sludgo Rides Shotgun with BodyByFisher

We first connected in the middle of a busy season for me, but @BodyByFisher was patient and kind as delay after delay hit on my end. When we finally did chat more at length about interviewing him as the next subject of the Riding Shotgun project, he kept expressing that, while he was honored by the ask, he couldn’t figure out why he’d been chosen since there was nothing particularly special about him. But as is often the case, a book can never be judged by its cover, and when it came to riding shotgun with this modest and self-effacing gentleman, the honor would be all mine.

I’m always interested in how people get their screen names. Is yours based on what I think it is?

Well, my first screen name was actually “New Guy,” which was really dumb because it gets outdated pretty fast when you’re not the new guy anymore! So I changed to “BodyByFisher,” because one of my earliest automotive memories (if not the first) is opening the door to my dad’s ’69 Skylark and right there on the door sill plate was that little buggy with the “Body by Fisher” script around it. To me it looked cool. Kind of classy. And my Dad had another Skylark and an Olds Cutlass and they had it too and I liked it, so I just thought that would be a good name.

I’m also always interested in how people first got into our favorite hobby. What’s your story?

My dad got me into it. For sure. He’s a gearhead, into cars and planes and boats, and was always building something cool. I’m not sure how he got into it because his dad was a pastor and they were dirt poor, but as a kid he was always working on mechanical stuff—had a Whizzer and built some motorboats—and that’s how I really got into it, since he wanted me to be part of that scene with him. He built a shop in our backyard and was really eclectic in his taste in cars. He had a ’28 Model A he was restoring and a ’69 Buick Skylark with the 350 4-barrel that sounded so nice and smelled like raw fuel when he’d start it up. I remember the neighbor guy always fawned over it. And at the same time Dad had a BMW Isetta that could not have been more different than the Skylark! We also had a Volkswagen Squareback and my mom had a Rambler early on and there were a few AMCs and a Cutlass in there someplace.

Any other big automotive influences for you back then?

Oh yeah. Brock Yates and Csaba Csere really perpetuated my interest. Early on my mom would take us kids to the library and I’d always read Car and Driver and eventually got a subscription to it and was just hooked. Kept every one. And I think it also helped that I grew up in maybe the best time to grow up in car culture: the 70s, 80s and early ’90s. Such a great time to be a young kid, because muscle cars were the affordable stuff. A lot of kids in high school had some serious muscle cars.

How’d you learn to drive?

In a Toyota pickup truck. Five-speed. It was when my father flew us everywhere and we’d flown out to Iowa in a little Piper Cherokee to visit my grandparents and my cousin had a Toyota pickup truck and asked if I wanted to go for a ride in it. As we were leaving the house he tossed me the keys and asked if I wanted to drive! Now, I’d never driven anything before, let alone a stick-shift, and I’m twelve years old or eleven maybe, nowhere close to getting my license, but I picked up on it really quick! We never told my parents, but by the time the visit was over I’d driven all over those back country roads! Ha!

Then after that when I was fourteen, after church my dad would let me go get the car from the parking lot and pull it around front and he’d get in the driver’s seat and I’d slide over but one day he got in on the passenger side and told me to just drive home. I did and that was the first time I’d driven one of our cars. The problem then was that I felt like I had a license to drive without an actual legal driver’s license. Because my Dad had let me drive, one day when my sister had driven us to school, I asked her if she’d mind if I drove us home. She said she didn’t care, but on the way one of our neighbors saw us and told my parents. Dad was upset, which I didn’t really understand, and grounded both of us from the car. I remember my sister was ticked about that because being grounded from the car really meant something to her since she actually had her license and could legally drive but my punishment was basically not being able to drive when I wasn’t supposed to be driving in the first place!

So tell me about your first car.

My older sister and I first shared a hand-me-down ’76 Buick Skylark. I remember the gas gauge was broken on it so we’d calculate how far we had to drive and the mileage we’d get on the way, then only put enough gas in for the trip, but eventually one of us would take it to the gas station and no more gas would go into the tank, so we must’ve been overestimating or underestimating somewhere in there! That car ended up getting stolen, but someone found it out in the woods and we got it back and it sat out behind Dad’s shop for a while. That was around the time I got my first official car, a ’77 Firebird. I paid four hundred dollars for it, since it must have sideswiped a pole or something—the whole driver’s side front fender and door needed replacement. Ordered a fender for it, then went to the junkyard and got a door and Dad did some welding and taught me how to do the dent puller and the bodywork as we went. I learned a lot then about bodywork and engine work and it was fun having my dad help me fix it up. It only had the 231 V6 so it wasn’t much, but I just loved that car!

Worst first car story?

