Celebrity Cruise: Joe Mantegna - Restoration and Renewed Membership - Auto News

The Buick was his daily driver until 1972. He was out of the band by then and acting in plays and dating Arlene, now his wife. But the Chicago winters were too tough on the car, so Mantegna put it in storage. Little did he know at the time the car would sit idle for the next 20 years. "I put it in my friend's barn in La Porte, Indiana, because I didn't have the heart to give it up," he says.

"He had a little baby at the time. I remember he said the kid would go play in the car, mice lived in the car. I mean, the car became like a joke," Mantegna recalls. "It rusted, because it was in that rickety barn. It leaked and the car got water in it. It was a nightmare."

In 1992, Mantegna got a call from his friend. He was moving out, so the Buick had to go.

"He calls me and says, 'What do you want to do with it?' Now my career was going very well, I'd just bought a new home out here, so I said, as magnanimously as my dad would, I said, 'Hey, throw it on a flatbed and send it out here. After all of this, of you being so kind to let me keep it in there, I can't just say, oh, yeah, junk it.'"

Mantegna was shocked when he saw the car again.

"When that thing arrived and I looked at it. I was like, 'Oh my god,' In fact, I was on Jay Leno's show that week," he says. "Knowing Jay's a big car buff, I brought along a picture of the car as it arrived on the flatbed. He held it up to the cameras and said, 'Call the Navy. We found their anchor.' Which is kind of what it looked like. It was terrible. I had no idea. You could hardly recognize it."

"But I thought, it's here now, what do I do? I could chalk it up as a loss. But then I said to myself, 'You know what, this is my first car. I have all these memories of this car. It's actually the same year I was born.'" Mantegna continues, "So it was like, you know what? My tossing this car away would be the equivalent of somebody tossing me away. So I said, 'No, I'm going to do right by it.'"

It was the beginning of a 12-year restoration journey. As he describes this project, Mantegna takes a deep breath when talking about how long it took to transform the Buick to its current glory. He found an old-school car restorer through his contacts at the Buick Club of America, a club of which he's proud to be part.

"I'd kept my membership in the club all these years," he said "Little did I know how exciting that was, because I'd let it expire. I joined in 1967. I let it expire, in a sense I didn't pay my dues, because I didn't need to, I didn't have the car anymore."

He called up to ask if he could reactivate his membership in the club, and they were thrilled to hear from Mantegna. "When I told them my name and they looked it up, they said, 'Wow, you're one of the first like 5000!' I was like royalty to them. In a club that's maybe got 40,000 members now."