OCTOBER 2019IICHEVY HIGH PERFORMANCE 59
OD PART
He didn’t know it then, when he was a kid, but he was already a goner. It
was John’s car-collecting father who drew him into the life. And the life that
was then is here today. The idea was to source as much of the work or the
product from the finite resources that have always abounded in and around
north Jersey. We grew up in the same Bergen County environs as John, but
with a couple decades separation (Paterson’s Gasoline Alley, where Dick
Simonek built the engines for our D/G 210 in the early ’60s, is long gone).
What was John after ... and then where would he go to get it done? “I have
always wanted to find a ’66 or ’69 Chevelle. I found this ’69, it was for sale on
the owner’s front lawn. Next minute I knew, I’d owned it.” John spun the car
up on a rotisserie, took parts off it, and removed the frame from the body. He
discovered, “it was a true 1969 SS 396, but missing the original engine and