Well, the Firebird had this little trick that if you put it in neutral the back-up lights came on and one night I was coming back from a date and this guy was tailgating me. My date was telling me to just pull over to the side and let him around but I said, “No, check this out,” and put it in neutral to freak the guy out with my backup lights, but I slipped and went all the way into reverse! The guy backed off for sure but it also ruined my transmission. We were able to get home but I was just sick about it. Never told my dad out-and-out what exactly happened, just that my transmission wasn’t working anymore for some reason. It was a TH350 transmission and he told me that was a really good transmission and that they never went out but I just played dumb. We happened to have a spare transmission—a 250 that came out of that ’76 Skylark that had been stolen—and he asked if I wanted to put that into the Firebird and since the old one was toast that’s what we did.

Well, you might have to come clean with him once this interview drops! In the meantime, are you watching for anything in particular on BaT?

I would drive an old Beetle if I had one and have thought about bidding on those, or a Corvair. You’ve got to love any rear-engine air-cooled layout. And a 911, of course—that’s like the pinnacle there. Porsche in the ’70s and ’80s had the most beautiful cars. They were just the right size. Small with skinny A-pillars. A lot of my buddies were into the F40 and the Testarossa and the Countach but those just looked like wedges to me. I had a poster of the 911SC—the G series. I love that series. It’s like the perfect car. They remind me of what in the ’50s and ’60s they’d’ve thought a UFO would look like. That retro-futuristic feel. Rounded and bug-like. And the colors! Especially in the ’70s! But between a Beetle and a Corvair I’d be more likely to go for the Corvair. I missed out on one of them when I was a kid and looking for my first car. There was a ’65 Corvair convertible for sale just down the road from us but my Dad just said those things were junk. The funny thing was that I was telling my wife this story years ago and she said that was crazy because she’d been looking at a Corvair when she was sixteen and her parents wouldn’t let her get it either!

What’s currently in your stable?

My wife has an NB Miata. I got it for her for our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary so it’s silver. It was a Texas car that was owned by the same lady—same family—and I was able to get it home when my wife was out of town so when she was pulling her car in she hit the button to open the garage door and the Miata was sitting there and she was just speechless. I don’t think I could ever get rid of that thing now. I don’t drive it much, just to wash it and put gas in it for her, but whenever I do I end up being gone for an hour or so and she knows exactly what’s going on!

Personally, I drive my TJ Jeep. Favorite vehicle I’ve ever had. It’s the “doesn’t care” vehicle. It doesn’t care about the road conditions—doesn’t even care if it’s on the road—or the weather. And I don’t care if I get a scuff on it or some dirt. In the summer you can take the top off. Even take the doors off! I mean, what vehicle can you take the doors off of? There aren’t many. It’s just a comfortable vehicle. It’s not big. You can hit trails and fit between stuff. I even used it to help yank out some dead fruit trees in my yard. It’s just a cool truck. You can have the worst day at work but then hit a long two-lane with it and put on some Def Leppard and just relax. I have more aimless driving miles on that Jeep than anything.

When we first chatted, you mentioned you’d restored a vintage Honda motorcycle. What’s the story?

That was a seven-year project that started when my oldest daughter was a sophomore or a junior in high school. Her time was beginning to be taken up by friends and getting ready for college so we decided to get a project that we could work on and spend more time together. Looked on Craigslist and found the Honda. A parts bike. I think I paid for it what I paid for my Firebird. Got it home and reupholstered the seat and pulled the wheels off and did the tires and brakes, just taking it piece by piece. That was in 2018 but then in 2019 my brother-in-law was riding his motorcycle up from Colorado Springs to where the family was moving and got hit head-on by another guy. It just devastated my sister. At the time they had three girls and had adopted two boys from Burundi. I remember my wife coming to the shop to tell me and just being broken about it. And as she was walking out she pointed at the Honda and told me she wanted me to get rid of it.

Well, I didn’t, but we also were just kind of done with it. It didn’t feel right working on it anymore and my daughter went off to college so it just sat there in the corner of the shop. Then we adopted our boys and I’d worked on go-karts and mini-bikes and the Jeep with them and I finally thought we should get back at doing the bike. My wife wasn’t keen on us doing it but it really helped our second oldest adopted son who really was struggling academically. We’d just sit down together and take our time and he’d have one carburetor and I’d have the other and whatever I’d do he’d do and we completely rebuilt those carbs. And the story there was that we put them back on and did whatever else we needed to do to get the engine running but I couldn’t get it dialed in. It kept running rich and I was struggling with it and looked into it and found out one of the carbs was messed up—the one I’d been working on! His was fine!

I’d like to know more about how you became a foster parent.

