Cover Story

CRUISE from page 45

Glieberman often attends some of the specialty car
shows around the country, such as the ones at
Amelia Island, Ga., Pebble Beach, Calif., and Bay
Harbor, Mich. (near Petoskey).

Ruth Ann Lippitt

Ruth Ann Lippitt of West Bloomfield takes turns
with her husband, Allen, driving her 1978 Corvette
in the Dream Cruise. "One year I drive and he
waves to the spectators, and the next year he drives
and I wave," explained Lippitt, who is a gemologist
with Sidney Krandall & Sons Jewelers in Troy.
"The cruise is really a lot of fun. You get to know
all kinds of people, and we renew acquaintances
every year. Sometimes we park the car for a while in
a big display of Corvettes at Woodward and Maple
— and we just walk around and talk to people."
Lippitt got interested in old cars as a youngster,
when her uncle took her for rides. She bought the
Corvette — white with a red interior — sight
unseen and proceeded to decorate her garage in an
old car motif. It has a turquoise interior with a dis-
play of wheel covers, old street signs and other
appropriate old car paraphernalia.
"A car like a '78 Corvette has to have a nice
garage; the garage can't look shabby," she mused.
She keeps the car there most of the time, driving it
to work once every few weeks in the summer or tak-
ing it for a spin at night.

Scott Baker

Scott Baker of West Bloomfield calls himself "one of
those troublemakers" who drives cars up and down
Woodward every night of the week leading up to
the actual cruise.
Not content just to cruise for one day, a number
of car owners have jumped the gun in recent years
and turned the event into a weeklong mini-cruise
— much to the annoyance of cruise organizers who
still are trying to keep it to just Saturdays.
It's easy for Baker to cruise often because he owns
12 old Cadillacs, models ranging from 1940 to
1991, and he drives a different one every day of pre-
cruise week.
"The cruise is great; I wouldn't miss it for the
world," exclaimed Baker, who's the CEO of the
Dako Group, an engineering company in Troy that
does business with the Big Three auto manufactur-
ers.
"I've been cruising most of the years, and you
meet all kinds of people from around the world," he
said. "I probably could walk from 10 Mile Road to
Maple Road and know almost everyone along the
way."
Baker's pride and joy is a 1956 red-and-white
Cadillac Coup de Ville that has only 15,000 miles
on it, which he drives on the actual cruise day. He
tries to drive each car about 500 miles a year, and
keeps them in a special showroom at Dako.
Baker's love for cars has rubbed off on his chil-
dren. The single father's son, Zachary, 14, now has
his own car detailing business, cleaning and sham-
pooing cars for upward of $100 a vehicle. Zachary
even has business cards, a Web site and a partner,
and is earning money to help buy his own cars.
Baker's other son, Isaac, 5, can identify any car
on the road. His daughter, Jennifer, 18, is mildly

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2004

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interested. "She keeps reminding me she
wants to get all of my cars eventually,"
Baker cracked.

Joel Jacob

Joel Jacob of West Bloomfield traces his
love for cars back to when he was a
teenager and often visited the Henry
Ford Museum in Dearborn. He used
$3,000 from his bar mitzvah money in
1972 to buy a 1965 Rolls Royce that
cost $8,500, even though he couldn't
drive it yet. His parents kicked in the
rest of the money, and they drove the
car until he was 16.
He now also owns a 1931 Model A
Ford, a 1953 Cadillac limousine and a
1977 Corvette. He bought the Model A
from the Sloan GM Museum in Flint.
"My wife Lauren was pregnant at the
time, and it took a long time for us to
drive the car home. We just barely made
it before she went into labor," said
Jacob, who recently became a father for
the fifth time.
Jacob usually piles Lauren and their
five children into the Caddy limo and
drives it in the Dream Cruise. Then they
cap the day by visiting the Keego
Harbor Dairy Queen, and drawing
another crowd to inspect the limo.
"I've always been fascinated by old
cars, and the cruise is a classic car
owner's dream," said Jacob, who owns
Bottle Crew, a company in West
Bloomfield that supplies bottles to com-
mercial product manufacturers.

Allan Grant

"The Piranha Man" — that's how Allan
Grant of Troy is known in the Dream
Cruise, because he owns a black Piranha V-
8 convertible, one of only eight manufac-
tured by the now-defunct Barracuda
Enterprises in the late 1980s. The license
plate even says "One of Eight." The car is
based on a Mustang platform with a Cobra
grille, and Grant usually drives it during
the morning of the cruise, when the road is
not too crowded yet.
But he also often drives his 1976
Corvette in the cruise. "To give spectators a
laugh, I get a friend to dress up as old
Judge Augustus Woodward (for whom the road is
named), and he sits in the car and waves to every-
one," said Grant, who owns a Troy advertising
agency.
Born on Memorial Day, Grant, who has blue
eyes and red hair, prides himself on being very patri-
otic. He and a few buddies drove old cars together
in the 1950s, joined the Marines together and now
each owns some classic cars.
"No one told us back then that Jews usually don't
join the Marines," he reflected, "so we joined —
and we were sent with 1,000 other Marines by
President Eisenhower to quell an uprising in
Lebanon.

"We were always under fire by the rebels. But we
didn't mind serving in the Marines because we felt
we were being trained to help defend Israel if neces-
sary."
Grant usually can't wait for the Woodward cruise,
so he also drives in a cruise in the Downriver area in
July, and he writes a column for the monthly Cruise
News, a 72-page newsletter launched in the early
cruise days that goes out to about 10,000 cruise
buffs in the Midwest.
On the Woodward cruise day, Grant and others
get together at the home of one of his old pals, Dr.
Michael Sherbin of Bloomfield Hills, who owns a
1960s-era Rolls Royce.