Fresno Bee, CA
March 14 2008
He keeps on driving: Blackie Gejeian, former racer and car
enthusiast, doesn’t shut off his engine with the 49th Fresno
Autorama, even after the death of his son.
by Diana Marcum, The Fresno Bee, Calif.
Mar. 14–No one could ever accuse Blackie Gejeian of not driving
hard.
Not when he was a 12-year-old driving a two-door sedan down raisin
ranch dirt roads. Not when he was a professional race car driver.
And especially now, when he’s hell on three wheels — speeding around
the Fresno Convention Center on a motorized scooter — yelling
(always yelling) orders as he sets up his 49th Fresno Autorama, a
collection of the finest show cars in the world.
He might not appear so, with his leonine presence, but Blackie is 82.
He just underwent his third hip replacement ("I’ve got more nuts and
bolts in me than a drugstore has pills!" he shouts.)
His son, who he always refers to as "my boy Charlie," died last
month.
But Blackie believes in survival. And to him, survival has always
meant going flat-out.
"No matter what happens in life, you cannot stop," he says. "I’ve
been through a lot of crashes in races and in life, but still I keep
going."
Well, granted, earlier on this day, he was hollering about quitting:
"I’m done! Boy, I’m telling you, 49 years of this $%#@ and it never
gets any easier," he said.
But Blackie throws his head back and laughs when his words are tossed
back at him.
"Truth is that this is my life. If you don’t have something in your
life that you love to do, then what do you have?" he asks. "Win, lose
or draw, I love it."
He did think about canceling the show after Charlie died.
"I about pulled the pins. I didn’t want anyone to think that the show
was more important to me than my boy," he says.
But at a family meeting, his brother and daughter convinced him to
carry on. They worried he might die too, without a race to run. The
2008 Fresno Autorama is dedicated to Charlie Gejeian.
The custom cars are coming in from all over the world. Blackie picked
every one for his invitation-only show.
At most car shows, owners apply and pay a fee. Blackie chooses the
cars he wants and then pays for the owners to bring them. His
invitations are rarely turned down.
"Blackie Gejeian is a legend. Anyone who has been in the car business
for more than a day knows who he is," says Mike Gray, 43, who owns
Advanced Restorations in Sacramento.
"When you get picked to be in his show, it’s the biggest thing in the
world."
According to an article last year in Street Rodder magazine: "The
Fresno Autorama has long been regarded as one of the finest indoor
car shows held in North America."
At the convention center, Blackie is deciding where each car should
be displayed, moving them around and rearranging them as if they were
Hot Wheels instead of full-sized, million-dollar cars.
"It’s going to look like a –#&$ Easter egg basket by the time I’m
done. Nothing but color," Blackie shouts.
He loves cars. He wants to talk about dual exhausts and candy-colored
paint jobs and everything else that goes into "the most beautiful,
the most custom hot rods in the world."
His phone is constantly ringing. He always picks up and yells
"Blackie! What?" into the receiver, while still shouting orders to
those in his vicinity.
The people he’s bossing around respond with respect and bemusement.
"You’re just like Patton," says a man who has brought in his car from
Las Vegas and had to move it several times at Blackie’s whim.
Andy Meyers, 42, Blackie’s right-hand man during the Autorama, smiles
every time Blackie yells at him to do something.
"He spent his life with exhaust pipes next to his ears, so he yells,"
he says. "But he’s the sweetest guy in the world. Whether he likes it
or not, I’ll always see him as a father figure."
Blackie slows to a calmer pace only when he talks about the raisin
ranch in Easton.
He still farms the land his grandfather and father worked. His family
were survivors of the Armenian genocide who immigrated to the San
Joaquin Valley.
"Seventeen of us lived in that one farm house. And you’ve never seen
such happy people. My dad played the violin. One uncle the clarinet.
Another uncle the tambourine. At nights they would play, and my
mother and aunts would dance in a circle, the old Armenian dances,
holding hands."
He learned to drive on those dirt roads.
"When I was a race car driver, I was really good in dirt, and it was
because I remembered our fields and orchards."
He went off to World War II as Mike Gejeian, came back and became
Blackie.
"When I came home from the war, I built a roadster, painted it black.
We wore black leathers. Ever since, I was Blackie. Nobody, nobody
knew me by any other name."
In his Easton garage is a photo of Blackie driving the roadster —
looking more bad boy handsome than James Dean himself — and the car
itself.
He built the street racer in 1945 in his dad’s barn. In one of those
dangerous, illegal races, there was a crash. The car got cut in half
and Blackie was almost killed. He spent 10 years rebuilding the car,
and in 1955 it was named "World’s Most Beautiful Roadster" by the
Oakland Grand National Roadster Show.
Even when he became a professional driver, he built his own cars.
"I never drove for anyone. If you drive for somebody else, you’re
always afraid of busting up their car. I drove the way I wanted."
The ranch house is a collection of past and present. There’s stacks
of Autorama entry forms on the dining room table. The walls are full
of framed photographs — one a ’70s promotional shot of a
well-muscled, bare-chested Blackie on a motorcycle, long brown hair
blowing in the breeze of a photo-shoot fan. Others show a
white-haired Blackie holding his grandchildren.
There are baskets of plants and flowers from Charlie’s funeral on the
living room floor.
Charlie and Blackie, both divorced men, bached it together the last
10 years of Charlie’s life.
They went to car shows together. Every night Charlie, an accomplished
cook, made dinner.
"There’s a great relationship. A father and son sitting at the table
together every night," says Blackie.
"My boy Charlie had a heart of gold. He helped a lot of people with
chemical dependency and alcoholism. He’d reach right into the fire
and pull them out."
But when Charlie, 56, backslid into drugs after decades of living
clean, no one could pull him out. No one was as disappointed in
Charlie as Charlie. He used a gun to take his own life.
Andy Meyers, who’s fielding calls and handling Autorama logistics for
Blackie, says Charlie was his best friend.
He says that in some ways, Charlie wasn’t so different from Blackie.
"Maybe Charlie got some of that tunnel vision too. He could be a
tormented soul. But he was the kind of guy you could call up in the
middle of the night. I did call him up in the middle of the night."
Blackie says he shakes a lot of hands, greets a lot of people at his
car shows, but he never shook so many hands as at Charlie’s funeral,
standing there for an hour and 45 minutes while people paid their
respects.
"One woman came from Ohio. She said Charlie saved her life," Blackie
says, wiping away tears.
He’s just now walking after the hip surgery, but four days after this
weekend’s Autorama, he’ll be at another car show, looking for hot
rods to bring to Fresno. Next year’s show is the 50th, and he wants
to make it bigger than ever. He says he can get cars to come to his
show that no one else can get.
"You have to have a feel, a passion, for what you’re doing in life.
You have to have guts," he says. "It keeps the motor running."