Car Classic Corvairs Hold A Special Place In This Collector’s Heart
Don Tilque of Cheney has this 1963 magazine advertisement posted on his shop wall:
“The Corvair Monza: It growls for the men, purrs for the girls!”
Those ad copy writers sure had a way with words back in those days.
Today, the Corvair not only growls and purrs, it beckons, at least to Tilque. He collects them the way other guys collect old tractors or fishing reels. He buys old Corvairs, fixes them up, and then keeps them around for fun.
“I’ve got nine of them that are runnable,” said Tilque, 68, in a voice that sounds exactly like Charles Kuralt. “And more junkers out in back.”
He’s not the only guy in town who likes Corvairs. The local CORSA chapter (Corvair Society of America) has 28 members. But none of them, he admits, have as many cars as he has. For one thing, most people don’t have the space.
“People in town can’t have a halfdozen old cars lying around,” he said, surveying his Corvair boneyard.
His house is out in the wheatfields between Cheney and Four Lakes, with room for two huge shop-garages and all of the Corvairs a person could ever want.
Which, for most people, is not a whole lot. The Corvair is not a common collector’s car, like a Ford T-Bird. But it has always had its admirers. It was one of the first successful compact cars produced in the United States. It was an allAmerican answer to the Volkswagen bug, and 1.7 million of them were on the road in the ‘60s.
“Now, the revolutionary Corvair!” shouts another old ad on Tilque’s wall. “With the engine in the rear, where it belongs in a compact car!”
Some models, such as the Monza convertible and the Spyder, even had sports-car appeal.
Today, the car oozes with ‘60s nostalgia, which is only fitting for a car that nearly matched the trajectory of the Beatles’ career. It was born in 1960, peaked around 1964 and went defunct in 1969.
For Tilque, nostalgia has always been part of the appeal. He bought a Corvair Greenbrier van back in 1962, the better to transport his 11 children. He was stationed at Fairchild Air Force Base at the time. That old van eventually took him, a U-Haul trailer and his entire brood to Wisconsin and Texas and back again, and he “never had a bit of trouble with it.”
Later, he bought a ‘61 Corvair pickup (yes, they made those, too) for $98. He drove it for 10 years and 300,000 miles.
But it wasn’t until five years after the Corvair had gone the way of the Studebaker that Tilque began to look at the Corvair as a hobby. He bought an old yellow Corvair coupe one day, had it towed to his place and started puttering around with it. With all of his expertise he acquired on his Corvair van and pickup, he had a knack for that kind of puttering. Before long, he restored that bright yellow coupe to cherry, or, should we say, banana condition.
“It just kept going from there,” said Tilque, who had by this time retired from the Air Force as a senior master sergeant. “People started giving Corvairs to me. I restored them and kept them all. I’ve never sold one. I figured with all of the work I’ve put into them, I want to drive them and enjoy them.”
Now, he takes them for Sunday drives and enters them in parades. Sometimes, he and his wife, Fran, make longer trips, such as one a few years ago to Ontario, Calif., for the National CORSA Convention. He won first place in his category.
Those conventions attract about 1,000 people, so obviously there are plenty of Corvair fanatics out there. While it may not have the cachet of a T-Bird, it does have the virtue of being relatively inexpensive.
Even the most beautifully restored Corvair convertible goes for about $8,000, and anything over $4,000 had better be in terrific shape. A collector can pick up an old unrestored Corvair for only about $300 or $400.
“You don’t want to pay a lot, because the parts are so expensive,” said Tilque.
That’s what happens when a car has been out of production for 26 years. Chevrolet rolled the last Corvair out of the factory in 1969, but the car had been slowly dying since about the mid-1960s. For one thing, Ralph Nader had singled it out as one of the most unsafe cars on the road for the propensity of the early models to roll over during high-speed maneuvers.
“But the Ford Mustang, that was the real downfall of the Corvair,” said Tilque.
Suddenly, there was another small, sporty, inexpensive car on the market, and it soon made the Corvair extinct.
Everywhere except in Don Tilque’s wheatfield, that is.
, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Three Color Photos
MEMO: Anyone interested in learning more about Corvairs can call Don Tilque at (509) 299-4835.