This is a love story, really, about a man and his first car.
Bob Tatum fell for the beauty the day his best friend purchased it new in 1958. He coveted it for years.
Finally, in 1968, his friend offered to sell. It was Christmas and every other feel-good holiday rolled into one the day Tatum paid his friend $200 and was given the keys.
He drove it from his hometown in Texas to Greeley, where he attended the University of Northern Colorado on football, baseball and tennis scholarships.
“It was the campus car, yes indeed,” Tatum, now 60 years old, reminisced. “Everyone knew it — a 1958 turquoise-green Impala with a white convertible roof.”
And then the day in 1975 arrived. Tatum was off chasing professional-football dreams. He had stored the Impala in a Greeley garage. When he came home, it was gone.
He filled out a police report. His buddies over at a local salvage yard told him to forget about it: It was either chopped up or on its way to Mexico.
Fast-forward to mid-June. Tatum was on his job taking an airline pilot from a Cherry Creek hotel to a training center at Stapleton. On East 23rd Avenue at Bellaire Street, he looked over. He could not believe his eyes.
In the driveway sat a turquoise-green, 1958 convertible Chevy Impala. The top was black, but how easy is it to change a top?
“Man, you’ve got to do it,” the pilot in the rear of the van told him. He circled the block and got out.
He knocked on the door. He recognized the people who answered, but they did not recognize him. So he simply asked if the car was for sale. He was told it was not.
Tatum called the State Patrol.
“It was extremely degrading and very depressing to have the State Patrol interrogating you in front of customers of a business you have spent a lifetime building,” said Sam Taylor, owner of Sam Taylor’s Bar- B-Q on South Cherry Street.
Taylor had gone to school with Tatum. He provided documents showing the Impala was his car. Besides, the vehicle-identification numbers did not match.
“I rescued that car from a Greeley chicken coop. It was so wrong,” Taylor vented. “But I am a forgiving fellow.”
Months later, the State Patrol called again. It had done work Tatum had not requested and tracked his Impala from Greeley to Iowa and on to Ohio. It is now, an investigator reported, in California, where it is owned by a car collector.
The detective knew this because the California Highway Patrol went to the car’s registered address in Tustin, Calif.
The new owner, Tatum was told, has put more than $50,000 into the car, which he estimated now to be worth more than $150,000.
“You know what is sad,” Tatum said, “is that I always wanted to one day do to that car what he has already done.”
A State Patrol investigator called Tatum on Monday with the number of the man’s lawyer. Apparently, they are willing to “make arrangements.”
Tatum doesn’t know what that means. He is a van driver. No way can he afford $150,000. But he will, he says, talk to the lawyer.
“After all these years, I guess I had given up on it,” Tatum said of the Impala. “I don’t know how I’m going to do it now, but I want my car back.”
Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.
