Car out of a Barn... for once!

Finally back online, my old system crashed. I am back up and running with a completely new system. This isn't a long adventure, but a nice one.

I was traveling outside Macomb Illinois when I was out at Western Illinois University, exploring for cars again. I came down a little road I had many times before, and directly in front of me is a flatbed tow truck.

This little street in this small town is made for barely one car, so I had to back up. I look at what is going on, and I see a man, a little boy and what appeared to be the tow truck driver sitting there looking at the car on the back of the truck.

I finally back up enough to see what is sitting on the back of the flatbed, and it is an early Camaro. This definitely peaks my interest. So I backed up and out of the way, and parked. I walked over to admire the car. I talked to the father, asking the guys what was going on. The father told me that it was his car, and it wasn't for sale.

I informed him I wasn't interested in buying the car, just admiring it, and I offered to help. They were all trying to figure out how to get this Camaro off the flatbed, and do a 90 degree turn and get it into their yard, all on flat, dry rotted tires.

I said that my RamCharger has four wheel drive, and huge tow hooks up front, we can do the best we could with the tow truck, then slide it sideways on the road using the RamCharger, and then I could use my truck to pull it back into the yard.

We decided on half of the plan, we had enough car jacks, that once off the truck, we would be able to lift it up, and pivot it enough so I could pull it back into the yard with the RamCharger.

This wasn't a really good plan, things can get bent and damaged, but the father and son were running out of time, and I was all they had (What did they think they were going to do? I don't know. Lucky I showed up.) So we got the car unloaded from the flatbed. Jacked the car up, and the father and I were able to get the car parallel to their home.

While we had the car on some solid ground, we were able to pull off the front and rear tires and at least break everything loose so we could roll the car to an extent. The flatbed was gone, and we were on our own.

I got the RamCharger behind the Camaro and put my tow straps around the rear axle of the car. It was very clean under there surprisingly. And then I started backing straight up, slowly by surely. We had to clear a support wire for a telephone pole, but we were able to work the Camaro back slowly.

After about a half hour, the Camaro was in his front yard. It felt weird putting a car in someone's front yard, instead of pulling it out. But it was coming from barn where it was never worked on, to his front yard where I would hope it would be eventually worked on.

Sitting there in his front yard, drinking a pop, I finally got the scoop on the car. The Camaro was his first car; it was a 67 Z/28. He bought it from a guy in town when he was 17 and began drag racing it. He scrapped the wall one time, and fixed the fender and door, and threw a 68 grille in there. After blowing up the engine, he pushed it into his friend’s barn, and left it there until the day I saw it.

His son had taken an interest in cars, so he was going to start fixing it up with him. I thanked him for the drink, and he thanked me for his help, and that I should stop by anytime. It was at this time that I realized that I hadn't taken a single picture of the whole event, but I was going to earlier, and left my camera on all day. Killing the batteries iI asked if I could take a picture, and he said that it was no problem. So I powered it up with whatever I had left, and snapped one quick picture of it.

I returned over the next year, the car never moved. He threw a tarp over it eventually. But the day I left Macomb, I drove by and there sat the old Camaro, waiting to rise from the rust.