Jay Leno, has Ben Skora got a car for you! Or any other car collector like you who can come up with the $150,000 asking price.
Before walking away from this deal, consider this: It’s a low-mileage 1976 Ferrari Daytona convertible, red with butter-soft white leather interior. The car’s odometer has logged less than 45,000 miles, some of them without a driver.
That’s right. Skora, 69, a renowned inventor and electronics wizard who lives in Palos Hills, customized the car so it can operate completely by remote control.
Completely.
Starter, steering, accelerator, brakes, windows, doors, lights, radio, trunk and hood all operate up to two miles away from the person holding the controller for the kit car that originally was used in the taping of the popular television series “Miami Vice.”
Skora said he completed extensive body, engine and wiring repairs on the Ferrari and replaced its upholstery and carpeting. What’s more, the Ferrari is not the first full-sized remote-control car Skora has created. He also installed remote control devices on a 1957 Cadillac convertible and a 1962 Ford Thunderbird.
Nor is it his only invention.
To his credit is a 280-pound, 6-foot-8-inch robot named Arok who can vacuum the carpet, mix drinks, dance, take Polaroid photos and talk, plus two 5-foot-tall robots, one for the Orland Park Police Department and another for the Park Ridge Police Department. Before the Ferrari there were three other remote-control automobiles. Skora said he invented a cordless telephone three years before AT&T came up with one. He has built a viewer/telephone that actually operates between his home and that of a friend in Mokena.
Skora’s home is an electronic fantasy land as well, with an electronic door (6 feet in diameter) that opens like the iris of your eye, remote control roll-down shower curtain and a revolving living room, 16 feet in diameter. The house has kitchen cabinets with shelves that go up and down electronically; lights, music and waterfalls that turn on and off by remote control; a wet bar that glides out from a flat wall; electronically controlled hands that appear out of nowhere to deliver hand soap or swizzle sticks for your drink; a magician’s transporter room; Hollywood smoke effects; and an easy chair that can be driven–starting, stopping and turning on a dime–by operating two toggles on the armrests.
And that’s not all. There are fascinating, too-numerous-to-chronicle things around every corner in Skora’s house. Most are activated by simply dialing numbers on a touch-tone phone.
“I can operate everything here even if I’m in Tokyo,” Skora boasted, his arm’s sweeping motion taking in his entire residence. What’s even more remarkable, from all accounts he has been able to perform that bit of electronic magic for close to 30 years.
All of Skora’s electronic bells and whistles–from the suit of armor that talks and bangs to the full-sized female mannequin/floor lamp with a lampshade made of panties (the bulb is wired to the hand)–are created with one thing in mind–fun. Ben Skora is nothing if not an elfin prankster. Friends say that if Skora thinks about something, he’ll build it, but if it can get a laugh, he’ll build it faster.
“I like to take (the Ferrari) to a restaurant like a Denny’s where there are lots of windows and sit at a table by the window with a good view of the car. Then I tell the waitress I own that car and start it up. I operate the windows and doors. You should see the look on people’s faces!” Skora said.
Bob Truckenbrodt of Mokena, lifelong friend and retired filling station/auto body shop owner, said, “Ben could be a millionaire five times over with all that he’s invented.”
Most of Skora’s inventions predated their commercial availability by years, Truckenbrodt said–such as the 1950 Ford that Skora rigged with an electronic starter pack similar to, but more sophisticated than, the ones just now becoming popular on late-model cars.
Skora calls the starter packs offered for today’s cars “kids’ stuff. Anybody can electronically start a car that has fuel injection. My starter pack works on cars that you have to pump the gas pedal to start.”
“If he had patented only that, he’d be rolling in money,” Truckenbrodt said.
But Skora isn’t about money. Oh, sure, a guy’s got to have a place to sleep and some ice-cold pop to share with friends now and then. And then there are those gizmos and gimcracks from the electronics and hardware stores, the total cost of which evades him. Ben Skora is more about the work of art that is his life. Close friends say he is inventing himself as he goes along.
When friends talk about Skora, or Uncle Ben as most call him, they marvel at his ability to envision something–such as a remote control automobile, kitchen cabinet shelves that lower from the ceiling or a robot that can vacuum the carpet–and go for it. He goes for it, they say, with superhuman patience and indefatigable perseverance. They describe him as a man who will let nothing, not even failure, stop him from achieving his vision.
Neighbor Dennis Dandeles, a science lab teacher at Washington Irving Elementary School in Chicago, recalls a time when Skora was painting the Ferrari: “He had been working on it for a long time. Sanding, priming, sanding again, then painting. He was spraying the red paint on the car in his garage when I stopped by to see how it looked. He laughed and told me he would have to start all over.”
Skora showed him where the paint had inexplicably bubbled and cracked on the car’s surface. Dandeles said, “I would have thrown a fit after all that work. Ben just shrugged it off and patiently started over.”
Dandeles said he wishes that spirit, the true scientific spirit that allows no barriers between you and your goal, could be bottled for school children everywhere. “Ben is a model of learning by doing,” he said.
