14 MAY 25-31, 2023 westword.com WESTWORD | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | LETTERS | CONTENTS | and lumber departments. Ever the helping hand, he’d befriend customers who would then hire him on the side for various odd jobs — fi xing leaky sinks, building patio furniture, installing appliances. He eventually grew the business to 450 regulars and worked seven days a week, he says. Around 1989, a longtime customer from the Kmart days asked Gale if he could install accessibility modifi cations at the home of a 27-year-old friend who’d recently suffered a stroke. That’s how Terry Gale came to meet Greg Kissinger, the reclusive heir to Denver’s Kissinger Petroleum fortune. “Greg would peek out the door to watch me when I was working at his house, and I had no idea, because he was unable to speak,” Gale remembers. “Greg would tell people that he fell in love with me the fi rst time he heard my voice.” As Kissinger gradually recovered his ability to speak, the two became friends, and then a couple. “It just felt natural,” Gale remembers. At the age of 31, Gale retired from his handyman work to spend his days with Kissinger, who needed an attentive, thoughtful, loving partner as he grappled with various health challenges. Generous to his core and with the money to make that mean something, Kissinger asked Gale what he wanted for their fi rst anniversary. It wasn’t a tough question. In the early 1970s, Gale’s late father had spent $50 on a 1954 Nash Ambassador at the dealer- ship where he worked. The car blew an oil pump when Gale was a kid, and it moldered on his family’s property in Grand Junction, rusting away long past Gale’s father’s suicide, Gale’s coming out of the closet and moving to Denver, his meeting Greg. Gale wanted to restore the car. A few headaches later, the Ambassador glistened better than new in Caribbean Blue...and Gale was bit by the car-buying bug. “As a kid, I always played with Hot Wheels and Matchbox and Tonka trucks. I just always loved cars,” he says. “When I got bigger, so did my toys.” Gale’s enthusiasm found its match in Kissinger’s generosity, and the collection swelled to thirty cars — all Nash, Rambler and AMC models, because they were far more affordable than decidedly more “col- lectible” cars, and, Gale notes, “nobody else was collecting them.” Fed up with Gale tinkering on his collec- tion in tight quarters at a small storage lot in Aurora, Kissinger surprised him with a fi ve-acre spread in Elizabeth as a Christmas gift in 1992 — and Rambler Ranch was born. Soon after, the couple bought another 160 acres to ward off developers planning a subdivision. “More space meant more buildings and more cars,” Gale says. They moved to the property full-time in 1995 after building a 7,000-square-foot house there — complete with a private theater so that Kissinger, who was “addicted to movies but terrifi ed of being out in public,” could indulge in peace. From swap meets to newspaper ads to eBay auctions and beyond, Gale grew his collection. First a 7,500-square-foot building for his dad’s 54 Ambassador and other prime Nash vehicles, followed by a 5,000-square- foot addition. Then an 18,000-square-footer dedicated to AMC’s nearly forty-year lineup and a 16,000-square-foot car barn for “Brand X” vehicles, those that weren’t necessarily produced by Nash or AMC. A quirky outbuilding hosts Kelvinator re- frigerators and other appliances that came out of Nash Motors’ 1937 merger with the Kelvina- tor Appliance Company. There’s a re-created ’60s diner, also decked out in Kelvinator, and a picture-perfect ’60s home with period fur- niture, bedding and appliances — including a 1957 Seeburg Select-O-Matic vinyl jukebox. Gale uses it to listen to old Patsy Cline records. “I’m kind of a hopeless romantic,” he says. “I don’t like rock and roll. I don’t like rap.” You get the sense that Terry Gale is the only child of the ’60s who never suffered America’s Vietnam War hangover — or any type of hangover, for that matter. He doesn’t drink and never has. All of these life-sized, time-capsule en- tries provide a pleasant detour from all of the cars — not that you need one. Around 250 automobiles are on display in the four main buildings, nestled between historic billboards, thousands of collectibles and dozens of mannequins all dressed authen- tically, if ostentatiously, for the periods the cars represent. In the Nash building, bulbous, pastel, chrome-y exemplars of America’s manic post-war optimism draw you past more fi ns than you’d fi nd in an aquarium — until you arrive at the decidedly boxier offerings from Nash’s early years. On the way out, you can’t help but linger by the striking 1955 Nash Ambassador Pinin Farina Speciale. Just don’t lean on it: It’s the only one of its kind. Ramble over to the AMC building, and you’ll fi nd a staggering number of economy cars that came to defi ne working-class life in America, even if AMC only ever outsold any of the “Big Three” once, in 1961 — “the year I was born,” Gale says. There are rarities here, too: near-mint-condition AMC Matadors, Javelins and AMXs, and the world’s only complete collection of the themed West- erner, Briarcliff and Mariner editions of the 1967 AMC Rebel Cross Country Station Wagon, each produced in small numbers and only available in certain parts of the country. Mostly, though, what you’ll see are the funky, family-friendly cars built for folks to afford: AMC Ambassadors, AMC Pacers, AMC Eagles and, yes, AMC Gremlins. And in the Brand X building, currently un- dergoing a renovation, are all of those cars that don’t quite fi t in anywhere else, even among AMC’s oddballs. CJs, YJs, Jeepster Com- mandos, Wagoneers and more from AMC’s seventeen-year Jeep stewardship, sure. But also the three-wheeled Reliant Robin, a BMW Isetta with its refrigerator-inspired front entry, and the “Lectric Leopard,” a 1980s Renault LeCar converted by U.S. Electricar to run on (you guessed it) electricity. And then there are the hundreds of part cars rusting out in Gale’s “Boneyard,” includ- ing a 1958 Ambassador wagon that belonged to none other than U.S. Senator Mitt Rom- ney’s mom, Lenore, from back when Mitt’s father, George Romney, was AMC’s CEO. As you take this all in, you wouldn’t be blamed for thinking about all the billion- aires spending world-changing amounts of money to blast off into space or blast off inanities on whatever social media platform they just bought. What did this all cost, and why would Terry Gale spend it on Lenore Romney’s station wagon, of all things? But Rambler Ranch doesn’t represent the midlife crisis of a frustrated or frustrating tech CEO. It’s instead the life’s work of an ex-Mormon high school dropout who came out of the closet not long after he discovered his father’s suicide. It’s the manifest result of thousands of hours from a workaday Kmart clerk turned handyman who fell in love with an oilman’s Vroom Service continued from page 12 continued on page 16 To add human context, mannequins are posed in and around the collection’s vehicles, most of which were bona fi de family and errand cars for their original owners. There’s also a period-specifi c ’60s house, complete with a working 1957 Seeburg jukebox. SKYLER MCKINLEY SKYLER MCKINLEY EVAN SEMÓN
