http://www.sptimes.com/2006/07/02/He...p_the_ho.shtml
A place to pop the hood
From a few fans, the Thursday Nite Cruise-In has grown into a carnival for area car lovers.
By MICHAEL KRUSE
Published July 2, 2006
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[Times video: Maurice Rivenbark]
Spring Hill Muscle Car Club Car Show
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SPRING HILL -- Late on Thursday afternoon, then into the evening - and this is every single week, all year long - the parking lots around the Chick-fil-A in the Coastal Way shopping center on State Road 50 start to fill up with Camaros and Novas and Impalas and old Dodge Hemis and muscle cars and hot rods and street rods and classic cars with fat silver bumpers and shiny buffed-up paint and low fenders and long fins and white-sided wheels.
This is the Thursday Nite Cruise-In.
Hernando County's only Chick-fil-A has become in the last two years a seemingly unlikely site for what is now one of the biggest classic car get-togethers in this whole classic-car-crazy state.
The weekly spectacle conjures up images of poodle skirts and ice cream floats set to a doo-wop jukebox soundtrack. The cars, though, in all their color and chrome, also say something about the pace and the pattern of the development of the county and in particular the booming area stretching from U.S. 19 to the Suncoast Parkway.
"We keep growing and growing," Mike Gagliano said one recent Thursday. The 58-year-old Vietnam veteran is president of the Spring Hill Drifters car club and the head organizer of the cruise-in.
"The last six, seven months, it's just taken off," said Stan Kopia, who's the boss of the Spring Hill Muscle Car Club, runs a Friday night show behind the Pit Boss barbecue on U.S. 19 and is a regular here. "If you had a cruise here five years ago you wouldn't have gotten five cars. Everything was on 19. Now you got Super Wal-Mart and everything."
None of this on SR 50 was even here 10 years ago.
Not the cars.
Not even the parking lot.
But the Wal-Mart opened in September 1996. The Sears and the Belk department stores opened with all of Coastal Way in August 2000.
The Ruby Tuesday came in October 2003. Then the Chick-fil-A two months after that.
The Thursday Nite Cruise-In debuted here in May 2004 after two years at the Steak n Shake on U.S. 19.
"The first night, we had probably 30 cars, maybe 40, but not real big," said John Mitten, the owner-operator of the Chick-fil-A, which recently was named medium-size business of the year by the Greater Hernando County Chamber of Commerce. "Now it's gotten to be sort of a carnival atmosphere it's gotten so big."
There were 425 cars here one night this past spring.
"I couldn't believe it," Gagliano said.
More than 400 cars isn't a big cruise-in. It's huge.
"When you get over 150, you've got a good-size gathering," said Mike Kelly, publisher of the Orlando-based Mike Kelly's Cruise News, Florida's most well-known publication for classic car buffs with a statewide circulation of 20,000.
"You can say with authority," Kelly said of the Chick-fil-A gathering, "that it's one of the biggest in the state."
There are lots of annual national and regional shows that draw thousands of cars, but those are one-shot, one-time-a-year events.
Florida is one of the country's meccas for classic car shows and cruise-ins, Kelly said, due to the combination of year-round warm, car-friendly weather and retirees who grew up with these cars and now have the time and the money to play.
Around the central part of the state, there are popular monthly shows in Dade City, Plant City and The Villages, and the biggest, most consistent weekly draw is Saturday nights in Old Town in Kissimmee, where the average turnout is about 300, according to Thomas J. O'Neill, the Old Town leasing agent.
In the Tampa Bay area, the most celebrated cruise-in happens Friday night at the Biff-Burger in St. Petersburg, but the Biff-Burger has "only" 140 parking spots, said Troy Musser, the general manager.
Other weekly Hernando cruise-ins include Friday night at Pit Boss and Saturday at the Hardee's on U.S. 19.
Here at the Chick-fil-A, though, even with a summer slowdown, when the snowbirds are back up North and the setting sun seems to sit still and shine hot, hundreds of cars show up at 5 and stay until 9.
The early arrivers get the spots in the Chick-fil-A lot or maybe over at the SunTrust bank. Then the cars start to spill out toward Belk and Circuit City and Office Depot.
The owners pop the hoods and walk around and sit down on folding chairs. They talk about weather, women and work - if, that is, they still work, or whatever they used to do wherever they used to live.
Some 40 percent of the hard-core cruise-in men came down here from Michigan, another 40 percent from New York, according to the regulars, and the rest are from a little bit of here, a little bit of there.
"We're all car guys," said Wayne Penwarden, 62, who came to Spring Hill from Michigan. "We were all in clubs up North."
Many of them have pictures of their cars on their business cards.
Penwarden has a blue-green '46 Mercury and a raspberry '40 Ford.
Harold Hoid, 58, of Spring Hill, by way of Los Angeles, has a candy-apple-red '40 Ford.
Dick Pasquale, 70, of Spring Hill, from Pennsylvania, has a '30 Model A Speedster, a pretty '30 Packard, a '47 Plymouth and seven other cars.
They all have their babies.
And they all bring them here.
"Location, location, location," Kopia said. "Parking. As long as there's parking. And something for the ladies to do."
He pointed over at the Belk.
"The women can browse. And the men can do this.
"We tell stories," he added. "Like fishermen. Only without the fish."
The show at "Chick-fil-A is like a religion," said Len Mowry, 57, of Spring Hill, from Rhode Island. "It's like going to church. It's just where everybody goes."
"It's what we grew up with," said Tom Cotton, 60, of Spring Hill, from West Virginia. "They're memories we don't want to lose. It makes us feel like teenagers again."
"The way it was," Hoid said.
Right smack in the center of the way it is. The way it's become.
Spring Hill Car Show(s) Pictures
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