BY T. Q. JONES
tqj@mindspring.com
Bob Heisterman has had this 1962 Chevrolet Corvette since 1962, and we wish we had been smart enough to keep some of the cars we owned back then. Heisterman worked for his father during high school and college at various businesses his dad owned, but didn’t get a paycheck. His dad also owned several Ford Thunderbirds about that time, all the later model four-passenger versions.

“I told my dad he needed to buy a sporty car, and the next thing I knew he had bought this Corvette. I came home from school to find it sitting in the driveway. He said it was payment for all the time I had worked without getting paid, and I still had to work to pay for the insurance and license plates and so on.”
Wisely, Heisterman left the Corvette at home when he went off to college, thinking he didn’t want to risk getting it damaged in that environment. (He drove a 1955 Volkswagen Beetle instead.) After graduation from college, Heisterman took his commission in the army and went off to Fort Rucker, Alabama to learn to fly helicopters and took the Corvette with him, but left it at home when he left for Viet Nam to fly Cobras, deployed with the 101st Airborne.
Wounded in a crash four days before his tour ended, Heisterman spent six months recovering and then became an instructor at Fort Rucker. When he left the army, he drove the Corvette to California and eventually moved to Austin in 1991 and he and the Corvette have been here since then.
“She’s my baby,” he says, “always kept under cover and maintained.” Despite the care, he has had to have the car repainted once (no one can make a red paint that doesn’t eventually fade) and the engine was overhauled once, but the car has about 100,000 miles on it.
In all that time, he notes, the car has never been hurt and the only thing he has replaced is the convertible top, all of which makes this particular car about as original as a red Corvette with a convertible top can be.
“I haven’t driven it much, though my son would drive it when he came home from college, which required me to make sure it was clean and full of gas before he got here,” Heisterman smiled.
The “duck tail” rear end was new to the Corvette in 1961 and continued until 1962, making these cars fairly rare, as the 1962 model year was the last for the “first generation” Corvettes. (In 1963 the first of the “second generation” Corvettes were introduced as the “Sting Ray” models and the first coupe body was offered.)
These ducktail Corvettes may be the best-looking of the original “C1″ Corvettes with its clean lines and the newly in vogue four headlight setup. But whether or not you agree, Bob Heisterman’s extremely clean 1962 Corvette is arguably one of the nicest Corvettes you’re likely to see on the road.