Frank and Deborah Whaley's 1985 Corvette

I finally said "I'd rather see you driving newer technology. Let's look for a Late Model at a reasonable price." After hours of searching the internet we stumbled across a tiny message in an obscure location:

I suspected a typographic error; this was low mileage compared to other cars we'd found. This one was located only a few blocks from our house, so we wouldn't lose much time checking it out.

The original owner was surprised to hear from us, as he really didn't want to sell the car (his wife may have been encouraging him) and had posted only a small advertisement. He did mention that the mileage in the ad wasn't quite correct; the car had seen almost 25,000 miles. It was mostly a show car, still wearing its original tires. His den was loaded with trophies and photographs.

We nearly gave up several times during the month of negotiating it took to pry the car away, but it was worth the wait. Our Corvette Fever is now completely incurable. We became Founding members of the museum (soon to become Lifetime members) and now own only Corvettes (we also have a 1996 Collectors Edition).

After six years our 1985 still has under 54,000 miles. Nearly 6,000 of them came from the 1999 National Corvette Caravan; our story can be found here. The picture above was taken on the ride home, during a side trip to Chicago.

We would be very distressed to be called into action for the Historic Motorama, which would mean that another Corvette was having trouble. However, we are very honored to have one of our cars selected as an alternate. We will be driving it to Bowling Green for the kickoff party (since we've already arranged the vacation time), and hope to watch the Motorama roll into the museum. While traveling we'll be updating our Motorama website.

Frank and Deborah Whaley
Windsor, CA
NCM Founding Member #4172