Canton car restorer prepares for antique car show

CANTON, Texas (AP) — He reclines in his chair, inside a cramped office surrounded by wall-to-wall framed magazine clippings and 40-year-old photographs of his drag-racing days.

By most measures, Gary Hatfield is a modest man, wearing white tennis shoes with crew-cut socks, denim shorts and a mauve work shirt for his business, Hatfield Restorations, located on his family's more than half-century-old farm.

"When I was a kid, I always wanted to own a filling station," Hatfield said.

Now 60, his dream has transformed into more than that — it is a million-dollar business of restoring and customizing icons of America's past: Antique cars.

Hatfield got an early start in the car industry. He purchased his first car, a 1944 Chevrolet Coupe, at 11 years old. He sold a cow and a calf to pay for the paint and sold a horse to pay for interior work. The car was road-worthy by the time he got his driver's license when he was 14.

His father usually kept nice cars around but never was involved to this extent. Cars are part of Hatfield's heritage. It is in his blood.

"I've always been a car guy," he said.

After graduating from high school, he went to work in the oilfields, took a year of drafting at Henderson County Community College — now known as Trinity Valley Community College — and became a commercial artist in Dallas.

In the meantime, he typically was working on friends' cars.

But the day he was drafted in January, 1973, put things in perspective.

"I kept thinking, 'I've got to get out of this Army to get back to doing cars,'" Hatfield said.

After two years in the service, he was back home and racing a 1962 Corvette and a 1968 Camaro on the Owentown drag strip, northeast of Tyler on Texas Highway 155 He also raced on the salt flats in Bonneville, Utah.

He remembers when drivers from Dallas and Tyler would come out just to race him.

Eventually, he stopped racing and joined his father in a commercial construction company, building schools and a hospital in Canton. Throughout that venture, he kept working on cars.

Coming from a family of builders, he said the mechanical aspects and working with his hands are his biggest draws to cars.