Cruising back to Wasaga’s good old days

DAVID PENHALE FOR THE TORONTO STAR

Cars at the Wasaga cruise.

Philip Marchand

SPECIAL TO THE STAR

On Wasaga Beach, automotive memories morph into legends.

Ask people about the “largest fresh-water beach in the world” and images of long, hazy summer days will likely emerge. They may even remember a long-ago July or August when cars, trucks and motorcycles rolled over the sand.

“I can remember being able to park on the beach and wash our cars on the sand,” says Eric Beamish. That was in the late ’60s, when snarling muscle cars were as common on the streets of Wasaga as anonymous minivans are today.

Beamish has brought back the good old days. A dozen years ago, his idea for a local car club led to the eventual formation of the Wasaga Beach Cruisers Car Club.

Its current president, Tom Flentzeris, speaks of the organization as if it were a service club or a church; a way of building community. Like service clubs, for example, the Cruisers raise funds for local charities. Like a church, they eagerly seek new recruits.

“I took over last year, and we’ve grown from 40 to 75 members,” Flentzeris says, although, like a modern pastor, he worries about bringing more young people into the fold.

It helps that the club has an ‘All are welcome’ policy.

Don’t own a cruise-worthy car? “We bring in new members without vehicles who are looking for a car,” Flentzeris says. “We help them get in there and get settled and find what they’re looking for.”

Afraid you won’t fit in? “When you go to car shows, you always find cliques of people who tend to stay together,” Flentzeris allows. “That’s not good. If I see members standing alone, I’ll go up to them myself and introduce them to people. Next thing you know, they’re chatting forever.”

The glue that binds members, whatever their background, is the dream car — the semi-magical object they’ve wanted all their life, the set of wheels for which they’ll happily sacrifice time and money.

It can be a humble car, like the old Volkswagen Beetle that Corey Finkelstein, a partner in a graphic design firm, spotted when he was a student in 1990. “I used my OSAP (Ontario Student Assistance Program) money to pay for it,” he recalls. “It was just a poor little Bug when I got her, but I’ve been restoring it for the last twenty years.” With its vanity plates (ZANE VW) and its elaborate graphics, the Bug is a labour of love.

Other members are equally devoted. “You get a lot of people who are factory workers who, believe it or not, have been working their whole lifetime to pay for their cars,” Flentzeris says. “You got school teachers. We have a librarian who comes in with an Edsel. Go figure.”

Flentzeris’s dream car, a 1970 Dodge Challenger, sits gleaming in the sun a few feet away. He owned a similar model as a 17-year-old but had to sell it to cover his university tuition. Now a software engineer, he promised himself to reclaim that car.

“I said to my wife, ‘I tell you what. I’ll make you a deal. I sold that car to better our future. When I turn 40, I want the car back.’” Four years ago, meeting his deadline, he acquired a Challenger — same model, same striking shade of green.

“It’s a Chrysler colour,” he explains. “Everybody thinks it’s a lime green, but it’s not. It’s called ‘Go Green.’ Chrysler was always crazy with colours. They had burnt orange, plum purple. This colour has a tinge of yellow and a tinge of dark green. Why they called it ‘Go Green,’ I have no idea.”

As the Challenger attests, dream cars are one-off. You don’t have to defend your choice. There are plenty of muscle cars here, but also restored family sedans and highboy roadsters and far out custom cars with ground-effect lights.

“It doesn’t matter what kind of car it is,” Beamish says. “We respect them all.” He walks over to a “rat rod,” a vehicle with a rust-covered 1933 DeSoto body and a Dodge 360 engine. “It looks like garbage, but it will go like hell, and the owner loves it,” he says. “This is the car he wanted. I love that.”

Sitting by the vehicle is Karyn Mackell, wife of the owner, Bryan Mackell. “It’s very noisy,” she says. “It doesn’t have any muffler on it, and we can’t talk to each other while driving.” It is also, she points out, a fair-weather car. “There are no fenders and just one front window. It can be pretty messy in rain. You get soaked.”

But Beamish is right. Despite the rust and the suggestion of chicken feathers, the DeSoto is as memorable as any car here. “We love it,” Karyn says. “It’s a lot of fun.”

That Wasaga Beach, with its motels and auto courts and go-kart courses, is no tony resort may have something to do with the cheerful acceptance of automotive diversity in the club. Many of its members celebrate their youth at this cruise, as well as their cars.

“In general terms, everyone who has gotten one of these cars is either a baby boomer or somebody who grew up in the ’60s or ’70s,” says Rick Seip, a local real estate agent. He says Wasaga marks the time in their young lives when “cars were almost more important than girls.” The point seems moot, he admits. To get the girl, you had to have the car.

“Everybody from Toronto would come up here,” recalls Beamish, 58, a Toronto native who is now a Wasaga Beach resident. “In the summer, we would come up every weekend — there was something special about the beach. My mom would be saying, ‘What are you doing this weekend?’ ‘Oh,’ I’d say, ‘working at the gas station. Hanging out with the guys.’ Mom would say, ‘You’re going up the beach, aren’t you?’ A bunch of us would come up and do some crazy things. Ready to impress the ladies.”

Would any of those “crazy things” involve racing on the beach?

“We frown on that,” says club member Russ Philp sternly.

“We frown on that,” agrees Beamish, equally sternly. He raises his voice, like a politician making something perfectly clear. “No one in the club has ever raced!”

Yes, and summer days last forever. As dusk descends, the cars rumble out of the Wal-Mart parking lot. Next Monday will be the final cruise of the summer and then the world goes back to its usual, remorseless way. Nothing is eternal, the drivers know, but dreams of cruising the sand and impressing the ladies at Wasaga may last for a while.

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