How about a national spokesperson for learning by doing?
Truckenbrodt can’t recall whether Skora ever had a real job where he worked 9 to 5, five days a week. Additionally, Skora freely acknowledges dropping out of Gage Park High School in Chicago to enlist in the Navy when he was 16 years old. He has had no formal education beyond that, yet it hasn’t stopped him from building a resume that includes stints as a professional stage magician, stage hypnotist, professional therapeutic hypnotist, auto body man (Truckenbrodt calls Skora one of the best he has ever seen), construction tradesman, electrician, independent record producer, cabinetmaker, inventor and custom electronics specialist.
Dandeles said, “You hear Ben tell stories and you think he must be exaggerating. Then he has the photos to back it all up.”
Yes, there are photos. There is also a suitcase full of books, newspaper clippings and copies of magazines such as People, Look and Newsweek, all with articles about Skora. The suitcase also contains memorabilia from spotlights he has shared with the likes of the hosts of a 1970s television show called “Real People,” former Chicago Mayor Jane Byrne, talk show hosts Phil Donahue and Tom Snyder, newsman John Drury, Bozo the Clown and no fewer than four Misses Nude America.
If all those credentials are worth anything, then Ben Skora is the genuine article, a bona fide self-made man. A self-made man who made himself a robot named Arok (in a perfect example of Skora-think, it’s Skora spelled backward, without the S).
The entrance to Skora’s home is modeled on the entrance to the spaceship in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” with Arok stationed at the end of the hall in front of the iris door. Skora has rigged a ground fogger to augment the theatrical effect. Arok has a humanlike face that moves when he talks, which he can accomplish from a recording or on the spot via his operator.
Orland Park police Sgt. Charles Cassata, operator of the department’s Skora-built robot, said that feature has been the most fun for him. He has traveled to schools, local and state fairs and national conventions with the Orland police robot, called Officer POLO (an acronym for Protect Our Little Ones). Similar to Arok, Officer POLO has a video camera and microphone in his head so the operator can see and hear as if he were inside the robot, Cassata said.
The robots can turn 360 degrees and have a top speed of about three miles per hour. Skora built Orland Park’s robot 10 years ago for about $18,000, paid with money donated by several local service clubs, Cassata said.
Skora has no idea what Arok would be worth retail. The robot has been featured in several children’s and adult reference books. He also was used to promote the 1977 science fiction film “Demon Seed,” in which a computer impregnates Julie Christie. Oh, yeah. Arok is old enough to buy beer, having been built in 1975.
Cassata said, “Our robot can actually follow people and hold a conversation,” chuckling at some of his experiences.
Similarly, Skora and his friend Dave Val like to take Arok to fast-food restaurants and send him inside to order food while they sit in the pickup truck outside. Arok’s humanlike hands rotate at the wrist and can grasp and hold items.
Said Val, “Some (fast food restaurant) clerks have a great sense of humor and catch on right away. They’ll ask Arok if he wants a beverage and the robot will say, `Yes. I’ll have a quart of 10W30 (motor oil).’ “
Val and Skora have been friends since they met four years ago when Val did the interior upholstery on the Ferrari. Val, who lives in Mokena, also leads a show band called Dave Val Rock Theatre for which Skora designs and builds electronic special effects. Skora also has designed and built electronic specialty items for others, among them an elevator and electronic pocket doors for the owner of the controversial Worth castle-in-the-making. He also dabbles a little in auto body repair and furniture design/construction. He’s currently repairing the Palos Park police department’s commercially made robot. Odd jobs, all. That is how Skora earns most of his money, Val said.
“I don’t stay with anything too long. I get bored easily,” Skora said. The man’s topsy-turvy garage/workshop is a monument to the absent-minded, easily bored professor. Last summer, when a local television crew was scheduled to film at Skora’s house, he was so busy building and designing and creating that he forgot to clean the house.
Val and others worry that Skora is too easygoing, too good-natured. Friend Eunice Clymer of Hickory Hills said she has seen many very wealthy folks ask Skora to build something for them and fail to pay him. She, too, thinks he should be a millionaire by virtue of his inventions.
Skora discounts the importance of such things as patents. He said he has had some negative personal experiences with unscrupulous lawyers and so-called business partners who befriended and took advantage of the preoccupied young inventor. He denies any bitterness.
“Aw. Things like that happen. I get along OK,” he said, shrugging off disappointment.
He is the son of a blacksmith who died when Skora was 10 years old. He has been married, and divorced, twice. Wife No. 2 left him, he said, because she would often come home from work and find he had moved the kitchen from one side of the house to the other.
“One day she came home and I had driven our car into the living room through a hole in the wall,” Skora recalled.
Of his family, Skora said they have differing opinions. “They think I’m crazy,” he said. “I know I’m crazy.”
Yes, if “Tonight Show” host/cool car collector Jay Leno does offer to buy Skora’s car for $150,000, he can be crazy all the way to the bank–until he gets his next idea.
