This IS His Father's Oldsmobile

 Ron Thorn's restoration of his family's 1970 Cutlass Supreme: A.J. Baime's  story s in WSJ. 

Ron Thorn, 51, a Fender guitar principal master builder living in Acton, Calif., on his family’s 1970 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme convertible, as told to A.J. Baime.

When I was a kid, my father, William Thorn, was a car nerd. He was a member and the car pinstriper for the Toronto Modified Car Club in the 1950s and early 1960s. In 1979, we moved from Toronto to Los Angeles. We had to sell pretty much everything, our cars, our furniture. We flew out to L.A., and the next day, my dad walked to a used car lot and bought a 1970 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme. He painted the wheels the same color as the car’s body. That was our family car and our only car, all through the 1980s.

In the 1990s, my dad got a company car. The Oldsmobile sat in the garage and started to get neglected. I became a car guy and got a 1969 Mustang when I was 21. I tore it apart, rebuilt the engine. There were a bunch of other cars I worked on, all Ford and Shelby stuff, and I built a number of car-themed guitars, with Shelby colors and configurations. But I always loved the Oldsmobile. I would wash it every now and then, and start it up.

Around 2012, my father threw out the idea of getting rid of the Oldsmobile because he did not like to see it decaying. I said, “No way. Why don’t you let me play around with it?” I drove the car home and dove in.

I had worked on so many cars, but never any General Motors products. Mustangs were easy to tear down; you could do it in a couple days. But this Oldsmobile had so many trim pieces, so much chrome and stainless steel. It took a long time to take apart. I sent the carburetor to a guy in New Jersey to be rebuilt and replated. I got the seats reupholstered and I had a paint guy do the paint. But the rest of it I did myself.

Along the way, my father would ask how it was going. I would downplay it: “It’s going really slow.” Meanwhile I had the reupholstered front and back seats in my spare bedroom, and the carburetor sitting on my desk at work like a trophy.

I went all in on N.O.S. (“new old stock” parts). Anything I could not restore, I had to find. I joined Oldsmobile forums to hunt for these parts. I loved all the original GM packaging, the smell of the boxes, and the way the parts were wrapped in tissue paper. All these parts had been in their original packaging for some 40 years.

I finally got it all together after two and a half years, and it happened to be the day before Father’s Day, in 2014, which was also my parents’ anniversary. I took the car to a car meet at Bob’s Big Boy in L.A. I parked it, then went to pick up my parents in another car to take them out for a Father’s Day dinner. I told them I had to stop at Bob’s Big Boy to see somebody and that they could take a walk around and see the cars.

When we got there, I had people hiding in the bushes with cameras. When my mom saw the car, she just lost it. When my father saw it, he could not say a word. He just walked around it, touching it. For me, I had seen the process over two and a half years. He had not seen the car in all that time.

It was a great moment. I said to my father, “This’ll last you another 40-plus years.” But it was not to be. My father died five years ago, and the Oldsmobile came to me. Never did I imagine when I was a kid that I would someday be its caretaker.