John DeRue and His ’62 Blue Chevy Impala

A longtime drag racer has finally decided to sell his 1962 Chevy Impala at age 81. “It was a life changing,” he says, referring to when he first got the car in his last year of high school

By John Addyman

 

Cue the Beach Boys.

“She’s real fine, my 409,” they sing. “Nothing can catch her; nothing can touch my 409.”

John DeRue remembers those lyrics and thinks red.

In his last year of high school, he was blessed to be driving a brand new 1962 Chevy Impala two-door hardtop, equipped with a special 327 cubic-inch engine and a four-speed transmission. His dad co-signed the loan for it after promising “That’s not going to happen” to John’s idea a buying a 1961 Corvette.

Owning that Impala turned out to be sweet.

So sweet.

“Instead of hitch-hiking to Charlotte High School, I was driving a brand-new Impala to school,” he said. “It was life-changing.”

A tall and skinny 6-footer suddenly found that he wasn’t invisible in the halls or cafeteria anymore.

“The lunch tables were different,” he said. Friendlier. People were suddenly impressed with him. The right people: “Girls that wouldn’t talk to me before were right there now,” he added.

It was delicious. “Everything had changed. Most of the guys were driving beaters,” he said.

DeRue was no longer “most of the guys.” He stood out.

And that drew the notice of the school bully.

“That guy had a red ’62 Impala with a 409 engine in it. He picked on everybody,” DeRue explained.

And there was a fair damsel involved.

“Yes, there was a young lady in school. Linda, a blonde. I eyeballed her,” he said. “I had the opportunity to seek her out when she and her girlfriends were walking on the street. It was just like you saw in “American Graffiti,” you drove up and down the street, racing anybody you wanted to race. I ended up giving her a ride. That was the start of a long relationship.”

But that bully and his red Impala hung on DeRue like tire smoke after laying a patch on Lake Avenue.

A serious meeting was inevitable and when it came, DeRue’s blue Impala was up to the task. The red Chevy bogged at the start and DeRue left him, blew his doors off.

“I outran that red 409 that day right there on Main Street,” Derue said.

The ride that he had given Linda was the start of a long relationship. They were married in 1965 and today have been together for 61 years.

DeRue, 81, still takes care of that blue Impala and Linda still takes care of him.

DeRue works every day of the week.

He does that even though he suffers from kidney failure. Three days a week, he goes through dialysis, supervised by Linda. It’s a continuation of a remarkable story. If he can do it, he argues, many others can, too.

From 1962 to 1965, DeRue and his Impala were part of Rochester’s street-racing scene. He also competed legally at Spencer Speedway, Niagara, Canandaigua, Lancaster and New York International quarter-miles.

He wasn’t a crazy kid — moving machines is literally part of his DNA. His dad’s business, George DeRue Contractors, had a lot of things for young John to drive well before he got a license. “We developed most of the subdivisions in the town of Greece. We worked on malls and the town hall,” he said. “I was driving everything, dozers, loaders. I was parallel-parking graders before I got my car.”

DeRue came to a point in 1965 that some diehard racers never reach, making a decision some never do — to walk away from the track. “It was time to get married and sell the car,” he said.

“There comes a time when you have to grow up,” DeRue said. “It was a real issue, race the car one day, fix it to drive the next day,” he said. “Working on it all the time and pouring money into fixing it. It just didn’t sit too well, as you can imagine. When I was working on the car, Linda couldn’t go anywhere.”

So, he said goodbye to the Impala.

“Before I sold it, I carved my initials in the steering wheel. I thought, ‘Someday I’m going to get this car back; I’m going to find this car.’ It ended up in a dealership in Rochester, Heinrich Chevrolet. I bought three cars there. In those days, you raised kids and bought station wagons. I had three kids and three station wagons.”

The car stayed in the dealership for quite a time.

“My wife said to me, ‘Don’t get near that car. It’s gone. You’re not going to see it again,’” he said.

