Hundreds attend Easter vintage car parade

Fred Ewers was a teenager when he saw her first. He wanted her then but who was he? "I didn't have the money," he said. "I was just a kid."

She was a jet-black chromed-out '59 Lincoln Mark IV Continental, gorgeous to him.

Sixty years passed. He bought the car and drove it Sunday for the second time in a year, from his home in Oceanside to Garden City for the 56th annual Easter Sunday Vintage Car Parade. "I feel like the president of the United States driving down the street in it," he said.

The event attracted more than 200 automobile lovers who strolled among 250 parked cars and trucks including a Model T, multiple Novas, GTOs, Impalas, El Dorados and Super Sports. After a few hours, the engines fired up and the classic automobiles made a slow, noisy procession down Franklin Avenue.

Bob Reed was there, over from New Hyde Park in a chocolate '39 Ford two-door sedan, deluxe model. Deluxe, in 1939, meant "a radio, a heater, I don't know, maybe side mirrors."

The Levey brothers were there, too: Marc, from Malverne, in a '48 Lincoln Continental and Arnie, from Atlantic Beach, in an '85 Rolls-Royce Silver Spirit.

"I think my father would drop dead if he saw the cars my brother and I are driving," said Arnie Levey. "He always wanted a Cadillac and thank God he got one before he died. It was something that was unobtainable to him, throughout the years . . . people who made modest livings didn't buy cars like these."

Sal Di Pietro drove out from Queens in the '60 Cadillac he rescued from the junkyard. "It was a dead car and I wanted to bring it alive again," he said. He did so using his mechanical skills. Then he painted it pink. Then he covered the seats with Elvis seat-covers and stuck an Elvis pillow in the back and a copy of The King's marriage certificate on the dashboard. He said he did the odd Elvis interpretation gig here and there, but was not in costume yesterday.

Not far from Di Pietro was a vicious-looking midnight blue Ferrari that might have rolled off the production line last year and a small convoy of World War II-era armored vehicles from the American Airpower Museum in Farmingdale.

The official stance of the Garden City Chamber of Commerce, which organized the parade, is that the Vintage Car Parade is for vintage cars. But, said Roger Eltringham, chamber president, exceptions are made. In this case, for an Italian sports car that costs more than a house.

"I'm not a purist," he said. "This is just a bunch of happy people getting together every Easter to watch the cars."