In the early weeks of 2019, the last lingering memory I had of our father’s dijon-mustard-colored 1969 Dodge Dart GTS Coupe was of the tired machine being hauled away on a flatbed after Dad had owned it for 19 years, which was basically his entire adult life. I (then age 6) had cried in the driveway next to my younger brother Sam (then age 3) on that warm, sunny afternoon in 1996. Even as small children we understood how important the car was to our father.
Around that time Dad had decided to return to school for a master’s degree, and also began working at Hoselton Chevrolet as a salesman since cars had been a lifelong hobby. Between going back to school and raising two young children, Dad decided it didn’t make sense to keep his prized car. Even though it was a fun, loud, fast car, it was starting to need more attention than he could give it, and it hadn’t been driven much in the preceding 6-7 years (since I was born).
Despite being a GTS with the desirable 340ci High Performance motor, Dad sold it for about $1,500 to a man named Jeff in Leicester, NY. A condition of sale was the caveat that if it ever went up for sale again, Jeff should call us back first. This was the same thing the past owner Tom had told our father during his purchase of the car in April of 1977. Unlike my father, who in fact did call Tom 19 years later when it came time to sell the car (Tom declined to buy it back but appreciated the gesture), we never heard from Jeff again.
Dad spent the following years kicking himself for letting go of the car, and especially so for not writing down critical information like the VIN. However, despite a 20 year absence from his life, one of very few pictures of the Dart served as Dad’s Facebook cover photo. My brother and I reached out on social media and on Mopar forums for several years attempting to track it down and hoping to buy it back, but each shot in the dark failed to locate the car. In the game of darts, we were ‘off the island’, so to speak.
To this day our father’s former car is the only Gold Iridescent (paint code Y4) 1969 Dart GTS we have ever seen, despite having gone to hundreds of car shows, museums and cruise nights. The general rarity of the car was something we were aware of, but perhaps not how rare it actually was. Regardless, I remained skeptical when my brother Sam called me on the evening of Friday, 25 January 2019 - almost 22 years after Dad sold the car - and told me we had to go look at a car for sale in a neighboring suburb the following Saturday morning. It was a disassembled Dart coupe, with faded gold doors, advertised as a project car.
The Craigslist ad Sam had come across featured a handful of clumsy pictures showing parts of a car in a tight garage, and offered only: “69 dart gts pro street project Too much to list so contact me with questions thanks” (sic). It was clear: the car for sale was a jigsaw puzzle, with parts scattered all over the garage and house and rafters above. A beautiful orange Mopar engine (not the original 340) sat unused on a stand behind the car, and the transmission sat on the floor beside the body. The entire front clip was in the rafters over the car, there was no interior to speak of, the rear fenders were only tacked in place, the original metal hood and trunk had been replaced with stressed out fiberglass, and a bulk of the original parts had long since been sold off. The inner front fenders had been cut with a torch, which the owner explained as having been done for some past hopeful 440ci engine transplant that had never occurred. There was almost nothing left to accurately identify it as a car, let alone a Dodge Dart GTS, and even less so the specific one we had been searching for coming up on a quarter century - except for three small things.
I may have been only 6 years old when I last saw the Dart, but “car folks” understand how funny we are about memories involving the machines we love. I was old enough to open the passenger door myself and ride in the front seat before dad sold the car. I swear that the moment I saw the passenger door I recognized the rust patterns across the lip of the door; they were the same as my last memories of the Dart, small specs of decaying metal along the perimeter between the back of the door and the rear fender, like no time had passed at all. Sam told me that since most of the paint had been stripped off, I was stretching what little truth and memory we had to work with. Maybe he was right about that, but moments later the seller picked up the fiberglass trunk to move it, and as soon as he was out of the way, I snapped my fingers at Sam and pointed to the sticker mounted to the vertical back of the trunk behind the rear seat: a Thrush bird.
The cartoon avian mascot advertised the Thrush aftermarket exhaust system Dad had installed on the Dart, and we both remembered the bird stickers (easily confused with the Roadrunner logo to a small child, for years I thought that’s what they were).
