Art car: How a Delaware artist's memorial to her father found its way to Gales Creek
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Eight and a half miles outside of Forest Grove, in a yard past a long line of trees along the sides of Gales Creek Road, a tall, burly man in battered overalls sits inside a 1995 Ford Taurus station wagon, surrounded by junk.
Robert Block, Jr., 63, lives in a two-story house on a sparse 12.5-acre parcel of grass and sunflowers. He has dark blue eyes and a grey beard. Behind the house, once the home of a local bar, is a parking lot full of antique cars from Craigslist.
Though a product of another era like the other cars, this station wagon is different.
The car is covered in purple and brown beads that together create waves along its exterior. Between the screaming bears on the car's top and the memorial on its hood is a depiction of the world, entrapped in green and orange spikes, protected by two crocodiles.
The words "See You Later" are spelled out in cursive just above an Oregon license plate that once read: "GRT RDE1."
"The Great Ride"
Less than a year ago, Block purchased the car from a lot similar to his, 20 miles outside of Oregon City. It had over 30 cars, from hearses to converted ambulance trucks, he recalled. He saw an ad on Craigslist for a rusty, gutted hearse.
Block thought he could either turn it into a rat rod or sell the parts for scrap money.
Then, the Taurus caught his eye.
Block paid $600 for it.
A year later, as he turns the car on, the engine roars without an exhaust pipe. He installed a fuel pump when he purchased it. He backs the car out from the spot beside his house and drives toward his own car lot.
The white and black paint on the front and rear bumpers have faded. A leopard cover on the steering wheel, the bug-eyed dog bobbleheads on the dashboard, the silver angels near the front window—all have been lost along the way during the car's cross-country journey from Chicago to Delaware to Portland.
Block knew little about where the car came from, only what he could take away from the message on a single panel on the car.
"This art car is dedicated with love to the memory of Benjamin Harris Josephson, father, father in law, grandpa, citizen of the world, 1925-1998."
Little did he realize that behind the station wagon is story of an East Coast artist, her father, and her son's cross-country journey back to college.
"It's worth whatever somebody will pay for it," he says. "Every car out here has a story behind it."
For Nancy Josephson, a mixed-media artist based out of Wilmington, Delaware, the art car is part of a larger canvas of work she has been compiling since she started making art in the mid-1980s.
The car was the third one she had built, but the one that she considered unique. It was made in honor of her father.
Her father Ben Josephson worked as a pediatrician in New York. Josephson, who Nancy described as an "adventurous spirit," took trips to Rwanda, Honduras and Mexico, among other places, to offer medical relief with different organizations, including Doctors Without Borders.
"He had this idea of being out of the world and being apart of the world and interacting in a very deep and wonderful human to human way," she said.
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