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And all he wanted was a car ...

Growing up poor, Carroll Dale didn't have a toilet, let alone a car. Now he tools around in a 1939 Chevy two-door sedan painted raspberry pearl.

GIBSONTON - When Carroll Dale drives his 1939 Chevy two-door sedan, he's making his childhood dreams come true.

It's not that he dreamed of having that specific car. He just dreamed of having a car, period.

"We were poor," he said. "Real poor. It was 2 1/2 miles to the grocery store and we'd walk there, or my mother would hire someone to drive us. I always wanted some kind of a car."

He didn't have any of the common teenage car experiences - never had an old car that he tinkered with, never cruised around town. His family was so poor that they didn't even have a toilet until he was 16.

In fact, he got his first car when he was an adult, and even then he got it mostly for his business. He had left his home in Tennessee and moved to Georgia. He bought a 1957 Ford and used it to deliver the moonshine he made to his customers.

"We'd put together about 50 gallons at a time," he said. "We had to move the still all the time because the big moonshiners, they were always reporting us. I had a Harley-Davidson motorcycle I used too. I'd put the bottle in the saddlebags."

Dale doesn't mind 'fessing up to his past as a moonshiner. It was a long time ago, back in the early '60s. He left the hills behind and came to Florida, where he took a job on his brother's tugboat.

"I had never seen salt water and I had never seen a shrimp, but they put me on a boat and sent me out to sea," Dale said.

By 1975 he was a tugboat captain himself. He retired in November of last year.

His tugboat career helped him land his first street rod.

In 1987, Dale was at a flea market when he met a man who had a 1948 Plymouth.

"He said, "If you'll take me for a ride on your tugboat' - this old guy was about 60 or 70 years old - "I'll sell you that car for $400,' " Dale said.

It took some work, but Dale got the Plymouth's flat-head six-cylinder engine running pretty smoothly, when it ran at all. It seemed that it would break down every time he drove it.

He finally called a Tennessee friend name Fred McMurray who was a car wizard.

"I said, "What's the chances of street rodding this thing?' and he said "Bring 'er on up here,' " Dale said.

Together, Dale and McMurray put a TransAm front end on the Plymouth, and installed a 350 Chevy engine.

"We had flamethrowers on it, we had neon lights on it," Dale said. "Man, we thought we were somebody. We were cool."

Dale rigged up the flamethrowers the cheapest way he could, which essentially meant that he had spark plugs in the exhaust pipes, he'd pump raw gas into the pipes and trigger a spark.

It was illegal to use them on the street, which didn't bother him too much, but eventually it fouled the engine. He sold the car to some guys he met at Port Manatee and never saw them or the car again.

Not long after that, he saw his current car, the '39 Chevy, parked outside a house in Gibsonton. He asked the people in the house if it was for sale. They said no, it belonged to a friend.

A couple of months later, the car was still there. Dale asked about it again, and it turned out the owner had passed away. Dale contacted the owner's daughter, who was only vaguely aware that the car existed. He bought it for $2,500.

"I think it had a 327 in it and it had a three-speed on the floor but it couldn't steer right," Dale said. "You couldn't turn around in a 10-acre field."

He called his old car buddy McMurray, who came to Gibsonton and diagnosed the problem pretty quickly.

"He said, "Carroll, you need a new front end. You got a Corvair front end in this thing.' "

They eventually brought the car to McMurray's place in Tennessee, put on a Cutlass front end and replaced the engine with a 350 and painted the car a raspberry pearl.

Dale said he loves the response he gets from the car. He gets thumbs-up signs from people in the street, and when he drives to Tennessee to visit friends he often gets comments from old-timers at rest stops who have fond memories of their own old Chevys.

He and his wife, Shelley Orlando, take it to a few of the big street rod shows - they were at the Florida State Fairgrounds for the recent Street Rod Nationals - and they usually display a picture of his old friend Fred McMurray on the hood.

"He passed away from cancer," Dale said. "We always put his picture up there. We thought the world of him."