The 1955 Chevrolet has long been an iconic collector car. One of the first mainstream collector cars, in fact. So it’s not too surprising that Donn Robinson found a ’55 Chevy Bel Air convertible appealing enough to own.
More surprising is that he used one as a daily driver for more than 40 years and that he restored three ’55 Bel Air convertibles, one for each of his daughters.
“The reason I stuck with ’55s is that’s the year I met my wife and I liked that model car,” Robinson, 80, says. “I didn’t dream of building three of them.”
But build three he did, over a period of several years, handing the keys for the last one to daughter Lisa Kott of Anaheim earlier this month.
It all started in 1972 when Robinson, a former longtime Anaheim resident and business owner who now lives in La Quinta, bought his first ’55 Chevy. He was looking for a car to drive to work and one of his employees had a ’55 Bel Air convertible he wanted $500 for. So Robinson bought the car and started fixing it up.
“I drove it to work and back for a number of years,” he says of the car, now restored and owned by daughter Laura Peterson and her husband, Bill, who live in Washington. “Everything was old on it. Every time I’d get up in the morning it wouldn’t start so I’d fix it and I made it into a good car. The girls loved it. We used to bundle up at Christmastime and all the girls would have blankets and I’d put the top down on the car and we would go around and look at all the Christmas lights.”
“We kind of cruised all together as a family so we just fell in love with that year (car),” Peterson recalls. “We would take the whole day and go as a family to picnics. He liked to go over to Bellflower Boulevard and Whittier Boulevard. It would be Mom and Dad in the front seat and us three girls in the back seat with our hair up in ponytails.”
Robinson remembers his daughters telling him while on a Christmas-lights excursion in the mid-’70s that they wanted a ’55 Chevy when they grew up.
“We always thought how neat it would be to have one,” Laura says. “And he just surprised the heck out of us one year and said, ‘I’m going to retire and one day I’m going to give you guys each one when I can, when you have space.’”
Robinson had plenty of space at California Vibratory Feeders Inc. in Anaheim, the business he founded in 1972, which came in handy when he started buying more ’55s to get parts for his first one.
“I was just fixing it up to drive,” Robinson says. “I wasn’t thinking of restoring it but I never could find the parts when I needed a part for it.”
The company is now run by daughter Kelly Reece and her husband, Joe, who own the second ’55 that Robinson restored. (Kelly recalls riding in a parade in her dad’s car when she was homecoming queen at Anaheim High, a feat repeated by sister Laura the following year.)
Robinson first bought two more ’55 convertibles – one already mostly parted out – at the old Movieworld Cars of the Stars swap meet in Buena Park. Others soon followed.
“I started looking for ’55 Chevys behind people’s houses, in junkyards and everywhere,” Robinson says. “I had an industrial building in Anaheim, and filled that building with them. I just kept going around buying them. Some were coupes but I needed parts off of them so I didn’t care what body style it was. I needed the bumpers, I needed this and that.”
Robinson’s business, which makes automation equipment for factories, had the tools and machine shop equipment he needed for working on the cars, though jobs such as paint, interior and metal work were farmed out to specialists.
After Robinson retired about 18 years ago, he could devote more time to the restorations.
The eventual result was three restored 1955 Bel Air convertibles, all painted red and white, same as the ’55 Chevy convertible used as the Indianapolis 500 pace car that year. Peterson got her car in 2003, and Reece’s followed in 2006. All the cars were upgraded to more modern features and all but the first one have late-’80s fuel-injected Corvette engines and four-speed automatic transmissions.
“I put power steering, power brakes and air conditioning in all of them – disc brakes because I wanted all the safety factors,” Robinson says. “They didn’t even have seat belts in them.”
“The cars have just been so much a part of my dad,” Reece says. “He’s driven one every day to work here at our Anaheim business. All he ever drove was a ’55 Chevy. He worked hard at restoring three of them and they’re beautiful.”
Kott’s ’55, the last of the three, is described as “perfect” by Robinson, who drove it for a few years to make sure it would be turn-key-ready when handed over. The car also was displayed at the Disneyland Hotel last year as part of a fundraising event.
Kott says she’ll be using the car mainly for parades and also to take her 93-year-old father-in-law to doctor appointments.
“I thought it might be fun to get him out in it occasionally to break up the monotony of going to the doctor,” she says. “It’s just really a special vehicle, so it’s not going to be abused or used for something other than something special.
“It’s kind of bittersweet because we just always grew up with Dad in a ’55 Chevy so my dad not driving around in a ’55 Chevy, there’s something awkward about that,” she adds. “I mean it’s joyous to own one, to have one now at our home, but it’s bittersweet because now my dad won’t be seen around town in his classic car that he gets all the thumbs-up from all the guys and everything.”
Though Robinson won’t be driving what is now Kott’s car like he used to, that’s not to say he’ll be entirely without a ’55 Chevy.
“For now, it’s out in the desert,” Reece says of her car. “That way my dad can still drive one if he chooses. We have it out there available for him because we have a condo out there by him. That gives him the opportunity to drive it anytime he wants to.”
And when he’s not driving her ’55, he can always use his latest acquisition, a 2004 Chevy SSR convertible pickup he’s already put some work into.
“Since I’ve had it, which is like five weeks, I had it painted and fixed everything that’s wrong with it,” he says. “There wasn’t a lot wrong, but it did need a paint job.”
Contact the writer: vldurgin@gmail.com
