Peter Coombs is an Islesboro excavator who would prefer driving his 1968 Mustang Fastback on Sundays to hauling shale in his dump truck. The four-speed Fastback was originally from the South, brought north by a NAPA franchise owner in Wiscasset who was making a business of buying and selling Texas cars.
Coombs’s Mustang is a “muscle car” — usually defined as an out-of-production sports coupe, decades old and powered by a V-8. Though car companies the world over manufacture stylish and beefy muscle cars today, by definition a muscle car on this island has to be a restored or well-maintained American classic.
Coombs bought his car in 1993 for $4,000 in very good condition and with over 100,000 miles on it. Since then he’s rebuilt the engine himself and is now painting the engine compartment while the Ford V-8 351 Windsor is bolted to an engine stand in the garage. He had hoped to have the car restored by the Fourth of July but he realizes now that it will be a couple more months before the Fastback returns to the road. Meanwhile, he’s spending a lot of time pushing it in and out of his garage.
Coombs has kept the original color: Meadowlark Yellow. A good finish makes a classic car a work of art, but a paint job is vulnerable and the Fastback has suffered from the occasional dings and scratches that are almost impossible to prevent. Soon after the got its most recent coat of Meadowlark Yellow, Coombs was working around it with a socket wrench in his hand. Accidentally, he hit the passenger door with the wrench and caused a dime-sized piece of yellow paint to flake off, revealing the primer beneath. A ding of that size and color and near a door handle is hard to ignore, but Coombs is begrudgingly beginning to accept it. After all, there’s a lot of car there to be proud of.
Many classics of all types — not just muscle cars — come to Cliff Houle for restoration and alteration. He owns a late-1960s GMC ambulance, which served as his wedding limo. The ambulance is a symbol of Houle’s role in Islesboro classic muscle car culture: he’s a car doctor. Like the traditional country doctor he puts in more hours working than the hours he actually gets paid for. His latest muscle car patient is Crystal Fairfield’s 1968 Camaro, in critical care.
Fairfield bought her Corvette Bronze, black vinyl-top 1968 Camaro with white interior in 1983. After a disappointing search for a car in Lewiston one day, she saw the Camaro on a lift in a garage in Rockland and fell in love with it. She bought it the next day and brought to the island on the ferry GOVERNOR MUSKIE. She was 16 then and even now she vows that she would just as soon “rip the top off the car and let it rot” rather than sell.
A mainland mechanic repaired the Camaro after an accident damaged the rear end a couple winters after she bought it. Years went by and the car suffered a long period of decline. Fairfield became a mother and the Camaro — though never forgotten — simply had to move lower on her list of priorities.
Rust invaded the car in some of the worst places: over the windshield, in the firewall and along the base of the rear window. Fairfield covered the car with a tarp in a desperate attempt to slow the decay but the tarp itself trapped moisture under it, and the deterioration only accelerated. Only the decision to accept the cost of a long-term and major restoration saved the car, which must compete against other projects for Houle’s time and for limited space in his garage.
When the restoration is complete, Fairfield’s Camaro will not sport a vinyl top. It will be Hugger Orange instead of the bronze color, which was not popular with her friends. It will not have the bumblebee stripe that wrapped around leading edge of the front end. Restoring the white vinyl interior is a prospect she can’t even think about right now. The body has been thoroughly sanded, filled and primed. Loops of shiny, silver metallic beads hang from the rear-view mirror still, a relic of happier days but also a symbol of hope that this Islesboro classic muscle car will be reborn under Houle’s care.
Some purists say a car is a muscle car because it was originally designed to look and perform like one. But some say that any car including a family sedan can be altered to become a muscle car. Charlie Pendleton has owned a 1966 Pontiac Catalina “since its conception,” he says. Peter Coombs says that Charlie’s Catalina is a muscle car but Charlie isn’t sure.
Pendleton bought the aqua-colored convertible coupe new in 1966 when he was living in Las Vegas and working at the Stardust Hotel. Before there were speed limits in western states, Pendleton would cruise, he says, at 100 mph on the open highway. The Catalina has a 389 V-8, which had a new block installed — bored for unleaded gas — soon after it passed 100,000 miles. The Catalina now has 160,000 miles on it. Pendleton uses premium gas exclusively. Otherwise, the engine will “ping like hell.” The white ragtop and ball joints were replaced awhile back. Mike Durkee repainted the Catalina with a coat of the original aqua when he worked at Bob Leach’s garage. No rust on the frame or body is evident, due to Pendleton’s custom of storing the car during winter and covering it in a gray fabric Quonset-style tent during summer.
Though Charlie’s Catalina might not have been conceived as a muscle car, it is a coupe, it has a big V-8, it was built in the 1960s and its styling suggests that by adding decorative embellishments like racing stripes even a purist might consent to call it a muscle car.
The place to showcase an Islesboro muscle car is the Fourth of July parade. Several enthusiasts hope to recruit enough muscle cars to make a decent showing next year. Until then, the owners of these Islesboro classics order the car parts they need from catalogs, scrape the money together to finish the work and visit the “Big Smokey Burnout” and “Muscle Car Calendar” websites to keep themselves pumped.