4-Wheeled Beauties

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4-Wheeled Beauties: Spindles Auto Club Members

Take Pride in Their Cars

By JACK ENCARNACAO
The Patriot Ledger

WEYMOUTH - They may pop in and out throughout the week, but they always leave a piece of themselves behind.

It’s a ’55 Chevy Bel Air, a ’69 Plymouth Road Runner, a ’38 Ford, an English taxicab. In many ways, the 26 cars under the covers at the Spindles Auto Club garage are part of a member’s identity.

Show any member a car, even if it’s not his, and he’ll tell you the entire story of where it came from, why it’s significant and all about the guy who owns it.

This is ‘‘labor of love’’ defined.

‘‘The majority of the guys are in their later 40s, 50s, because that’s the point in our lives where we can start playing with our toys again,’’ said Spindles president Steve Levreault, 56, an Easton resident and Randolph’s town engineer.

Spindles, which meets in a nondescript clubhouse behind a custom car shop in Weymouth, is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. Levreault says that makes Spindles the oldest continuously operating club in the country that maintains a garage.

While many members are from Quincy, Weymouth and Braintree, there are also members from Plymouth, Hingham and Hull, Milton and Dorchester.

They include a lawyer, a milkman, a retired school principal, a union president and construction workers. There aren’t as many mechanics as you’d think, but there is the coveted transmission repairman.

‘‘You don’t have your transmission rebuilt by anybody but Bobby,’’ club member Rich Perkins of Weymouth said.

Spindles started in 1957 in part at the behest of a local judge who figured troublemaking youth could benefit from being assigned to fix cars as community service.

‘‘It actually started out as a bad boys club,’’ said member Fred Calef, 58, a retired assemblyman from Quincy. ‘‘In the old days, they used to say either you go to jail or go in the service. Then, it was either you to jail or you join Spindles. They let the kids work and work out their problems that way.’’

The first club garage was an old wooden barn built in 1957 in Jamaica Plain. The club moved to South Boston and then Quincy.

‘‘That ‘garage’ didn’t work out too well for the members because it burned to the ground,’’ reads a club history. ‘‘When the roof caved in six cars were instantaneously converted to charcoal colored low riders.’’

The club finally landed on East Street in Weymouth in 1978 and has been there ever since. But you wouldn’t know it.

Spindles has kept something of a low profile over the years. There are no signs on the street signifying its presence, save for a small hand-carved wooden sign out back.

Things get more conspicuous come June, when the club’s cruise night season starts and hot rod riders from all over the area gather at the Spindles garage to talk cars every Monday night.

For more than 25 years, the club has also organized its annual car show and swap meet at the Marshfield Fairgrounds in September. Steve Frazier, 55, of Braintree said the admiration that comes with owning a meticulously restored automobile is a big motivator.

‘‘It gets the older people saying, ‘Wow, my father had one of those,’’’ he said. ‘‘It makes me feel good. I like the feeling.’’

Frazier, a former club president, said Spindles has never had the level of car restoration activity it has now.

‘‘This is the most productive I've seen it in the 12 years I've been here,’’ he said. Frazier also said it’s getting harder to find young people who are into classic car restoration.

‘‘We have a lot of guys who are old school,’’ he said. ‘‘The younger guys are coming in with more ‘fast and furious’ cars.’’

Calef, the Quincy retiree, has a series of projects going, including restoring the 1969 Road Runner from its bare bones. He also wants to buy a car that’s been in the Spindles garage for 18 years but was never finished because its owner died last year.

‘‘If I haven’t got two or three projects going, I’m not doing my job,’’ Calef said.

Members pop in and out of the garage at their leisure. Some are ‘‘key holders,’’ meaning they have keys to enter the club 24/7, and others are ‘‘spot holders,’’ meaning they store a car in the garage. A couple of spots are left open for members to bring in their cars and do their own oil changes and repairs.

All benefit from picking each other’s brains within the confines of the poster-covered garage, Spindles president Levreault said.

‘‘Everybody's got a different angle that they're looking at the hobby from,’’ he said. ‘‘There's always somebody there at the club that can give you their point of view. You’ll get more opinions than anything. You can pick and choose.’’

Jack Encarnacao may be reached at jencarnacao@ledger.com.