He already had a multi-level career, working in the family business, starting a sidelight of renovating every model 1936 Ford V8s, two-doors, four-doors, trucks. He and Linda opened the Country Corner B&B in Hamlin in an 1845 farmhouse. When the parts supplies for ’36 Fords dried up completely after 20 years, DeRue switched to 1970 Chevelles.

Each renovation requires about 1,000 hours of work. Two of his cars are owned by Yankee great Reggie Jackson.

And somehow, the ’62 Impala came back to him.

The service manager at Heinrich’s Chevrolet who had bought the Impala contacted DeRue and asked him if he still had an interest in the car, 20-some years after the sale.

DeRue wanted to scratch that racing itch again. He got Impala back on the track.

“But new racing was totally different from what I was used to,” he said. “So I was running time trails, getting the enjoyment of making a pass down the track. I only went into the elimination rounds once.

“When my son. Corey. turned 18, we took the car down to the track. He had never driven a four-speed car in his life. I thought my wife was going to kill me when she found out I let him run this car well over 120 mph in the quarter-mile. We finished second and got a trophy, which was really nice for his first time down the track. I was proud of him.”

In 1991, DeRue was finally done with racing again, sort of.

“My wife told me I was too old and the car’s too old for me to do anymore racing,” he said.

In his last race, at New York International, the car was sporting a 720-horsepower engine and spit out a drivetrain.

“That got my attention,” he said. “That was it. That was my last quarter-mile. It was time to do show cars and restore them.”

DeRue and his son turned the Impala into a show car through a frame-off restoration and took it to the Antique Automobile Club of America fall meet at Hershey, Pennsylvania. “If you win at Hershey, you win the best of the best,” he explained.

“I had been going there for 50 years. They had a class for old race cars. I noticed that some cars had later motors in them. They were all old Ford flatheads,” he said. “I talked to an official and told him I had a ‘62 Impala with motor from the ‘80s. He said, ‘There’s something I think we can do.’

“Eventually, the AACA made a class for that car. My car got a lot of attention. A lot of old timers didn’t like it; a lot of diehards were against it. But I was in a class, simple as that.”

In race car judging, the car has to complete a circuit around an oval track.

“I made some passes and really drew a crowd. It was pretty exciting. Five or six judges went all over that car top to bottom and I won the class,” he said. “Later they contacted me that the car was eligible for a national meet award. I had no idea what they were talking about.

“I was put up for the national meet, with all the cars in the Eastern US in the same class. I won and I got an invitation to a black-tie award banquet in Philadelphia and received the President’s Race Car Award. And my name went on the national award, which is four feet tall. It was unreal. I ended up being on the front page of AACA magazine and the calendar in 2019 with a car I’ve owned most of its life.”

 

Kidney failure

But now there were more changes in store for DeRue and his Impala.

He spends every other day hooked up to a dialysis machine. He suffered catastrophic kidney failure two years ago.

Sitting in the garage where the Chevelles are being worked on, he gestures at all the tools and parts and machines he uses.

“You can still do this,” he said. “I’m 81 and I’ve been doing dialysis for two years. I still work seven days a week on those cars. I can still do what I did in my 50s. With any kind of enthusiasm, you can still do that. You can live, work and survive with kidney failure. It’s threatening, but you can live a good life with it.”

He and Linda went through comprehensive training so she could handle his dialysis at home.

“We can regulate everything I have to do to keep order. I don’t have to go to a clinic. Linda does it all. Without her I’d be in a clinic, I wouldn’t be restoring these cars. I’m blessed and I give her all the credit,” he said.

The DeRues upload information on a laptop and send it to John’s doctor. “I lost my kidney function,” he said. “At this point, my kidneys are holding their own. As long as I keep doing what I’m doing, I should be in good shape.”

He is planning on doing some cruise nights and a couple of car shows into summer 2026. Then he’s going to say goodbye to the Impala.

He’s selling it.

“When it’s gone, it’s gone,” he said, thinking that it might be nice if the gentleman he bought the car from would come back to buy it.

All those Chevelles are waiting for DeRue.

Cue the Beach Boys… “Shut it off, shut it off, buddy going to shut you down…”