Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, September 11, 1995 TAG: 9509110021
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BETH MACY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Dirt under the fingernails. Check.
Posters of near-naked women on the garage walls. Check.
The rusted-out rear end of a Camaro heaped onto the front-suspension parts of an old Mustang. Check.
Multiple kinds of car grease. Check.
It's all there in the garage behind John Rinehart's Wasena home, birthplace of some of the country's finest souped-up old cars - a.k.a., street rods.
And then there are these little flourishes: Classical music blares from the NPR radio station, WVTF, in his garage. Christopher Parkening's classical guitar wafts from the Pioneer stereo speakers of the pickup truck that Rinehart carved out of a '33 Dodge sedan. It's called a kingcab, and it's valued in five figures.
This guy isn't just grease-monkeying around.
To Ferrum College folk-art expert Roddy Moore, John Rinehart is ``a true artisan and a Renaissance man.''
Rinehart himself shrugs off the labels - too hifalutin.
``I'm just an old carhead,'' he says.
It's always been that way. From the 1958 Soapbox Derby championship he earned cruising down Roanoke's Howbert Avenue, to the car magazines he swapped during recess at Lee Junior High.
``There were guys interested in girls, and guys interested in books, and guys interested in cars, see, '' he explains. ``And we were too slow to be into girls or books.''
And then along came Wanda. That's Wanda Rinehart, his wife.
It was 1963. Rinehart was a year out of Jefferson High, working at a local wood-pattern shop and cruising for girls in his spare time. The usual route was the Lendy's loop - a very slow cruise from Lendy's on Franklin Road to Lendy's on Williamson Road.
Rinehart was driving a Corvette. White, the '58 model.
He first laid eyes on Wanda at the Roanoke Drag Strip.
She first laid eyes on his '58 Corvette.
``I guess she thought, `I'm gonna nab ahold of this guy.' She liked the car,'' recalls Rinehart, now 52.
By the time he would graduate from cruising cars to rigging cars, the year would be 1976. The Rineharts would be married with a 10-year-old daughter, Melissa.
Melissa would become the first girl in Roanoke to enter the Soapbox Derby that year (she came in third). Competitors would try to claim that her daddy built her racer, but it wasn't true. John was too busy designing his first street rod.
The family called it ``Wanda's car,'' a '32 Ford sedan with late-model running gear (i.e., a newer, souped-up Chevy engine). Bright yellow - and guaranteed to make you stop and stare.
``Wanda didn't drive it a lot, but she cleaned on it and rubbed on it and rubbed on it,'' Rinehart says. ``She cried for days when we finally sold it.''
By the time they would sell the car - and pay Melissa's college bill with the proceeds - Rinehart was known across the country as a top-notch street rod designer. In carhead circles, he was the No. 1 ``rigger and jigger.''
They're the ones who take heaped-up, rusted-out mounds of old car parts, throw in a new engine, fire up the welding torch, and voila: An entirely new beast of a car - a street rod - is born.
For the carhead novice, a street rod technically is a pre-1949 automobile, modified in body and/or engine - whereas the hot rod is a modified, usually racier car, whose time period can span from the '20s to the '60s.
Goodguys Rod and Custom Association would put Rinehart's sedan-turned-pickup, the kingcab, on the cover of their T-shirt. Magazines with names like Hot Rod Mechanix would print color pictures of his work, along with descriptions like this:
``The wheelbase now measures 136 inches between the Mustang II independent front suspension and the 2.75:1 geared 8-inch Ford rear end.''
And when National Geographic photographer Richard A. Cooke III came to the area in 1992 looking for colorful shots for his book, ``The Blue Ridge Range: The Gentle Mountains,'' it was Roanoke's John Rinehart who would catch his eye - cruising down the Blue Ridge Parkway in his squeaky clean, two-toned kingcab.
(Official colors: ``Corvette Aqua on the bottom and Nissan Sandstone Pearl on the top.'')
(Coats of paint: seven.)
(Coats of wax: six.)
(Special sitting instructions: Back in, rear first. ``So as not to step on the running boards.'')
``People call from far and wide wanting to know how he did this or that,'' Wanda Rinehart says. She accompanies John to the many car shows he attends across the country, though she doesn't drive the kingcab. ``If there was any kind of nick in it, he'd probably say I did it. So we just sorta let Dad have his truck.''
Moore, the Ferrum professor, likens Rinehart to the master craftsmen of the 18th and 19th centuries. ``He is predominantly a metal worker, and had he been alive then, he might have been a coach builder.
``Master craftsmen take what they learn and develop beyond that stage, creating new works of art; they're true artisans, and that's John.''
Street-rodding is a growing hobby. The National Street Rod Association reports having 50,000 members, and some car shows attract as many as 12,000 entries.
``I see three groups of people involved,'' Moore says. ``People like John, who grew up and never left it. People like myself, who grew up, left it and came back.
``And the third group, people who always wanted to have one, but never had the ability or the means before and now they do.''
Rinehart's rigging-and-jigging wizardry comes in handy for a variety of people with whom he trades advice and work - from the Roanoke fireman, to the Florida preacher, to the Vinton dentist.
People spend from $3,000 to $150,000 creating street rods. Rinehart's kingcab, for instance, took $6,000 to construct plus 3,000 hours worth of labor. He says it's worth between $20,000 and $30,000.
To show it and other area street rods off, he has started the monthly Star City Cruise-In. Carheads from Bedford to Floyd converge at the Hardee's parking lot on Brambleton Avenue on the second Saturday of every month to swap tips, and to ooh and ahh. Last month, more than 100 cars were parked for the 6-to-10:30 p.m. gathering.
``The wives call it the midlife crisis,'' Rinehart says. ``And you know, these guys now are realizing they're on the downside of life, and they need to get out and have some fun.''
In the early days, that meant ``gunning it around, seeing how fast you could go.''
But sitting recently in his '33 sedan-turned-pickup - license plate: 33 DQDGE - Rinehart's version of cutting loose was to ditch the Parkening CD from his car stereo and crank up the Allman Brothers' ``Lord, I Was Born a Ramblin' Man.''
Driving at a law-abiding 25 miles per hour down Main Street, he was asked if he still likes to cruise Williamson Road.
The answer was yes - minus the girl-ogling.
``We'll take this car out to eat at the New Yorker on a Saturday night maybe,'' he said.
``If it's not going to rain.''
by CNB