My car is Serial # R4918, a round headlight model from late 1963, Avanti Red with standard
 (perforated) red/fawn interior.  Original equipment included a supercharger, wide-ratio 4-speed
, TT 3.73 axle, front seat belts and push-button radio.  It was shipped to a dealer in Stratford,
 TX but it didn’t sell so it was sent to Amarillo, TX, 80 miles south.  The 2nd dealer had trouble
 moving it as well but finally sold it in April 1964 to Neil Kolman, an Air Force pilot from Clovis,
 NM.  Kolman had the dealer remove the blower and install air conditioning because his wife would not
 hear of his buying a supercharged car.  The Kolmans and their three young children drove the car
 all over the country but eventually outgrew it, so he put it up for sale in October 1972.  My wife
 and I gave him $2,500 for it, with 93,000 miles on the clock.

 
For almost six years the Avanti was our primary transportation.  After our first child was born in
 1976 it quickly proved too small to tote all the things one needs for a baby and we bought a 
station wagon in April 1978.  I drove the car everywhere until March 2002 when, again, it was 
replaced with something roomier.  I was a traveling computer technician and the Avanti didn’t 
have enough room for all of the equipment I hauled around.  It is still my primary day-to-day 
car, mostly in town, and it has 240,000 miles on it.  It’s had two paint jobs, one in 1976 and
 a second in 1989.  It took a national 1st place trophy at the SDC Meet in Las Vegas in ’89 and
 I didn’t show it much after that.
 
The car’s engine is on its 3rd rebuild, with a .060” overbore.  In May 1997 I adapted a Borg-Warner
 T-5, a 5-speed from a 1984 Camaro, and the article I wrote about the conversion was published 
in the AOA newsletter.  For several years I would remove the air conditioner in the winter and 
install a blower, then reverse the process when summer came.  But freon got too expensive and I 
enjoy the performance boost from the Paxton, so for the past six years the car has been an R2
 5-speed.  It is showing wear (the paint has chips in it and the bucket seats need recovering) 
but it’s still as much fun to drive as it was in 1972.  That manual steering takes a lot of 
effort, so I plan to install power steering, get it painted again, and look for yet another 
set of NOS seat covers in South Bend.  Eventually, of course, I’ll get too damned old to drive 
it and it will go to one of my sons.  But until then I’m having a blast with it.

 
 
Jack Shiver