MUSCLE
50 SEPTEMBER 2019Long-Term
Love Affair
50 Years With
His High School
Sweetheart
O
ver the past couple of decades,
the muscle car hobby has
grown exponentially, and the
value of authentic, high quality
cars has risen accordingly. One of the most
significant forces driving this has been the
desire of enthusiasts who experienced
the first golden age of muscle cars to re-
capture a slice of their youth. Today, baby
boomers are willing to pay whatever itBy Richard Prince“The Impala was a delivery truck for a while”
takes to acquire a hot set of wheels just like
the one they either owned back in the day
or lusted after but couldn’t afford to buy.
A very few, extremely fortunate indi-
viduals don’t have to dig deep to recapture
a snapshot of their young and wild days
because they never let go of the sweet ride
that carried them through their teenage
years and young adulthood. New Yorker
Henry Pagliocca is ecstatic to be amongthis group. In 1969, as a high school stu-
dent, Pagliocca gleefully spent $775 of his
hard-earned savings to buy the Palomar
Red 1963 Impala SS409 you see here. He
has loved it each and every day of the 50
years since.
“I was a budding motorhead,” Pagliocca
recalls, “and spent many weekends detail-
ing my dad’s Fawn Beige 1961 four-door
Impala. But it was a six-cylinder and just