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The Shock of My Life
’57 Bel Air is dream girl for ‘a Chevy man at heart’
By Randy Hallman
.jpg) She was sitting in the parking lot at the Midlothian River City Diner, drawing all eyes in the vanishing sunlight like a well-polished jewel, as fresh and hot-looking as that first time he had fallen in love with her lines, her beauty, back in 1957.
Doyle Robinson and his wife, Shirley, had just arrived with son Scott for Doyle’s 76th birthday dinner when the retired Richmond creative director suddenly gasped:
“Look at that ’57 Chevy! That thing is immaculate.”
The object of their admiration was a 1957 hardtop iconic Chevy Bel Air, with a black exterior and red interior, factory-equipped with a 283 “power pack” engine, two four-barrel carburetors and dual exhausts.
“When this car first came out,” Doyle recalls of a time more than half a century ago, “I thought it was the hottest-looking thing on the road. I was in the Army and couldn’t afford to buy one, so I sent Mom money every month to put in the bank; and when I was discharged in ’58, I had just enough saved to buy one. The ’57 Chevy is my all-time favorite car.”
EIGHT YEARS RESTORING A T-BIRD
That preference is an interesting one, given that Doyle is currently the proud owner of a beautifully restored 1956 red Ford Thunderbird, fixed up by Scott, who was in the restoration business at the time. Every piece of that car is original T-Bird, a labor of love that took Scott eight years to complete.
Scott says that while his dad loves the T-Bird, he doesn’t drive it much because it’s hard for him to get into and out of. “And, frankly, he’s always been a Chevy man at heart.”
This time, having given up his restoration business years ago, Scott (who now owns Monster Motorsports in Powhatan County) was hunting for a ’57 Chevy already restored. It took a year of reading ads in car publications and going to shows before he .jpg) found the car to knock his dad’s socks off. “I even found it in black,” Scott says.
A CLASSIC CHEVY … FOR A VALIANT?
Back in ’58 when he went to his local Chevy dealer in North Carolina, Doyle had wanted a black ’57. The dealer had a black ’58 but that wasn’t close enough. Then he called back to say he’d found a ’57, only in white. Doyle took it. “It was straight stick and could really move,” he says of his dream machine.
He brought it to Richmond and he loved to drag race it — so competitively that he eventually messed up the transmission and ended up with only two gears in working order. He then replaced it with a 1960 Plymouth Valiant — a trade Scott has never let his old man live down.
Doyle has always talked and dreamed of replacing his lost ’57. And here was the perfect one in the parking lot — so perfect it almost brought him to his knees. The two men spent 10 or 15 minutes walking around it, looking it over. Then Scott asked, “Wanna see the inside?”
“THE SHOCK OF MY LIFE”
Doyle stared at him, puzzled. “How?” he asked.
Scott threw him the keys. “It’s your car.”
What a birthday present! “I was stunned,” Doyle says. “I was so nervous I could barely eat dinner. It was the shock of my life.”
Scott had bought the Gold Spinner Award-winning car from a seller in Michigan, the daughter of a recently deceased man who had restored it and willed it to her.
Doyle takes the Chevy out a couple of times a month, when the weather is right, and otherwise keeps it under cover, alongside the T-Bird.
Is he ever tempted to get into an occasional drag race?
“Oh, no. No. No,” Doyle says in horror. “But with those two four-barrel carbs, I’m sure it would do pretty well.”
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Randy Hallman is a Richmond-based freelance writer who often writes on Wheels and Money for Boomer.
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