Members of the Schooners softball team had just seized a table in the packed beer garden of their sponsor, a neighborhood bar and grill, when a cigar interrupted their post-game debriefing.
It was a very large cigar. A half-foot long. Fat as a kielbasa.
It moved slowly from a table at the back of the beer garden through the packed crowd to the front bar, all the while protruding from the teeth of an attractive young woman who otherwise might have been mistaken for a local resident. The stogie, however, was a dead giveaway.
”The Corvette People have arrived,” grumbled the Schooners catcher to his second baseman.
No further explanation was needed.
Swallows to Capistrano. Collegians to Daytona. Corvette People to Bloomington.
For 20 years, a massive and flashy migration of Corvette People has ended each June in this otherwise tranquil central Illinois community, nearly doubling its population of 50,000 for one surrealistic weekend in which anything goes.
And wherever it goes, it goes in a Corvette.
More than 4,000 of the American sports cars poured into town this year. The annual all-Corvette road tour took 2 hours 20 minutes just to clear the starting point-a parking lot owned, appropriately, by State Farm Insurance Co., which would not be nearly as flush if it weren`t for the astronomical monthly premiums paid by Corvette keepers.
There were 1,621 cars in the road tour`s Corvette conga line. It stretched 20 miles, jamming traffic for hours. Half the local population cursed, the other half lined up to watch and cheer the Corvette People and their disposable income.
”They filled the restaurants, they bought gas, they cruised through fast- food places. The usual estimate of how much they spend in the town is between $3 million or $4 million,” said Dave Hawkinson, executive director of the local chamber of commerce, who admitted to avoiding Corvette-caused traffic jams by ”riding my motorcycle on the shoulder.”
”A bit of inconvenience for those kind of dollars was relatively insignificant,” he noted.
Gone for good
But neither the Corvette People nor their significant dollars will be back next year. The 20th annual Bloomington Gold event was the last hurrah for Bloomington-the final fling for those who have picked the pockets and patted the backs of the Corvette People, and for those, too, who have cursed them and their cavalcades of cars.
The Corvette People, love `em or hate `em, have gone for good from this town. Even though this is where it all began. Even though it will still be known as Bloomington Gold.
Next year, the massive event will be held 50 miles down the road in Springfield, where it will be billed as Bloomington Gold at the Illinois State Fairgrounds, which rings in the ear as well as the Kentucky Derby at the Indianapolis Speedway or the Hula Bowl at Boston Garden.
”Bloomington just happened to be the place where it happened first; I never thought about the event getting so big,” explained David Burroughs, president of Bloomington Gold and king of the Corvette People.
Bloomington, along with its twin town Normal, prides itself on being a boom town, but the city, or, more specifically, its 50-acre county
fairgrounds, was just not big enough to hold the ever-growing throngs of Corvette People, not to mention their jewelry, their cigars and their cars.
Corvette People do not travel light. Most pack at least one extra Corvette to be either sold, judged or simply ogled enviously by the mere Taurus-driving public who this year paid a $10 admission fee for the opportunity to watch thousands of fiberglass-bodied sports cars not rust.
”Hey, if Taurus or Ford Escort owners ever want to have an event like this, we`d think about putting on a show for them, too,” said Randy Lorimor, marketing czar for the Bloomington Gold Corvette show.
A cash cow
While more than 30,000 attended the last Bloomington Gold in Bloomington, nearly as many local residents had come to view the event as a national phenomenon in which tens of thousands of people with an unhealthy interest in one type of sleek but fairly common automobile swarmed on Bloomington to make it impossible to get a restaurant reservation, drive to the golf discount store or find a hotel room for relatives who then freeload at your house.
Just as there must be inhabitants of Capistrano who curse the swallows, many here have contemplated roadblocks at the borders and bazookas at the broadside on Bloomington Gold weekend.
While the first sighting of a Corvette Person has long been a rite of summer here, shooting insults at them and their auto-affluence has also become a custom. Local radio personality Scott Laughlin is a leading heckler of ”the Bloomington Gold chains,” a reference to the neckwear sported by many Corvette People.
”I always wondered why people would spend $10 to go in and look at a bunch of Corvettes when you can sit in Denny`s parking lot and look at them for free,” said Laughlin, who has regularly staged mock interviews with supposed out-of-towners come to the event ”to steal a Corvette.”
The Bloomington deejay was once called on the carpet by a humorless Chamber of Commerce bigwig for ”encouraging vandalism” because he and a cohort jokingly offered free bumper stickers to listeners who would put them on visiting Corvettes-on the paint rather than the bumpers.
