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Cars

Salvation of '62 Porsche soothes his soul

A man of faith unearths a rare 356-B Karman Hardtop and learns what devotion and forgiveness are really all about.

By MARTY CLEAR
Published August 5, 2005

BRANDON - It's not unusual for people to find some valuable items when they clean out a garage or a storage unit. An old painting, maybe, a piece of memorabilia or some antique furniture.

Donnie Russell found a Porsche.

Not just any Porsche, either, but one of the rarest ever: a 1962 356-B Karman Hardtop.

"There were fewer than 1,000 made," Russell said. "They never caught on in America for some reason, so they stopped making them after one year. But now, if you can find one, they're invaluable."

Finding the car was the beginning of a long and exasperating odyssey. Besides having been buried under mounds of forgotten boxes and debris, the Porsche was in nasty condition. It had been in storage so long that Russell couldn't even tow it at first. The wheels wouldn't turn.

Russell, a division chief with the Salvation Army, and a co-worker came across the Porsche in 1987. They were cleaning out a warehouse on Florida Avenue, across the street from the Salvation Army offices in Tampa Heights, to turn it into additional office space.

"We saw this old white car," Russell said. "And we were like, "Oh, my God, it's a Porsche!' "

At first they debated over who would get the car. Russell thought his friend should take it; the friend disagreed.

Eventually Russell relented.

The first step was to find the owner. It turned out to be a Tampa doctor, a friend of the guy who owned the warehouse. He had stored the car there for 10 years. Apparently he always intended to get it back into shape but never got to it.

Russell bought the car for $4,500. Getting the title was the first problem. The doctor didn't have it, and it had been so long since the car had had tags that Georgia - the last place it had been registered - no longer had the records.

Legwork, letters and affidavits finally got Russell the clear title. Then he got started on the car itself.

He shipped the engine to a California company, which, he says, ripped him off. The company said it didn't receive the entire engine.

Russell wanted the California mechanics to rebuild the engine, but then he decided to have them build him a new, larger one, essentially a Porsche 912 engine customized to fit his 356.

He started building an additional garage at his Brandon home for the Porsche. He worried that he wouldn't have the garage finished before the car was ready and he might have to park it outside.

UPS went on strike right after he had ordered parts. He thought that might delay the project.

He needn't have worried. He took the body to a place in Clearwater. It was such a massive job, the guy there told him that it would take four months.

"I remember thinking, "Four months? That's a lifetime,' " Russell said. "It ended up taking four years."

Yep, four years. It was a small shop, and the guy who ran it told Russell he had to make other people's cars his priority. If people needed their cars to get to work, he had to get to those first and handle the Porsche in his spare time. Russell understood.

"He said if I couldn't live with that, I could take my car back," Russell said. "But I had seen his work and liked it so I left it there."

Meanwhile, he took the interior to another Pinellas shop and got ripped off again. The work was so poor, he said, that he stopped the job halfway through, took the interior to another upholstery shop and had it start all over.

Finally, the body and the upholstery were done to perfection, the eggshell-white paint replaced with champagne yellow, the red interior giving way to a camel brown.

A place in Brandon installed the engine, which had been sitting in a Seminole Heights garage. In 1991, four full years after he had found the car, Russell got to drive it for the first time.

It was bliss.

"One of my fears was, what if I don't like it?" he said. "I thought I would, but I didn't know. Maybe after all that I wouldn't like the way it rode."

On his first ride, his fears vanished. The car looked great, like nothing else on the road, and it was a joy to drive.

But then ...

"I had gotten maybe 5 miles. Maybe," he said. "And then it quit on me."

He barely got it started and then got the car to limp back, coughing and sputtering, to the Brandon shop. The engine had to be rebuilt, but because it had been sitting for four years, Russell didn't figure the ripoff company in California was likely to give him any satisfaction. He paid for the repairs himself and waited a few more months.

Finally he had his car, looking impeccable and running perfectly. It took 41/2 years and cost something like $30,000. He doesn't regret a single day or a single dollar.

"It's just so beautiful," he said. "I'm going to have this car forever."

[Last modified August 4, 2005, 08:43:14]