12 MAY 25-31, 2023 westword.com WESTWORD | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | NEWS | LETTERS | CONTENTS | don’t have to be a car person. By the time people leave here and they see the designs, the colors, the style, they see these as more of a work of art. So it’s kind of almost like going to an art museum, because they’re so unique-looking.” That’s a bit of an understatement, even when you compare Rambler Ranch to other car museums in this state (see story, page 17). Many collections, from Kentucky’s Na- tional Corvette Museum to the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles and the Larz Anderson Auto Mu- seum in Massachusetts, tend to truck in superlatives: They’re home to the fastest cars, the rarest cars, the most expensive cars, the most impressive cars, and so on. Gale’s collection, by contrast, celebrates the automo- bile’s center-stage role in the lives of America’s working families, folks who likely have never been within spittin’ distance of a so- called “supercar.” “People will come here, and they’ll tell me, ‘Oh, my grandma drove one of those, or one of those,” Gale says. “Other folks will ask me if I have a Duesen- berg,” a hyper-expensive, ul- tra-collectible car produced in exceptionally small quantities from 1921 to 1937. He doesn’t. “Nobody’s ever told me their grandma drove a Duesenberg.” But many grandparents drove Nash Ramblers, AMC Ambas- sadors and even AMC Eagles, depending on their appetite for adventure. Nash Motors was the car company founded in 1916 by former General Motors presi- dent Charles W. Nash after he bought out the Thomas B. Jeffery Company and renamed it after himself. In 1954, Nash Motors merged with the Hudson Motor Car Company to form the Ameri- can Motors Corporation, the U.S. auto industry’s spunky outsider — famed for its innovative and offbeat moon shots against the “Big Three” manufacturers: Gen- eral Motors, Ford and Chrysler. Its Pacer was made famous by Wayne’s World. The Gremlin, sketched out by AMC design chief Dick Teague on an air sickness bag and promoted by the company as “America’s fi rst subcom- pact car,” looked like nothing else on the road at the time — and still doesn’t, for better or for worse. The Eagle, a four-wheel-drive passenger vehicle, is now acknowledged as the fi rst-ever “crossover” car and the forerunner to all those Subaru Outbacks and Toyota Rav4s on the road today. And then, starting in 1970, there was AMC’s ownership of the famed Jeep brand, thought to be the golden years of the Ameri- can icon. In the late ’80s, AMC designed what would become the Jeep Grand Cherokee, though perhaps it shouldn’t have: Chrysler CEO Lee Iacocca wanted the car so badly that he led a buyout of French automaker Renault’s stock in AMC, not long after its head, Georges Besse, was assassinated by French leftists. Chrysler took over the company completely in 1987, and AMC badging — and its outsider spirit — were long gone shortly thereafter. While AMC cars pop up here and there in some collections, Rambler Ranch is the world’s only dedicated, permanent place to take in their entire story. Throughout their history, Nash and AMC vehicles were largely sturdy, reliable, economical cars that fulfi lled the basic promise of the automobile in American life: giving folks the freedom to get where they wanted, and often needed, to go. AMC’s Rambler American was regu- larly the lowest-priced American-built car for much of its run. The vehicles lacked the panache of the Chevrolet Bel Air, Chrysler 300 or Ford Thunderbird, but they got the job done. “A lot of people who have been through here have said, ‘Oh, we had a Rambler when I was a kid. I was so embarrassed to be seen in it.’ It was seen as a poor man’s car,” Gale recalls. “When these kids were buying their fi rst car, they bought a Ford or Chevy, be- cause that’s what the cool kids had.” But unlike collectors of high-octane hy- percars, Gale — an almost painfully earnest, unpretentious former handyman now worth an untold fortune — almost certainly never cared what the cool kids thought. Born in January 1961 in Price, Utah, Gale was the youngest of seven kids in a “very, very Mormon” household. He was maybe two or three when his parents divorced; Dad hightailed it to Grand Junction, while the rest of the family decamped to Castle Gate, Utah — until a coal company bought out the entire town and relocated everybody. His mom remarried, though Gale wasn’t espe- cially close with his stepfather. He cherished regular visits with his dad. And as if it weren’t enough to deal with a divorce, two blended families numbering nineteen kids and the literal brick-by-brick reconstruction of his whole town, Gale also held on to a secret: He was gay. “Living in this small Mormon town, I knew I had these feelings,” he says. “I’ve always been attracted to men. And I thought, I’m the only guy in the world like this. What’s wrong with me?” He distracted himself from the gravity of these greater questions by keeping his nose to the grindstone: mowing lawns, clerking at a grocery store, fl ipping burgers, and even delivering ears of corn door to door. At fi fteen, before he had a license, he saved up enough to buy his fi rst car: a 1967 Ford Galaxie 500. Not long after, sick of the strife with his mother’s husband, he moved in with his dad in Grand Junction. “I was really close with my dad,” he says. “He was always very affectionate, very, very loving. We got along great. He was very sup- portive of whatever I wanted to do.” For a moment, life opened up for Gale. But then, not long after he turned sixteen and could fi nally take the wheel of that ’67 Galaxie, tragedy: “On March 6, 1977,” Gale recalls, eyes glistening, “my father commit- ted suicide. I was the one who found him.” Gale took his eyes off the road. He dropped out of high school and moved in with a nearby brother, though his relation- ship with his sister-in-law was fractious. That same year, he also managed to tell his mother he was gay. She “wasn’t thrilled,” he says, but she still wanted to be part of his life. A bright spot, sure, but overall? “I was miserable,” he remembers. Fed up at eigh- teen, in 1979 he moved to Denver. He worked at a Kmart for a stretch, then took a gig as an exterminator. “I was a hired assassin for a couple of years,” he jokes, before he fi gured that breathing all those chemicals all day was too much of an oc- cupational hazard and went back to Kmart, where he rose through the ranks to manage the paint, hardware Vroom Service continued from page 9 continued on page 14 SKYLER MCKINLEY Terry Gale’s Rambler Ranch features his father’s 1954 Nash Ambassador, the fi rst car in his collection; an 18,000-square-foot building that houses the world’s largest assortment of AMC vehicles; and various collectibles, displays and memorabilia on 165 wooded acres in Elizabeth. EVAN SEMÓN SKYLER MCKINLEY
