By John Howell Sr.

For most of the owners of vintage vehicles in the Batesville Shrine Club’s open car show Saturday, it is all about restoration to fine detail with brilliant paint and shiny chrome parts.

Not Heath McGovern.

“You can take away a lot of memories with paint,” McGovern said after Saturday’s show.

McGovern’s unpainted, partially completed 1947 Dodge “Rat Rod” stood in contrast to all that bright paint and chrome.

And it won the “Peoples’ Choice” Award.

The Shrine Club Open Car Show attracted 80 entries to the first-time event. It was the first show for McGovern’s Rat Rod as well, he said.

“Shiny is okay,” said McGovern. “We’ve built shiny before.”

But for McGovern, the best satisfaction is a vehicle that when kids approach, “We don’t mind them opening the doors.”

Not that his Rat Rod took any less time or effort. Starting last November with a chassis discovered under a tree in the Shady Grove community, McGovern, with the assistance of his wife, Heather, and Hollis Robinson and Taylor Wilson, the team “scrounged and scrounged” to locate parts that were absent. 

McGovern’s online research allowed him to determine the pickup’s origin as an Air Force vehicle. “It’s still Air Force blue on the inside,” he said.

To locate those missing body parts, he enlisted help from W. L. Lott of Batesville, this area’s dean of vintage auto collecting and restoring. 

“You’ve got to find the old cats to find the old parts,” McGovern said.

Assembling the body parts and power train involved “hours of cutting and welding,” and sometimes recutting and rewelding, he said.

The pickup is now powered by a 302 cubic inch Chevy engine with a Turbo 350 transmission. There will be other modifications in coming months to get ready for his Rat Rod’s next scheduled appearance at the October 4 “Showoff on the Square,” jointly sponsored by Delta Street Rods and the City of Batesville.

Reclaiming the old vehicles from conditions that appear beyond salvage to an untrained eye is a “passion,” McGovern said, “way beyond a hobby.”

“We’re still playing with cars,” he said.

With McGovern’s Rat Rod and its interior color in Air Force blue, he may have preserved a small piece of history.

The pickup’s vintage —1947 — was the year that the National Security Acted created the United States Air Force as a separate branch of the United States Armed Forces. It was initially part of the Army.