Local business leaders have had good reason to view the giant Corvette show as a cash cow to be coddled. Bloomington`s hoteliers, for example, generally have doubled their rates for the event, milking Corvette People, who, suffice it to say, do not have the option of sleeping in their cars.
”The only way I got a room is because I know the guy who built the hotel,” explained Ricky Pierce, a showgoer from Valparaiso.
The Vette-heads, after all, make themselves fair game for fleecing by openly doling out $6,000 for restored fuel-injection systems from cars that themselves cost a mere $5,000 brand new 20 years ago. This year, as in years past, there were reports of Corvette buyers and sellers flashing huge amounts of cash in grocery bags or tucking it into briefcases handcuffed to their wrists.
In the world of Corvette People, cars generally cost more when they are old than when they were new. Twenty-year-old models in top, or ”gold,”
condition sell for as much as or more than new Corvettes with sticker prices in the neighborhood of $40,000. Car loans were offered like corn dogs from trailers parked next to the sale lot at Bloomington Gold.
In addition to Corvette People and their cars, Bloomington Gold consists of a vast array of ancillary items, a veritable bazaar of Vette viscera. This year, 427 vendors rented space, at rates from $90 to $125, to hawk old parts, new parts, clocks, watercolors, glassware, jewelry and-this may shock you-T-shirts.
Corvette-crazedness
The height of Corvette-crazedness at the final Bloomington Gold was undoubtedly to be found at the booth of Joe Trybulec, whose business card cryptically characterizes him as ”writer-historian-photogra pher-parts.”
Parts-man, parts-Corvette, Trybulec holds a Ph.D. in car arcana. And he was the only vendor at the final Bloomington Gold selling bricks.
Ahh, but not just any bricks. These were Corvette-related bricks.
”These are the only remaining artifacts from the St. Louis Corvette plant where Chevrolet started producing their first cars on Dec. 28, 1953, and continued to produce them until June 30, 1981, when they moved production to Bowling Green, Ky., where production continues today,” said Trybulec, a car nut with the air of an Archeology 103 lecturer.
The bricks from a basic exterior wall of the plant were offered at $100 each. ”But that includes a brass plaque and an 8-by-10 photograph of the original wall,” Trybulec said.
The Corvette historian had another item so valuable that it was neither on display nor for sale. ”It`s in my truck,” he confided as if the Holy Grail were at hand. ”It`s the last vacation schedule for the materials department at the St. Louis Corvette plant. With all the employees` names on it.
”I`m not selling it,” he said. ”It`s going to go in a museum someday.”
Trybulec`s obsession is typical of Corvette People, according to their leader, Burroughs. Silver-haired and supremely confident, Burroughs, 45, is a Country Companies insurance executive and marketing mastermind who causes eyes to roll all over the Twin Cities area when he asserts that profits from his event ”are not quite fair for all the work involved.”
(Corvette People pay him $90 and up just to park their cars in a car-sale lot at Bloomington Gold. About 400 cars were parked there this year.)
Burroughs is also an astute student of the Corvette`s allure. He cited the ”20-year lag theory” in explaining that a high percentage of Corvette buyers are in their late 30s and early 40s and they generally purchase Corvettes that they yearned for in their teens.
”A lot of people are shopping for their high school fantasies,” said Burroughs, whose own fantasies must have been plentiful. He owns three Corvettes and has a partnership in two others.
This year, in a special high-security area, Burroughs displayed his rarely seen 1967 L-88 model, which, with 12 miles on the odometer, is said to have the lowest mileage of any known vintage Corvette.
To preserve that record, Burroughs had the car hauled in on a trailer. He then drove it backward for 200 feet to its position on the show floor. He claimed that trip was the farthest the car had been driven in seven years.
”Can you believe that these people spend tens of thousands for cars that they never drive?” asked deejay Laughlin, the Corvette scorner.
Precious commodities
As precious as their cars are for Corvette People, their Bloomington hotel rooms for the event have run a close second over the years. A chief reason for moving the event to Springfield is the more plentiful supply of hotel rooms there, according to Burroughs.
In Bloomington, Corvette People had come to view room accommodations as a matter of life and death.
The Bloomington Days Inn sits adjacent to the fairgrounds, and its rooms have always been especially valued during Bloomington Gold, according to Matt Groppi, general manager.
”Two years ago, a gentleman came to the desk and said he had a reservation, but we couldn`t find it. Then he explained that the room was under someone else`s name,” Groppi said. ”But he said the other guy would not be checking in because he was dead.
”Then he whipped out a will, a legitimate will, and the gentleman who had passed away had bequeathed his Bloomington Gold Days Inn room reservation to this guy,” Groppi said. ”It was real and we honored it.”
”Obviously,” added the innkeeper, ”I hate to see Bloomington Gold leave town.”
