[Hey guys. This one’s gonna be a bit personal. I debated whether even to publish it at all. But knowing how impactful many of our fathers have been on our journey into this hobby, and needing a bit of an outlet to share some thoughts, I felt it appropriate to share this editorial here. I hope you don’t mind. –Ed.]

What makes someone a “car guy?” Now, before answering this rhetorical question, I suppose there are two ways to approach this: How does one become a car guy and what constitutes (or qualifies) one to be identified as a “car guy.” I’ve come to wrestle with both iterations of this question in the wake of my father, Kerry passing away a little over a month and a half ago.

Many of you who subscribe to Mopar Connection Magazine’s YouTube channel will have seen him in this past June’s Hot Rod Power Tour coverage. Having my dad ride shotgun with me on a week long adventure was particularly special. A painful hip injury and damaged sciatic nerve in 2010 kept him from ever driving a manual transmission again, so he declined any opportunity to pilot my Charger that week.

After we returned home that Saturday, he took the next two days to lounge around the house, laugh with my daughters and poke around the garage before flying home. A little over two weeks later, he was bombing through the dunes of Glamis, California with my brother and his two boys. A month after that, he joined my sister and her family for some serious Jeep trail climbing through the Sierra Nevadas.

To say the old dog got in some living during those three months is an understatement. But adventure is not without its consequences.

We speculate that dad picked up walking pneumonia then; camping at 6,800-plus-feet is not for the faint of heart. Three months later, the untreated symptoms had progressed to full-blown pneumonia and fatefully, a widespread septic infection.

Upon receiving the news, I flew out on a red eye that same Monday he was admitted to Riverside Medical Center. My brother picked me up and we rushed straight to the hospital – visiting hours be damned!

We stayed beside his bed most of Tuesday with hopes that the antibiotics and oxygen could help reverse course. By that evening, his saturation levels were anything but inspiring.

We were up early and by his side Wednesday morning. Things were really bad. His body was declining and he knew it. I personally delivered the news that the BiPAP machine was the only thing keeping him alive – and that was no way to live.

“This is it, pops.” I said. He nodded with understanding, jotted a note on a clipboard and turned it to me: Everybody OK with plan? I smiled through the tears. There was no way he was going to stay hooked up to a machine. Rather, he was going to leave on his terms but wanted to make sure we were OK with it.

After saying goodbye to all of us and forcing out a hoarse I love you to my mother, his wife of 58 years, the nurses administered a sedative and removed the breathing mask. My brother, sister and I held his hands as he slept, sharing stories – many that included my dad getting injured in one stunt or another – laughing and crying along the way.

At 11:50am, November 6th my 81-year-old father, Kerry Shaw ever-so-peacefully slipped into eternity.

This of course, has given me much to contemplate over the last few weeks. How did this man influence who I am today? Would I be who I am without him? The evidence is striking. While he and I certainly were not strictly aligned in all of our interests or personality, there’s significant enough connective sinew between us to draw a laser-straight line.

My father loved cars of many shapes, styles and flavors, but harbored a particular penchant for road racing, and a taste for European sports cars.

As a teenager, he owned a ’51 Ford Victoria that he painted purple, hilariously coating his ever-so-meticulous father’s garage in overspray. As I recall, Grandpa Norm was a lifelong career man at McDonnell Douglas, so he kept his garage tidy like any good aircraft engineer should.

A ’30 Ford with a 327 Chevy came shortly after. It was the one car he regularly admitted, “Scared the $#%& out of me.” By his early 20’s he had a pair of “bathtub” 356 Porsche hardtops.

A yellowed photograph of him in tight black jeans thickly cuffed over polished black shoes and a white T-shirt with the sleeves rolled up remains hidden in my mom’s many photo albums. A greaser! I laughed when I first saw it. Dad was a greaser!

A smattering of Japanese motorcycles came and went, but as a married man in his 30’s with three kids, one would think the hijinks might’ve mellowed. Not so. He purchased a ’66 Porsche 911 from a neighbor and promptly repainted it from Irish Green (#213) to metallic silver (it was a 16-year-old car at the time. Nobody cared). The sound of its air-cooled Flat 6 still sounds in my memory.

In 1986, he hunted down a ’72 DeTomaso Pantera after having first eyed one in a two-page advertisement in Motor Trend the night my brother, Cameron was born in 1971. I distinctly recall my mom ushering me to the porch to watch dad drive the Pantera down our street and ease it up our steep driveway. He painted over its factory yellow paint with high gloss black, blackening out all of the chrome trim as well.

The previous owner had swapped out the 351 Cleveland for a 427 big block Chevy some years earlier. The change was actually a major draw. That 427 was soon replaced with a 4-bolt main 454. The Pantera saw plenty of track time at Buttonwillow, Laguna Seca and Willow Springs – as well as an all-time best ET of 11.28 @ 118mph with a 100-shot of nitrous at Pomona – as I recall.

The Pantera was sold shortly after his accident that made operating a clutch pedal far too painful. I think that took a big emotional piece out of him, so to speak. He shared that Pantera with us the same way I share my Charger with my kids. It was rough, built on a bare-bones budget and could easily be labeled a rattletrap; but it was still special to us because it was dad’s car.

I had spirited away the Mexican blanket he once kept in the Pantera and guard it in the Dodge’s trunk today. Nearly 40 years ago, he pulled up to my elementary school for a surprise picnic lunch in the Pantera, it’s solid lifter idle reverberating the school’s windows. We ate sandwiches on that blanket in the cool grass, while the other kids sat staring from the cafeteria.

It’s hard to say whether Dad didn’t care much for American muscle cars or not. He sure wasn’t against them, but I knew most American designs didn’t have the sleek profiles that typically caught his eye. Thankfully, he wasn’t against his sons’ favoritism for them. Rather, I believe he was just happy that I wanted to wrench on something instead of playing video games or picking my nose.

Deviating from my dad didn’t make me any less of a “car guy” either. Car guys come in all forms but share the same passion and that is what this hobby is all about, I believe. I’ve had this same conversation with guys in their late-20’s who are solely interested in JDM cars. Boy, there’s little to nothing out of Japan that interests me personally, but I’m glad guys are keeping these 30 to 40-year-old cars on the road.

Conversely, I’ve met guys in their 50’s who love late model Challengers being ostracized by 70-year-olds because they didn’t labor 20 years to restore a ’68 Valiant. That seems incredibly narrow-minded to me, and ultimately, as I see it, the precise reason our hobby is thinning in numbers.

My dad was a hot rodder, a cruiser, a biker, a road racer, a Jerry-rigger and a shadetree mechanic – but of all the things he could be called, he wasn’t an elitist. I, like he, don’t care if you love Mopars, Fords or Volkswagens. I can recognize just as much love poured into a bagged-and-airbrushed ’64 Impala lowrider as I can a stanced-out WRX STi. Does that mean I want one? Nope. But that doesn’t devalue the time, care and effort that those guys put into them.

I guess my takeaway from all of this is don’t be a dick, live your life to its fullest and share what you love with those whom you love most. And for heaven’s sake, do everything you can to encourage a kid, a neighbor or friend to get into cars. We just need more car guys.

– Kevin