Silver Corvette Stingray was a teen boy's dream car

NASHVILLE — So I’m standing there in Gary Harden and Dawn Snider’s driveway this week getting a close look at and rubbing my hand along the smooth faded paint on a 1963 Corvette Stingray convertible Harden bought when he was just 15 years old.

“It’s just an old beater,” he said, nonchalant, pointing out missing paint chips in the hood.

Right. The nicest old beater I have ever seen.

It was 50 years ago that Harden paid $2,400 for the used Chevrolet Corvette. He had started putting money into his car fund when he was just 6 years old, and as a 15-year-old in 1967, he purchased the silver Stingray.

And he’s still got it.

“A lot of people spend their lives wanting one,” he said. “I got that out of the way early.”

Harden had the coolest car in the high school parking lot, then ended up drag racing the car for a few years before he sent it out west for storage at his brother’s in Oklahoma.

“About three years ago, I brought it back.”

Snider recalls Harden taking her for a ride in that car back when the two were 16-year-old students at Brown County High School, Class of 1969. They first met in fifth grade at Nashville Elementary.

“I remember going for a ride in his car back then,” Snider said. “We were just friends. It was a pretty big deal for someone to have a Corvette in high school.”

Time passed, nearly four decades. Snider and Harden reconnected, and got married in 2006. They were 55 years old and a lot of things had changed since their high school days.

But Harden still had the car. “Every time I get in it, I cry,” Snider said. “It’s just so nostalgic, like having our youth again. Gary just looks at me and shakes his head, saying I like the car better than he does.”

The half-century old Corvette has just 32,533 miles on the odometer, some acquired on drag strips in the late 1960s, “when we’d win about every race,” Harden said. The fake plastic louver inserts on the hood distinguish the car as a 1963 model. “That was the first and only year for those,” Harden said.

“It’s never been painted, never been wrecked and nothing’s been done to the seats or any of the interior,” he said. And the car has never seen a car show. “I’m not much for them,” Harden said.

The only non-original parts on the Corvette: the side pipes Harden removed from his brother’s 1967 Corvette and attached to his own car, which spent years dismantled inside his brother’s garage in Oklahoma.

Harden, his brother and a friend reassembled the car and brought it back to Nashville on a trailer

“It’s just a car to me,” Harden said. Will he keep it forever? “Well, you know, life doesn’t last forever,” he said.

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