Lee & Paulette Scarlett

Lee and I discovered that we had been bitten by the Corvette Bug back in 1975. Lee was working for Barton's Texaco in Londonderry, and his boss Ronnie Barton had a 1963 split window Corvette that he raced at New England Dragway every weekend. Every Friday night, Lee would stay at work and help Ronnie fine-tune his Corvette and make special changes for the race. Then in 1980 Ronnie decided to restore his Corvette back to when he first bought it. It was that summer that he told Lee that he could take the Corvette and drive it for the whole summer. After that summer, we knew that someday we would have to buy our own Corvette.

But someday took along time in coming. We bought a house, and had two wonderful daughters and after that life just got a little complicated. So we gave up the idea of ever having our own Corvette.

Then in the summer of 2002, we had another opportunity to drive a C5 convertible for the weekend and that did it! We started looking for our dream car again. Of course neither one of us imagined how much a C5 would cost until we started looking. It was a little more than we had planned, but we didn't give up.

One afternoon, Lee came home early from work and we decided to go for a ride to the beach and have supper. We were driving down Rt. 4 in Northwood, when there it was. Under an elm tree was a white Corvette convertible! At first I wasn't sure what year it was, but when Lee told me that it was a C4 not a C5 I didn't want to look at it, but he made me get out of the car and sit in it. At that point, we wanted a Corvette so bad that he went to the house to talk to the lady about the car, and when he came out, we owned a 1987 Corvette. We never did get to the beach that night.

It had been neglected since the owner died. The outside needed a bath and a good buff job, and several coats of Zaino to restore the shine. Then we worked on the inside. Cleaned the interior and washed the carpets, and bought new floor mats, a console cushion, and an upper pillar lock for the driver's side. We had problems with it overheating, so we replaced a sensor and fan motor. Since it was an older car, Lee was able to do all the repairs himself.

Since then, we've had so much fun with our Corvette. We've gone to the beach, made several trips to the mountains, and have met a lot of interesting Corvette owners.

We finally made our dream come true, and maybe someday we will own that C5 or maybe even a C6 who knows, but we will always remember the day we found our 87-rag.