During This Chevelle Owner’s Worst Days, a Friend Came Through to Help Piece His Life Together
HOT ROD Power Tour, presented by Chevrolet, is difficult to explain at times, even for us, as it means more than anyone can imagine to some folks. In practice, it’s a massive road trip over thousands of miles, but for others it’s a bookmark in their lives. If you’ve ever been through a life-shaking injury, you know how destructive the experience is to your morale and how important it is to find meaning in things again. For Dennis Perkins, Power Tour became real therapy in his recovery after his 1969 Chevrolet Chevelle fell off its jackstands, crushing his skull and rib cage back in April.
“I was detailing underneath, and when I reached over, the watch band I was wearing shorted out on the starter,” he recalls. The starter began driving the six-speed Chevelle off the jackstands, crushing Dennis. “It’s just so vivid, I could feel my teeth breaking. And the car started surging on top of me, like it was still trying to start. By the grace of God, I was able to pull the wiring from the starter and it stopped—then I realized I can’t breathe with this crushing weight on me, and I’m sayin’ my prayers.” By a righteous miracle, Dennis was able to escape from under the Chevelle and walk into his house to grab his old man for help before blacking out.
Dennis was in a coma for two weeks while doctors worked to piece him back together. About half of his face is titanium now, and he’s undergone a wealth of reconstructive surgery; all in all, medical science has done a good job of restoring him, if you will. He also tore his shoulder up during the ordeal, which was still strapped up when we met him in June.
“Yeah, you called me the day you came out of the coma,” says Donnie, Dennis’ friend who helped him work on the Chevelle over the years. “I should’ve been there that weekend, but I went to the lake with my dad. I got the news and I kept calling him and calling him, but finally he got back to me and said, ‘I’m alive, but I’m barely alive. I need your help.’ So I knew what he needed and I got over there.” As Dennis recovered, Donnie worked to finish the Chevelle and repair the damage from the accident. “To look at the car the first time [after the accident] was hard,” Donnie recalls. “It really was. The first jack I put under there got me thinking, ‘Man, this had to be a nightmare for this man.’ It’s everyone’s nightmare to have something like this happen.”
“We have those financial investments in the car, but it’s those spiritual ones that you have that are priceless,” Dennis says. The Chevelle had a lot of meaning even before this; four years ago, it was a gift from his wife, who bought it to replace the one he first owned when they met. They sold it for a down payment on their first house, and now that the family has been reared, it was time for a small reward. She surprised him with plane tickets to California after locating this Chevelle, and they brought it back to their home in Missouri. It didn’t take too long for Dennis to find an excuse to build it (in this case, popping the original motor), and he and Donnie began their restomod.
It now features a CPP stage-four tubular suspension kit with QA1 shocks, was sprayed Fathom Green with the side stripes being leveled under layers of clear, and a ZZ502 big-block and T56 took care of the motivation—literally. “You know how they give you all these exercises in physical therapy? Well, one of them stuck out: It was a shifter exercise!” In physical therapy, you have to often retrain your body to do simple tasks, and one shoulder motion in the routine was essentially the back-and-forth of rowing gears. “But my wife is gonna kill me when she finds out that I did drive it. I had to hold it tight and shift with my whole body. I could only handle it for 30 minutes, but I felt so good, I wish I had the words to explain it to you—I felt relaxed, I felt fulfilled.”
While doctors won’t advise it, to us it sounded like that half hour of driving was the best physical therapy he could’ve had, and Dennis even found that co-driving and navigating the rest of the trip helped re-sharpen his cognitive skills and sense of direction after his brain injury.
Power Tour was not just a vacation but also a step in his recovery. “Everyone I came across, they’re car people. It just rejuvenates me, I can’t just sit at home,” Dennis says. More than just a five-day rolling roadshow, the trip was closure for the two friends. Everyone has a Dennis-and-Donnie story of some kind—that one friend you can lean on when life can’t hold you up, and more often than not they’re car-obsessed.
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