The last detail we never actually saw, but Sam had asked if the original front bumper was still with the car. The owner said it was, and that it was in the rafters over the garage. Sam asked if there was a dent in the bumper slightly left of dead center. Perhaps confused at this point that we were looking at a sticker, bits of rust, and a dent in the bumper, the owner confirmed that in fact there was a dent, exactly as described. That dent was from when my grandfather had backed into the car in the driveway with the family’s 1973 Plymouth Fury when my father still lived at home as a teenager. Without knowing the rest of the history, without seeing the registration, and without any proper documentation and most of the original parts, we knew: this was what remained of Dad’s 1969 Dodge Dart GTS. In 2001 it had vanished into a garage in Webster not 15 minutes from our Brighton home, and remained there dismembered almost the entire time.
The guy our father had sold the car to had raced it maybe a handful of times before hitting a wall at the track, and selling the car to a local racing shop with a damaged front quarter. The seller told us that he had bought the Dart as a project car, and then shortly thereafter he had suffered an unrelated car accident that kept him from working on the car. He had never progressed past the roll cage, some patches to the worn body, and several thousand dollars of engine work for the motor that never made it into the car. He had purchased the car from two brothers that he had met who raced exclusively Dodge and Chrysler vehicles, and at this point we assumed that the two brothers who sold it to the current owner were the same two brothers who had bought it from the man in Leicester our father had sold it to around 1997. The seller let me take a picture of the registration and we said we would be in touch but had some more research to do. We thought it unlikely to encounter a bigger surprise than finding Dad’s long-lost Dart GTS. We were very wrong.
It was a 1969 Dodge Dart, 2-door coupe, Y4 gold metallic, with a 340ci high performance motor. Minute details matched our father’s car. Every box was checked. The timeline supported our theory that this was in fact our car, because the chances of anything else were astronomical. Sam and I went home, looked up Dodge VIN decoders separately and both came across the same two glitches: the second digit, and the seventh digit.
The VIN on the registration was LM23P98333283, which breaks down as follows:
L: Dart
M: Swinger
23: 2-dr Hardtop
P: High Performance 340ci V8
9: Manufactured in 1969
8: A typo, likely in place of “B” designating the Hamtrack, MI Assembly plant
333283: Serial number in production.
If this was the correct VIN, the Dart we had just found was a Swinger. We were convinced beyond any reasonable doubt that this was Dad’s car, but on paper it appeared not to be a true GTS, even though it had presented as such for its entire known life, even to the owner that preceded our father (who was the second owner, from about 1972-1977). The only logical alternative was that it was both the right car and that it was a true GTS, but that at some point the paperwork and VIN had been swapped to inflate the value of an otherwise near-twin metallic gold 1969 Dodge Dart 340 Swinger coupe. We did not have a record of the VIN, and since the tags were stripped from the car due to a series of racing modifications and a violent encounter with a racetrack wall after Dad sold the car, it might never be something we could determine for certain.
Armed with this puzzling new information, on Monday 28 January 2019, Sam walked into the shop where the Mopar-racing brothers still operated, and asked to speak to the Italian brothers by name. After confirming he was not there to break kneecaps (yes, they did actually ask that), Sam presented the same photograph that Dad used as his Facebook cover image: a grainy three-quarter drivers-side front shot showing off the 14” aluminum slotted mag wheels that were also long gone. We had completed the chain of ownership. The brothers confirmed that they bought exactly that car from the man Dad had sold it to, even with the slotted mags still on it. In fact, the Mopar-racing brothers even still had the original tail-lights and fender tag for the car somewhere in the shop, and maybe even more left over original parts that never transferred with the collection of parts that accompanied the shell to the current owner.
The last puzzle piece was the discrepancy in the VIN. The Swinger designation suggested one of two probable scenarios. The first possibility: a deliberately fraudulent GTS clone was customized by the original dealership that sold the car or the first owner thereafter, and it had fooled every owner up until my brother and I sat down to research it one-half-century after the original sale. The second possibility: a later error involving swapped VINs either by mistake or otherwise while the car was taken apart in a shop that dealt exclusively with Dodge racing cars resulted in our car being incorrectly designated as a Swinger. Both were plausible.
Sam sent away for historic records from the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles, but neither of us expected a useful or timely answer (we ended up being right - it took three weeks and the records provided were utterly useless). In the meantime we deliberated for several nights what course of action made the most sense. We knew we wanted the car. We wanted as many original parts as we could get our hands on. We wanted to painstakingly piece back together the ghost of Dad’s Dart into an even better resto-mod version of the car he loved for so many years. But nothing ever goes as planned.
