In its day, a 1993 Saturn SL2 was nothing special. That's what makes it very special to one family

On a Sunday night in June 1993, George Chamberlain couldn't contain his excitement. He gathered his whole family - wife, son, daughter - and hustled them in to his hand-me-down beater Volkswagen Rabbit. That night in St. Peters, Missouri, there were no carnivals, no church suppers, no special events that had George thrilled. Instead, it was a silver Saturn SL2.

"It was his first new car," his son, Scott, said. "He did a lot of research on it - read all the reviews, read up on it in Consumer Reports."

George, a mechanical engineer at McDonnell Douglas, labored over the order sheet, picking the exact options that maximized the value he'd get out of the four-door spaceframe sedan while remaining in his budget. The dual-overhead camshaft, 124-hp, multi-point fuel-injected 1.9L four-cylinder engine was a must. Same with the alloy wheels and the ABS system for the four-wheel discs. The five-speed manual transmission would do. Though he wanted the sunroof, he balked at the price. All told, it cost him a little less than $15,000.

He'd placed his order and waited patiently enough, but the rust continued to slowly consume the Rabbit and the leak in its exhaust grew louder by the day. The call from Lou Fusz Saturn of St. Charles County, notifying George that the car had been delivered and that he could pick it up that Monday, couldn't have come soon enough.

Scott, who'd turned 7 just a couple days prior to seeing the pre-delivery SL2 still in its plastic transport wrapping under the dealership's lights, was largely oblivious to the details of the transaction and didn't share his father's enthusiasm for the car itself. He didn't pore over sales brochures or read the reviews or compare prices with his father. "It was just an average ordinary family car, always in the background while I was growing up," he said. "It was really insignificant at the time. Even my dad had no illusion the car was anything fantastic."

The Chamberlains at the SL2's "launch."

Rather, what memories of that time stuck with him concerned the cutaway cars he saw on the dealership floor when accompanying his father on his fact-finding missions. "It was the first time I'd ever seen a car pulled apart like that," he said. And even more than that, he appreciated Saturn's much-ballyhooed efforts to create a sense of fraternity around Saturn ownership. Like many Saturn dealerships, Lou Fusz organized road rallies and picnics, offered home maintenance workshops, and made a big spectacle - the launch, they called it, keeping with the astronomical theme - of handing the keys of each new car to the customer and sending them on their way.

"From the standpoint of bringing families together, it was a really good ownership experience," he said. "It didn't feel disingenuous, it genuinely felt like they enjoyed what they were doing. They did a good job of creating a community out of the brand."

A year after delivery of the SL2 and after taking part in some of the dealer's events, the Chamberlains even traveled to Spring Hill, Tennessee, for the first Saturn Homecoming, where the family - wearing matching red-and-white Saturn outfits, no less - toured the factory, mingled with the tens of thousands of other Saturn owners who showed up, and reveled in all things Saturn.

For an "average ordinary family car," the SL2 served the Chamberlains well. It survived sibling roughhousing and countless road trips. It's there in just about every family photo and video from that era, parked in the driveway of the new house that George had built, serving as a backdrop for family portraits. "In the videos he took, he'd always pan slowly over the car," Scott said. "You could tell he really liked the car." A couple years after the "launch" of their SL2, George got an aftermarket sunroof for it. Even after an accident with a truck nearly totaled the car in the late Nineties, George had the Saturn repaired and kept it going up past 100,000, past 200,000, past 300,000 miles.

Then, in November 2001, when Scott was in his freshman year of high school, George Chamberlain died at the age of 49.

"He got sick, and it ended up being a heart issue," Scott said. "He needed major surgery - too major for him to recover from."

If anybody knows how to process the sudden death of someone so instrumental in their formative years, it is not a teenager. Scott, his sister Audrey, and their mother Denise mourned George, but they also - perhaps too soon - decided to stop talking about him, Scott said. They went on with their lives. About the only things Scott kept of his father's were his cassette tapes - mostly classical music.

The Saturn sat around for about a year until Scott grew closer to 16 and driving age. His grandfather, Bob, stepped in and took Scott to empty parking lots in the Saturn to teach him how to shift a manual transmission. Together they cleaned the car up and sourced parts from junkyards to get it back on the road.

Scott at 16 in the Saturn.

Still, "it didn't really mean much to me at the time," Scott said. "In fact, I really didn't like it. It was Dad's car, and now he's gone."

