ATLANTA — When jazz trumpeter, vocalist and bandleader Joe Gransden, 53, finally tracked down the car of his dreams, it was sitting under a tree in Arab, Alabama, providing a home for snakes, mice and mold.
The black beauty that was the joy of his adolescence had been in the weather for 15 years, during which time the T-top had been leaking, the floorboards rotting, the dashboard disintegrating and the firewall crumbling. The engine was blown.
He cried. But they were tears of joy, because he knew it was his car. “The buff mark I put on the front fender 30 years ago was still there!” he said. “It was in bad shape but the bones were there, the sheet metal was there.”
How Gransden was able to locate a car that had passed through four other owners and into oblivion is a wildly improbable tale. What happened after he found it was almost supernatural.
“This car is a miracle,” said Rick Deiters, the Miami, Fla., super-mechanic who brought Gransden’s Pontiac back from the dead, then almost killed it again. “It was like finding a needle in a haystack.”
To understand the passion behind Gransden’s relentless quest, it helps to know about the Firebird Trans Am, a monster that came along during the era of the Jurassic car, when giant engines powered Detroit’s finest.
Pontiac introduced the Firebird in 1967 to compete with the Ford Mustang (created in 1964). The Firebird used the same platform as the Chevy Camaro, which had been born five months earlier.
In 1977 Hal Needham chose the redesigned Firebird Trans Am as the car that Burt Reynolds would drive in “Smokey and the Bandit,” a movie that made $300 million on a $4.3 million investment. He got four cars from Pontiac and wrecked them all. It brought the slap-happy cinema of car chases to a delirious new high and turned Burt Reynolds into the South’s favorite low-key action hero.
It also turned Trans Ams into the ultimate muscle car. “Nothing else came close,” said Scott Warmack, co-host, with his brother Tod, of the 2018 Discovery Channel reality show, “Trans Am” in which the pair restore vintage Trans Ams and build new replicas from scratch. (Episodes can still be viewed online.)
Watching “Smokey and the Bandit” is “a homework assignment for people who work in my shop,” said Warmack.
Of course the movie and car appealed to all regions. After “Smokey,” Trans Am sales more than doubled in two years. Gransden grew up near Buffalo, N.Y., and saved up to buy his 1979 model when he turned 17. He was already a talented trumpeter. After a few semesters at Fredonia State University, he toured with the Tommy Dorsey big band for a year, lived in Manhattan, then relocated to Atlanta to study music.
To cover tuition he sold his beloved special edition Firebird.
“I really needed a Honda,” said Gransden. “In Atlanta a nine-mile-per-gallon four speed Trans Am was not the way to go.” On the other hand, “I really didn’t want to sell that car.”
Robert Baitis, a transplant from Germany, bought it in 1993 for $7,500 then moved to an apartment in Huntsville, Alabama, where the Trans Am had to sit out in a parking lot most of the day.
Baitis felt bad about that, so he sold it to his mechanic in Alabama for $9,500, before moving back to Atlanta. The mechanic died, leaving the car to his widow, who remarried and sold the car again, to someone in a small town south of Huntsville.
In the meantime, Gransden married, became a father and survived cancer. He flourished in a successful career as a bandleader, horn player and singer. He reached a point where he wanted to enjoy a few of the sweet prizes available in a fleeting life. Urged on by his son Joey, he decided to track down that pony car.
He had no vehicle identification number, and didn’t know how to find Baitis, now in North Carolina. He did some research and contacted Rick Deiters, the preeminent Trans Am specialist in Miami. Deiters said without a VIN it would be tough but he put a photo of Gransden’s vehicle on his website.
In 2019, Baitis, who hadn’t quite escaped the charm of the Pontiac, was scrolling through Deiters’ website one night and saw his old car. The one with the buff mark on the right front fender. Within hours he was talking to Gransden. Baitis found the VIN through 20-year-old records at his insurance company, and Gransden tracked it to Alabama but the trail went cold there. No one had registered it since 2002. That’s when Gransden hired private investigator Tim McWhirter, who found a name and an address for the owner.
Arab, Alabama is a small mountain town. Gransden and McWhirter knocked on the door. No answer. A German shepherd leapt snarling at the fence. There, behind the chain link, was the car. It looked bad. But the buff mark was there.
A neighbor drove by and said the owner wasn’t home but suggested that Gransden and McWhirter visit the owner’s sister, at a trailer park just up the hill. At the trailer, pit bulls ran free. The sister came to the door. After some bargaining with the brother, Gransden bought back his old car for $6,000. He sent it on a flatbed to Trans Am Specialties of Florida in Miami, where Deiters keeps perhaps 80 Trans Ams that he’s restoring, selling or buying.
After four years in the shop, and many thousands in restoration costs Gransden’s Firebird came home.
A container truck brought the once and future Trans Am to his Roswell garage on the last day of June.
Said Gransden: “It feels complete. That journey is complete.”
