January 11: Maybe Something to That Astrology Stuff After All?

By Paul Clark
(aka motomynd)

Zodiac. Astrology. Palm readers. Fortune cookies. Horoscope. They all go together. When I was growing up, our local paper printed the daily horoscope right next to the comics. That made the point, said all that needed to be said.
    At least that’s what I thought, until my son was about 14 months old. He was always precocious – took his first step a week before his seventh month birthday, insisted on walking into his 12-month doctor’s appointment on his own, “hands off dad, I got this!” – but shortly after he turned a year old, he began to outdo himself.
    It started small, like most kids, looking intently at every toy car and truck, and always wanting more of them: more, more, more! Then he began to compare them and want to know what they were. “That’s a truck,” I would tell him, “and that’s a car.” When a 14-month old gives you an eye roll, that’s humbling. “I KNOW that,” he said. “What kind of truck? What kind of car?”
    And thus it began, his infatuation with all things automotive. Actually, obsession might be a better word.

From then on, every toy had to be investigated. Bring in the toy, let him unwrap it, look it up on Google, talk about EXACTLY what it was, when the real version of the vehicle was made, compare its performance specs to the last new toy we bought him, and so on.
    By the time he was 18 months old, he would stand on his skateboard, hang onto the end of our dining table, and glide back and forth – side to side to side to side – while watching videos on his tablet. He of course knew very little about how to use a tablet, but he figured out how to search videos, and he ALWAYS wound up on something automotive.
    One day I noticed he was intently watching someone hone the cylinders prior to rebuilding a motor. The only thing more boring and tedious than doing this task is watching someone else do it. But not for my son, he would rewind and replay certain sections, like he was embedding the how-to part in his brain.
    “Does that look like fun?” I asked him.
    “No.”
    “Then why are you watching it?”
    “Because someday I will need to know how to do that.”

The author’s son – age seven – putting the knowledge gleaned
from videos into action, as he hand sands and removes
a particularly dreadful layer of damaged clear coat

    Well, okay then. You know what they say about asking a stupid question.

Somewhere along the way, I mentioned his automotive obsession to the younger of my two much older sisters.
    “Oh no!” she said. “That’s just like our brother at that age!”
    She would know this, and I wouldn’t, because she is three years older than our brother, and I am 10 years younger. Yes, I am the baby – by a decade.
    Why the “oh no!”?
    My brother was not the best student. In fact, he HATED school. My brother was an incurable gearhead until at least age 25, and probably would have been the rest of his life, except for marrying way too young, having a daughter way too young, and enduring his first divorce way too young.
    My brother was born in the mid-1940s, which meant he came of age during the hottest part of the hot rod era. While other school kids were dutifully learning “readin’ writin’ and ’rithmetic,” he was memorizing just about all the parts numbers in what were – in the pre-internet days – the hot-rodder bibles: the JC Whitney and Warshawsky catalogs.

This is not the actual “dream car”
the author’s brother created at age 16,
but it does look exactly like it.
The question is, will this car also
smoke the tires when you “grab” 3rd gear,
as the original would?

    Why would he do this before he was even 10 years old? Because he planned to build his own dream car and have it ready to fly, by the time he was old enough to drive. He accomplished that goal, by the way, by boring and stroking a 283-cubic-inch Chevy small-block engine to 302 cubic inches, adding a race grind cam, and nearly doubling the horsepower. He did this somewhere around 1960, when he was barely 15 years old, creating in our backyard shed the forerunner of a motor that Chevy would launch in 1966 as the now-legendary Z28. If only my brother had known how to patent his creation….
    Let me interject here that while my brother and I have always gotten along well, we have almost nothing in common. He LOVES beer, I like Scotch and HATE beer, which I learned while trying to work on cars and drinking beer with him in our driveway, when he was 18 to 20 years old, and I was eight to ten years old. He is also an enviable six feet tall, the only person in our lineage to top five-foot-seven-inches since our clan came to America from Scotland some 200 years ago. I am the 5-7 average. I like to drive cars, but don’t really like to get my hands filthy working on something I barely understand; my brother can dive into just about any car problem, and while he may come out greasy to his elbows, he can fix the problem. Me? I call my brother.
    Knowing that my brother has spent much of his life somewhat bogged down in his vehicles, the thought of raising a child similarly possessed, is vexing. If that’s his inclination, do I encourage it and hope he achieves his dreams? Or do I try to steer him onto a more pragmatic path? The silver lining here is that while my brother has missed out on a plethora of great opportunities in his life, he has earned an annual six-figure income the past several decades; if my son manages that, hopefully he will at least put me in a nice retirement home someday.