The Chamberlains sold the Saturn to some friends of the family for their son, but when he didn't want to learn to drive a car with a manual transmission, the Saturn went on to somebody else who Scott knew tangentially. It was well out of their lives for several years.

But then, in the early part of the 2010s, a few things happened. GM, of course, officially nixed Saturn in October 2010, generating a good deal of headlines. In 2011, Scott's grandfather, who had stepped into the role of second father to Scott, died. Perhaps just as devastatingly, the family lost many of their childhood memories - old toys, mementos, family albums - in a fire at Denise's house.

Fortunately, just a month before the fire, Scott had borrowed some photos and videos that he wanted to digitize, and as he went through them he thought how it'd be nice to have the car back.

"It was one of those things where you don't realize the value of something until it's gone," he said. "I realized that the time I can't get back with him makes that vehicle all the more valuable."

Not long after, he struck up a conversation with the third owner of the car and asked if he still had it. "He did, but he was thinking about donating it to get something else," Scott said.

The Saturn as Scott got it back.

It needed some work. Though it looked decent, the plastic body panels can be deceiving. Everything underneath was worn out, Scott said, and rust had infiltrated the steel spaceframe. The only reason the third owner wanted to donate it was because he didn't think he could get more than a couple hundred bucks out of it if he were to put a for sale sign on it.

"It really wasn't worth anything at that point," Scott said. "So I told him I'd consider taking it back."

They made the arrangements, and, with some time on his hands, Scott started to take the Saturn apart. In the process of doing so, he kept coming across old memories in the form of knickknacks and detritus still with the car: Scott's high-school i.d. card, still in the glovebox next to an antenna ball they got at the 1994 Saturn Homecoming.

"I pulled one part of the interior out and found some crayons that I had melted in there and that my dad had gotten so mad at me for," he said. "I think I'd have totally forgotten about that otherwise."

Once he had the car all stripped down, he sent it to Terry Palmisano at Cornerstone Auto Body in St. Peters, Missouri. Terry did the work on the car after the late 1990s accident, and this time he handed the job of repairing the car's rusted spaceframe sections to his son, Devin. Devin also later repainted the body panels for Scott.

"We were fortunate we got it back when we did, just a couple of years outside of the brand being discontinued, so we were still able to source a lot of stock parts," Scott said. Items like carpets, floormats, and door panels weren't hard to come by. But even then, he was finding that some items had already or were quickly becoming discontinued, so he bought a couple of parts cars.

One of those parts cars, a wrecked 1994 SL2 Homecoming Edition with less than 50,000 miles on it, provided not only the partial leather seats unique to that limited edition but also a complete factory sunroof setup, which Scott grafted onto the 1993.

"I remembered seeing cars without roofs on the assembly line at the Homecoming, which made me realize I could easily swap the original roof for a factory sunroof," he said.

The other parts car, also wrecked but with 20,000 miles on it, provided a healthy replacement engine, which Scott paired with an NOS five-speed manual transmission. He then went through the entire subframe, replacing the axleshafts, brakes, bearings, and  "every bushing that exists."

That second parts car ended up being repairable enough to put back on the road, so Scott put the seats from the 1993 SL2 into it and sold it to his mother, who still drives it, he said.

Scott at 30, with the restoration nearly complete.

Scott said he's not really into cars that much, and his mother and sister are into cars even less, but they appreciated what he was doing, and the process of restoring the Saturn started to get them to open up more about his father - more than they'd done so in years.

"I found myself asking Mom a lot of questions in the process of restoring it," he said. "It certainly increased the number of conversations we all had. It was good to talk more about it, and it helped me become more curious about my dad."

The restoration for the most part wrapped up a couple of years ago, but Scott's also spent time since then tracking down electrical issues - usually due to a burst capacitor - and sourcing the last little bits and pieces he needs for it, some of which he may end up replicating on a 3D printer.

"Like any car project, it's not really done, it's just an ongoing evolution," he said.

But for now, it runs and drives, and whenever Scott gets the chance to take it out for a spin, he pops in one of his father's cassette tapes.

"For a minute or two, it feels like 20 years ago," he said of those moments. "It's sad that we didn't get to experience life together and that he didn't get to enjoy the car more, but this car, even though it's just an outdated family sedan and an ordinary vehicle, is like a time machine. It allows you to appreciate the ordinary moments in life that were nothing special at the time."