Jour1111- Factual Story Telling Assignment

The Car Star

He was an army brat, forever on the move. So much so, that the only consistent in the small boys life was the car he was travelling in. The road trips were long and tedious and being a child of the 60’s the only thing he had to entertain himself with were his two younger brothers and their combined imagination. John was his name, “king of the car trip games”! ... Or so he called himself. The rules were simple, the game, challenging for most, but not John. The aim was to pick the taillights and makes of the cars in front first; John was the constant victor in this, which had his brothers convinced he was cheating… somehow. But they all knew deep down that he had a natural knack for cars. Maybe it was a genetic thing, his father also loved cars, and owned an Austin Healy as a young man, perhaps this love for cars was intrinsically intertwined into his DNA, either way who knew that this childhood talent would go on and help determine the young boys calling.

John spent five years of his childhood in Malaysia at the Australian army base before returning to Australia at the age of seven, finally residing in the quiet suburban estate of Zillmere and having a permanent place to call home. This was something he’d desired his whole life but upon receiving it, he became restless, unsettled even, movement then eventuated in his schools. He’d been to seven schools before the end of grade ten, where he eventually left and got an apprenticeship at sixteen. Sixteen was John’s year of change. Not only had he left school, but in the eyes of the law John was now a man, a young man who purchased his very first car. “A 1969 Hillman Hunter” he recalled with a glint in his eye, “I pulled it apart and put it back together working even better than beforehand all before the conclusion of my first year as an apprentice”. He seemed content, he’d begun his journey towards bigger and better, this dreamer had taken the first steps towards making his aspirations a reality. He was doing what he loved and exploiting his childhood talent for cars; he thrived in the business, and not long after his twenty-fifth birthday was established enough to open his own company, Virginia Auto Electrical. He began to build his legacy.

Johns like a child. A child playing with toy cars, but where once the small toy car fit inside the inquisitive young boy’s hand, the roles have reversed, and the boy now fits in the car. The passion remains the same from the beginning, work has never got him down, never aged him, never become unenjoyable. “Yes you get bad costumers, but at the end of the day I can bury my head and zone out from the chaotic world, I always feel that element of just being a big kid with a big toy car”. A trivial escape to some but something he can always rely on.

 John is a thinker, he is to cars as Tom Keating was to art restoration, or so I’d like to imagine. He recognises the beauty in the worn down, broken and tired and intricately brings them back to life. “Engines are like clocks, in the sense that people wear them, use them but never truly appreciate the particular intricacy they require just to provide something simple, like the time, I appreciate them both.”

John is now forty-seven, been under the bonnets of over a thousand cars, owned over twenty cars in his lifetime and is still an Auto Electrician, owning his own business, twenty-six years strong. With his eldest son set to one day take the reins of the company, John is content. Content knowing he’s aided in keeping the passion alive, even if it is for just one more generation “I look and my son now with the same glint in his eye over cars, I had as a young man, and smile... simply smile”. Currently John claims the ownership of three classic cars, an Aston Martin DB6, a Series 1 Etype Jag Roadster, an Alfa Romeo Montreal and building a bigger garage for just one more, his dream, a lime green Lamborghini Mura which is worth a cool quarter of a million dollars, “That’s a home loan I know, but my passion hasn’t hindered our lifestyle so far, as long as there’s a roof over my family’s head I can plotter along and dream as big as I like,” he laughed. When I asked what the future held John said this, “I remember as a kid seeing my first Aston Martin, the dark haired man drove down a small street and everyone stopped to look, like the car demanded everyone’s attention. The immediate thought I had in my head was, that’ll be me one day and look where I am! I hope to remove myself from mainstream Auto Electrics, and focus on classic car restorations, they don’t make cars like they used to. Today they’re disposable, they are nothing like the bewildering pieces of art I got to grow up with. I want to keep classic cars alive, and maybe just maybe, some small boy is out there looking at me in my Aston when I drive by and thinking just as I did all that time ago.”

Cars will always be in John’s life whether he’s working on them or studying them in complete and utter admiration, classic cars are Johns muse, his mistress, his calling.

An ode to my father, John Paul Caruana