BERKELEY – This is a story about a man and his car.
Joe Zaccaro had big dreams. Coming back from the Army in 1968, he threw himself into a project to rebuild a 1954 Fiat. He poured long hours into it.
“I wanted to build a Double A Fuelie funny car,” he said. He started building a dragster frame for it. That’s when his mother asked what he was up to. He explained how he wanted to race it.
“I took her to the track one time to show her the racing. There was a critical accident. A week later, the car was on the roof,” he said.
While he was building it, his dad had been supportive, wanting to know if the family name was going to be on the side of the car. After his mother witnessed that crash, his father mounted the car on the roof to make her happy.
Since 1969, the Cosmo’s car has become an icon, in a stretch of Route 9 known for roadside oddities like the dinosaur and the giant champagne bottle.
Then, it disappeared. And the locals panicked. They thought the building had been bought and the car removed. They thought the worst. But really, it just needed some TLC.
The car had only been down twice before, for restoration and for a drive in the 1976 bicentennial parade. This third time, it needed to come down for more restoration. As one person said: it needed about as much work as any other car that’s been on a roof since 1969.
Months later, the car was lifted back up and remounted on the roof. A party sponsored by Fenix Auto Parts brought everyone out for the event. Family, friends, and car enthusiasts gathered at the shop to watch the great unveiling. Drivers were slowing down to get a look at it.
The team who restored it include Tony Cirillo, Dave Serino, Brian Applegate, Kevin Woodruff, Tim Lombardi, Vinny McNamee, and Mark Ott.
There are a lot of stories about the car, and there is only a little truth in most of them. For example, most people assume it’s a Volkswagon Beetle. But Zaccaro knows the truth. Just as he knows that the original engine was bought by someone who put it into a row boat at Whitey’s Landing.
He was surprised to hear that it was featured in the book “Sloppy Firsts” by Megan McCafferty, a Central Regional High School graduate who became a bestselling author. There’s a chapter in the young adult novel where one character gives a tour of the fictional town of Pineville which was clearly a stand-in for Bayville. The tour includes the car, the dino, the bottle, and even der Wunder Wiener.
As soon as the car came down, Zaccaro said he got tons of phone calls. People were worried about it. They said of the landmark “That’s the only way I know my way home.” Something that started with a young man dreaming to be a racer has become a part of the local landscape, known to hundreds of thousands of drivers.
Because this is a story about a town and its car.
