GAS — Muscle cars — gleaming beauties of old-fashioned American horsepower — are a family affair for the McKarnins. At the forefront is Danny McKarnin, now 47, whose love of all things on four wheels began when he was a toddler.
“He was always wanting to read about cars,” said his mother, Jeanne McKarnin. “I can remember he would run to the window when he’d hear our neighbor pull up to the driveway.”
McKarnin was particularly fond of his neighbor’s car, a 1967 Chevelle.
Like most cars of that vintage, it wasn’t built for comfort.
It had no power steering, no power brakes. And the “air conditioner” consisted of rolling down the windows at highway speed.
But boy, did it have power.
As a child, McKarnin would ask his neighbor, Larry Wolken, if he could sit in the car and pretend he was driving.
He would soon get his chance.
When he was a sophomore in high school, in 1979, Wolken put the car up for sale.
McKarnin found odd jobs and scrimped and saved every penny he could to buy the car for $300.
As fate would have it, two of his best friends, Duke Miller and Todd Stevenson, happened to be cracker-jack automotive artisans.
(Miller would later take over Miller’s Gas Body Shop. Just down the road sits Stevenson’s business, S.S. Automotive.)
They rebuilt the engine and did some body work, but most wasn’t for show, McKarnin said. “It was for driving.”
“Oh, if that car could talk, I’m sure it would have stories,” Jeanne said with a laugh. “I’d always know when Danny was coming home because I could hear him turn from the highway” — even though it was several blocks from their house. Then, she said, “He would turn off the engine and coast in (thinking) we wouldn’t hear.”
MCKARNIN’S love affair with his Chevelle ended abruptly in 1982.
He was zipping along a county road one idle evening when he realized the road was about to end.
“It was a T intersection and somebody had stolen the stop sign,” he said. “I didn’t see it until it was too late.”
McKarnin and his friends had hiked up the car’s rear end, and the headlights had ended up pointing toward the ground.
“We just never readjusted the headlights,” he recalled, contributing to his inability to see the end of the road.
McKarnin couldn’t stop before the car jumped a small ditch and tore through a barbed wire fence, narrowly missing a nearby telephone pole.
“I know the farmer was mad because we tore up his fence,” he recalled. “We had to come back the next day to fix it.”
But his car was a wreck.
Until that point, McKarnin’s entire life savings had gone into keeping the Chevelle running.
“I was back at square one,” he said. “I was burned out on it.”
So McKarnin parked the Chevelle in a barn where it sat, sheltered but unattended, for the next 25 years.
FAST FORWARD to August 2007.
McKarnin — now a City of Iola power plant employee — was ready to see if the old girl could be brought back to life.
Plenty of work lay ahead. The engine needed to be replaced and metal restored. McKarnin again turned to his friends Miller and Stevenson.
Miller handled the body work, keeping the car in his shop for the next two-plus years, working on it in his spare time.
“I wanted the factory original look,” Danny said.
There were a few modifications.
“I wanted everybody in the family to have a part,” McKarnin said of the restoration.
His daughter, Kylee, chose red for the exterior, a change from the original white. “It’s a color that GM produced, so it works very well,” Danny said. The black vinyl that had covered the roof was removed, and a few creature comforts, such as air-conditioning, were added.
He next sought out the car’s original owner, James Lutz, of Garnett.
“He bought the car new in 1967 but kept it less than a year,” McKarnin said. “He had just gotten married and his wife didn’t like it.”
McKarnin contacted Lutz because “I wanted to find an original, wooden steering wheel, like it had.”
His phone call led to an extended conversation about — what else? — cars.
“At some point, I’d like to get him down here for a ride,” McKarnin said.
McKarnin wanted his restoration to be as close to factory original as possible, he said, so he had Stevenson put in a 396-cubic-inch motor. The car “now has a factory big block engine — it’s actually more original now than I when I had it in high school.” In addition, McKarnin said, the car has “the transmission that comes with the car brand new.
“Some people go all the way to wanting the same types of spark plug wires, things like that,” he said. Most often, those folk create automotive showpieces that come out for car shows then head straight back into the garage.
There’s a term for cars like that: “trailer queens” — the only time they move is on the back of a trailer.
“That’s not for me,” McKarnin said. “I like to drive mine. I know it’s not as fancy as some cars you’ll see at shows, but mine has history.”
“That’s something you can’t buy,” his mother interjected. “Danny respects his car, and he babies his car, but he also enjoys using it, too.”
MCKARNIN scarcely holds a monopoly in his family in his love of cars.
Jeanne points with pride to her 1971 Chevelle Malibu, which also had been recently restored and repainted.
Like her son, Jeanne’s car doesn’t just sit.
“If you look in the trunk, you’ll see the potting soil I got at Walmart,” she said. “This is my family driving machine.”
McKarnin does keep his son Derrick’s restored 1971 Chevy pickup in storage, though.
Derrick had the pickup restored while a student at Iola High. Now a student at Pittsburg State University, both father and son agreed the truck should remain at home.
“There are too many bad things that could happen to it if he kept it down there,” he said.
McKarnin noted his son’s studies will play a role in their next endeavor — to restore a 1971 Chevy Nova currently parked in the back yard.
“If he doesn’t keep his grades up, he won’t get a job, and without a job, he can’t pay for the car,” Danny said.
“That was the deal I had, and that’s the deal he has.”