I get accused of being a saint, but I’m not. At all. People need to know who I married to understand how I got into this. She’s great at getting us into stuff and I’m good at getting us through it I guess, but it all started when my son was in high school and a good friend of his had gotten kicked out of his house. That evening we got a bunkbed and the two boys shared a room and he wound up living with us from that point in his junior year to when he graduated his senior year. He’d been in like fourteen different foster homes by then and his mom had kept some of his siblings but given him up. Can you imagine how that must’ve felt? Anyway, he graduated and joined the Army and by then my sister and brother-in-law had adopted their boys and my wife said she thought we should do something like that here. So we added a room in the basement with an egress window and turned the living room into a bedroom and became foster parents, then started having kids come through the house. There’ve been eight or nine at my last count.

The hidden beauty of it was that I started out my career doing mental health and working with people with disabilities, and as you know there’s not a lot of money in that field so I started building cabinets and furniture on the side and did okay at it. There was even a year I did better doing that part-time than I did doing my social-work stuff full-time. Every time I’d have a sale I’d just put it back into the company and wound up building myself a nice shop to do furniture. But eventually I kind of accidentally ended up being the CEO of the not-for-profit company where I am now, and even though I didn’t have to do furniture on the side anymore, that little shop became the best place when it came to us and the foster kids. The house was crowded so often me and the kids would be out there working, just fixing something, whether it was on the Jeep or a go-kart or a minibike or the motorcycle. So while I’d originally thought the shop would be a place for my furniture business it turned out to be for something completely different, but life never goes where you think it’s going to go, does it?

Speaking of where things are going, where do you think the hobby is going?

It’s changing, I guess. It’s bizarre. I hope we don’t go all electric. There’s just no soul to that. That said, I used to not appreciate what the younger kids like but I’ve kind of softened. Maybe every generation just has something different they like, but now kids don’t even want to drive. One of the young ladies my wife and I are guardians for didn’t get her license until she was eighteen. We were just carting her around and taking her places. She just never had the desire. But the hobby itself is all about relationships. That’s what it comes down to. And if you’re just about the thing—the car—I think you’re missing out on the bigger picture.

As long as we’re talking The Future, thoughts about self-driving vehicles?

Well, honestly with the people we serve at my company, Corvilla, those with cognitive disabilities, that will be a game-changer. We have folks who’ll never be able to drive and they’re missing out on the freedom that the rest of us enjoy by being able to have your own car and get in and go somewhere by yourself without staff or a parent or guardian driving you there. That’s exciting to think about, especially since it could happen in my lifetime.

Now I need to hear how the BaT auction of the Nash with @Stratos came about.

It was our annual car show at Corvilla, a fund-raiser, and we had a paid side where people could enter their cars to win prizes and then a cruise-in side where people could just come with whatever, and this one older guy brought in a ’57 BMW 507. Really nice. He was super down-to-earth and we were talking and he knew one of our volunteers and was saying that he really loved what we did and that he had a small car collection and was getting older and wanting to whittle it down a bit and that he had this Metropolitan that he wanted to donate and we could take whatever profit we wanted from it. I told him we’d love to do it and he was true to his word. Followed up and we met and talked about it and I told him that I knew of this website that would be a good venue for it. He wasn’t familiar with Bring a Trailer, but we put it up at no reserve and he was very gracious. In the process I got a cool tour of his collection. He had some really neat stuff. A Ferrari 360 and also a Mercedes-Benz once owned by Princess Juliana of the Netherlands!

So we put the Metro up and it was interesting. @Stratos was watching the auction, and he texted me and said he thought we needed a few more eyes on the auction, then asked if I’d mind if he tagged some people. Well, of course I didn’t.

How did you know him?

Under my old screen name, right after I’d lost my brother-in-law, you’d written a Mile Marker that really hit me hard and I’d commented on it and he’d responded then ended up calling me. We spoke for a while and he helped out a lot in that situation and then helped get more eyes on the auction. A good guy. He still texts sometimes just to touch base and genuinely cares about others. An amazing guy. As far as the Nash goes, a guy out of Florida bought it for his wife. He donated above what he paid for it and Bring a Trailer even donated back the buyer’s fee and also waived the $100 submission fee for Corvilla. I’m very thankful for their generosity and want them to get the credit they’re due.

Winding down, what’s been your best road trip?

My “road trips” were usually flying with Dad and my family, honestly. He had that Cessna, and I remember taking off and sitting in the copilot seat, where he’d let me fly for short distances, teaching me how to read the gauges and where to keep things and just having conversations with him as my mom and sister slept in the back seat. I remember listening to the ATC on the headset and all the pilots talking to each other and wishing each other a good day. Those were fun trips.

Okay, final question: Best road song?

Joe Bonamassa, “Drive.” On summer nights my wife and I sometimes go for drives in the Jeep up to the lake to an ice cream shop we like and that song will always be on the playlist.

Ahh…good choice. Thanks for the ride-along, @BodyByFisher…