About two weeks after our visit, Sam brought our go-to mechanic Steve back to look at the automotive puzzle. The obvious conclusion was that it wasn’t worth it. The seller refused to budge from his $15,000 asking price, which was absurd (even if you factor in the sentimental value) since the entire car was disassembled and the motor hadn’t been touched in years. Perhaps this was a consequence of too-popular TV auctions convincing regular people that their neglected and incomplete cars were somehow worth untold fortunes. In January of 2019 a finished, fully restored ‘69 Dart GTS could be had for $30,000-$50,000 on eBay. Ours was easily $20,000 away from even being operational, if we could even confirm that we had all of the parts we needed.
After several more days of agonizing over a course of action, Sam and I discussed one last time what we thought was the right thing to do. Sam had found the car, so he made the decision: per Mom’s recommendation, he was going to tell Dad, which meant that even if we were ultimately able to purchase it someday, we would lose the element of surprise we had worked so hard to protect. We would never be able to take Dad to a cruise night, show him a car “just like his old Dart”, and then hand him the keys to his old car and hear it roar to life - and that was disappointing even if we could still somehow acquire the car in the future.
I wanted to be there for the conversation, so Sam agreed to wait until I got home. I rushed over to our parents house to intercept before they went out to dinner with friends. They were surprised when I walked in the house and said “we need to have a discussion about something”. We all went to the living room and sat down, and Sam started.
He said “There’s bad news, and there’s good news. The bad news...is that it isn’t worth it”.
Dad shrugged “OK” anticipating a variety of scenarios that turned out not to be true. Sam was not buying a house, neither of us were in trouble with the law, and nobody was pregnant by surprise.
Sam continued: “The good news is that we found your Dart.”
Dad said “Yeah, ok.” And then he leaned forward while the news set in. “Wait, you what?”
I stepped in: “We found your Dart. It has been in a garage in Webster for about 20 years. But we confirmed, it is your car.”
He pressed to know how. How did we find it? How did we know it was the same car? What did it look like? We relayed an abbreviated version of events, and showed him the pictures. Mom sat on the floor playing with our pet rabbit, unable to bring herself to look at the carcass of the car she had such fond memories of – my parents had gone on some of their first dates in that car. Dad looked through the pictures. He told us that the torch-cut fenders were in fact the work of Tom (before Dad bought the car) in order to accept fenderwell racing headers, further confirming that we had found the right car, and that we knew things even the current owner did not.
Dad stepped back from the computer after he’d seen enough, and said “he ruined my car”. It was a heartbreaking moment. Mom managed to avoid the depth of emotions that Sam and I both felt upon seeing the garage door raise up to reveal a skeleton of a beloved mechanical former family member: a sense of loss and betrayal that anyone could be so careless and indifferent to such an awesome machine. They did ruin Dad’s car, and now they wouldn’t let us save it either. Their carelessness was only matched by greed. It was crushing.
As of this writing, the ad is no longer up. We remain uncertain that we will ever have an opportunity to buy back the Dart, but we have not given up. That we got as far as we did meant a lot to our father, who spent the next few days telling everyone that would listen that his sons had tried to buy back his old Dart. We came pretty close, too.
If the current owner ever develops an honest understanding of the many factors that determine the value of a vintage machine, perhaps we will some day have a chance. If anyone can be convinced that $15,000 is a fair price for a partially complete shell of a car missing almost all of its original body, drivetrain, interior and trim pieces, then it is certain that our hobby is lost, doomed to die in the yards and garages of old folks who spend too much time watching televised auctions, and not enough time ensuring the survival of their own machines and the stories they have to tell.
We hope the Dart will someday be part of our story again. I have always believed that machines don’t die, they just require love and care to keep them going - how I hope that is still true for this one.
Michael + Sam Lempert
Rochester, NY
2020.04.12
P.S.: If you ever end up with 'our' Dart, never hesitate to contact us. I cannot promise we will be able to buy it - but I can guarantee we will enjoy knowing it is still out there, Dart-ing around.
Pictures, in order: The Dart, the Dart next to Dad's 1970 Plymouth Roadrunner, the Dart registration with VIN, followed by pictures from the day we saw the car in person (on January 26, 2019) for the first time since 1996, in pieces in a garage in a Northeast suburb of Rochester, NY.
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