that carried him to his second business. Page restored the Vette as an at-home project. When it won awards at hot-rod shows, he got requests to work on other folks’ cars. Four and a half years ago, he opened Page Custom Rods & Restorations, a shop tucked away in the Goochland County woods.
In the Richmond area, there are few full-service custom/restoration shops. Page’s shop and Masi’s Muscle Car Garage on Jefferson Davis Highway are two.
At Page’s shop, you can spend a few thousand dollars or a few hundred thousand, depending on how rare your car is and how much you want done to it. Business is booming. Page is expanding the shop from 8,000 square feet to about 10,500. “We’ve been very fortunate,” he says. “We’re going to add a couple of people now that we’ll have room for them to work.” That will bring the shop’s staff to seven.
Page Custom Rods & Restoration is one of about three dozen such customizers nationwide invited to be in the prestigious Builders’ Showcase at the National Street Rod Association’s 41st annual national show Aug. 5-8 in Louisville, Ky. The shop prepared a 1950 Ford convertible as its showpiece.
Vehicles in various stages of restoration or customization populate the shop. Running the operation is Rusty Holcomb.
Holcomb shows off a customized 1969 Camaro owned and cherished by CBS football analyst, Harvard grad and car nut James Brown. The purple, tricked-up car has been presented at three shows and won awards every time. Brown is so taken by the Camaro, Holcomb says, that he has declined to so much as sit in it, lest he smudge it.
Nearby sits an orange ’57 Chevy. A visitor has to look twice to see that the front fenders have faint painted flames. “Ghost flames,” explains Holcomb. “They’re popular now on cars from the ’50s forward.” Not so subtle is the 502-cubic-inch engine replacing the original 283.
“Some people want pure restoration,” says Holcomb, “a car exactly like it was the day it came out of the showroom. Some people can’t stand a restored car. They’ve got to change something.”
Randy Hallman is a Richmond-based freelancer who frequently writes the Money story for Boomer.
.jpg)
