The Great Garage Clean Out

I’m writing this on April 15, 2020—perhaps significantly, as it’s the anniversary of the Titanic sinking and that seems allegorical of humanity these days.

- David Freiburger

I can’t predict how the Coronavirus program will be by the time you read this, but I can tell you that I, like you, am sick of hearing about it. So let’s look at the positive: gearhead productivity worldwide has spiked over the last four weeks of quarantine. Faced with nothing left to do because none of my cars are currently on the property, I stared down the calamity of my garage. Moms don’t tell their kids stories of my garage because they’ll have bad dreams.

I have a slightly oversized 1941 two-car garage and no fantasy of ever parking a car inside it because it’s overflowing with boxes of the detritus of my gearhead life and car-journo career. Of course there are a whole bunch of great parts and treasures of automobilia, but you’d never know that by surveying the pile of boxes that looks like a tornado hit the warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. I rarely get rid of anything, so I have boxes of obsolete stuffI’ll never use that was involved with, say, a Car Craft magazine story on Buick engines that I wrote 25 years ago. And in the past 9 years that I’ve been hosting the