Somewhere along the way, it occurred to me, my brother and my son were born the same date: January 11. I briefly pondered the idea there could be a connection, but moved off it as I remembered the horoscope listings always being next to the comics.
    As time passed, I began to accept there was no steering my son onto a different path and started using his car compulsion to teach him other skills. Do you know how many cubic inches there are in a liter? How many cubic inches in a six-liter NASCAR motor? Probably not, eh?
    Don’t feel bad. I had no clue until I started teaching my son. He had those numbers nailed, all the way to eight liters – for the uninformed, that’s a 488-cubic-inch stroker – by the time he was five years old.
    Long before that, he started memorizing car emblems. We would walk and run along our country back road when we lived in North Carolina, and I quickly realized I was struggling to keep up with his car ID skills. By the time he was 2½ years old, he had memorized nearly 30 car emblems; I was still stuck somewhere around 20.
    When he was two years and eight months old, we took a 10-day family outing to California and Arizona. In the LA airport, various dealers had a wonderful display of the latest model cars.
    My son happened to point out a “Mini, Countryman, second gen, they changed it just last year” as a very attractive flight attendant with a blinding smile walked past. She spun around and asked, “Did I just hear him identify that car?”
    “Of course,” my son answered, “you can tell it’s a second gen – that’s second generation – by the design changes.”
    “You deserve a reward!” she said, pinning a small wing emblem to his shirt. “If you can tell me some more cars, I will give you more of these.”
    Thinking what I would give to be 30 years younger, I – in a very dad-like way – told the flight attendant, “That’s very nice, but you are being hustled.”
    And away we went, my son happily pointing out car after car, and her pinning on more emblems. When we made the circuit back to my wife, she took one look at his heavily adorned shirt and said, “Do I even want to know?”
    A couple of days later, walking through a parking lot at Venice Beach, we spotted a mysterious sporty coupe that stumped us. My son, with an eye roll, said, “Really? Everyone knows that’s a Tesla.”
    And then it was on to Arizona, where we spent a few days in Bisbee, and neighboring Lowell, which is a sort of old vehicle mecca. As my son held court and talked cars with anyone who was willing, a local collector looked at me and said, “May I ask how old he is?” Before I could answer, my son said, “I’m two years eight-months old. Why?”
    “Because that truck, that you’ve been telling me about the last 15 minutes, belongs to my 30-year-old son, and I think you may know more about it than he does. This just doesn’t seem possible.”

The author’s son – age two years eight months – with a pickup truck
he desperately wanted to bring home from Arizona.
“It isn't rust,” he says, “it’s patina. I love patina.”

    Which, for some reason, clanged a long-silent distant memory: I used to know some other car guy who was born January 11. Who was it?

The next day, looking at a wonderfully restored collectible Mustang that was worth more than a million dollars, it hit me. This car is a Shelby. Wasn’t Carroll Shelby born on January 11? Carroll was five years dead by then, and I hadn’t seen him in 15 years, but some numbers stick with you. I asked my wife to look it up on her phone. Sure enough: January 11.
    For the three of you who may not know, Carroll Shelby is arguably the greatest performance car guru in American history. In 1959 he was the first American driver to win the 24 Hours of Le Mans; he oversaw the Ford effort to overwhelm Ferrari and win several titles at Le Mans in the 1960s – a feat memorialized in the 2019 movie Ford v Ferrari – and he was the creator of the legendary high-performance Shelby Mustangs. When he said, “I love horsepower,” he wasn’t kidding.
    Make of it what you will, remarkable happenstance or something possibly launched from a place far, far away, but the three most inveterate car guys I’ve known in my lifetime were all born on January 11. I’m not yet advocating to move the horoscope section away from the comics and put it with the news, but that is a heck of a coincidence.

Copyright © 2022 by Paul Clark