PONTIAC, Mich. – Woodward Avenue was packed Friday night as Dream Cruise weekend kicked off.
The event always draws massive crowds along Woodward Avenue, and you might be surprised by who you run into while checking things out.
Stay on Woodward Avenue long enough, and you’ll see everything from the vintage collection to the new cars, the supercharged, and everything in between.
“Everything that my father is right there,” said Russ Rhue. “This is what he loved and what I love.”
A 1967 Pontiac GTO seen in the video player above has been a passion project for Rhue’s family.
“When you put your blood, sweat, and tears into it and it’s related to your family, it’s like having a dog, and it’s part of the family,” Rhue said.
A familiar face was out and about looking at the Vintage Dara at the M1 Concourse Friday (Aug. 19) and echoed the same sentiment, as he was causing quite a few to do double and triple takes.
“When you find the guy who sanded and painted his car in his driveway, and it looks as good as the cars at Pebble Beach car, you go, ‘boy, that’s a craftsman,” said Jay Leno.
Leno is in the Motor City working on a new season of Jay Leno’s Garage and car care products rolling out at Wal-Mart.
The Dream Cruise is his second time coming to cruise on Woodward Avenue, and he says he has a soft spot for Detroit.
When he was 16 years old, he was the lot boy at a Ford dealership in Massachusetts. That meant he took the hubcaps off every night and put them on again the next day.
“So one day, I was carrying a bunch of hubcaps (in my arms) filled, and the used car manager turns around the corner and bangs into me, and they all fall,” Leno said. “He (the used car manager) goes and says, ‘you’re fired,’ and I go, ‘but you banged into me.’”
The manager fired Leno on the spot.
Leno said he was too embarrassed to tell his parents, so he wrote letters to Henry Ford II and the board members asking for his job back.
“About two weeks go by, and the general manager says, ‘I don’t know who you know in Detroit, but you can have your job back,’ so I always thanked Henry Ford II for getting me my job back,” Leno said. “Hank the deuce.”
The moral of the story is that it never hurts to write to the CEO and that you never know who will show up to the cruise.