Memories of the empire rustle loudly in the dirt ( a GREAT read) [View all]

Their Ghosts Still Haunt The Place: How Four GM Motorama Show Cars Were Saved from the Scrap Heap


An old-school junkyard, Warhoops Auto and Truck Parts squats on 15.5 acres of dirt speckled with the detritus of our throwaway culture. A Cadillac propped against a tree exposes its Northstar to the sky. Bent buses and crumpled cop cars line up against a white fence. It’s forgettable real estate except for one key attribute: location.

Tucked out of sight in an industrial area in the working class Detroit suburb of Sterling Heights, Michigan, across the road from a Ford transmission factory and just a little north of the plant where Chrysler assembles the 200—and a straight shot up Mound Road from the General Motors Technical Center in Warren—the yard has been a fixture in the area since 1955. Founded by Harry Warholak Sr. the same year GM moved its Research and Design operations into the Tech Center, Warhoops is steeped in local car lore. Yet the wider automotive world will forever know it as the place GM sent its Motorama dream cars for their unceremonious burial.

Current-day proprietor Harry Warholak Jr. invites us to sit in his car for an interview because there’s no room and no privacy in his small office, which is little more than a warm shed packed with a counter, a desk, scattered memorabilia, and a door to hide some plumbing in the corner. Warholak explains that “Warhoops” was a nickname acquired by his dad during World War II, based on his ­Polish surname. The elder Warholak earned a Bronze Star as a mechanic tending B-17 bombers. Until he died in 1997, some people still called him Harry Warhoops, even after he turned the nickname into a trademark.

“I was in high school, probably 14 or 15, when Dad took me with him down to Warren to see these cars,” Warholak remembers. “It was all the Motorama dream cars, by that big steel-roof dome they’ve got at the Tech Center. I was too young to be involved in the negotiation, but you can imagine how my eyes got like saucers. These dream cars–the Buick Wildcats, Cadillacs, La Salles, Firebirds, everything–and he told me they  were coming to our yard.”





http://www.caranddriver.com/features/their-ghosts-still-haunt-the-place-how-four-gm-motorama-show-cars-were-saved-from-the-scrap-heap-feature