Nothing screams manliness like Busch Light, a box of greasy Craftsman tools and a 1969 Mustang GT 350 with a blown engine, its body encased in rust from air intake to muffler.
Only a guy could appreciate a worthless hunk of metal, years from being restored to its original state. Only a guy could salivate over the words spark plugs, PVC joint and alternator, right?
Or to put it another way, when the term “car mechanic” comes to mind many people envision a man in a jumpsuit, covered in grease. But when the words “woman” and “car” are married, there’s the image of a clueless women looking for the oil spout or lying on top of a muscle car in a string bikini.
But these stereotypes don’t include Emily Holben. With her four inch black patent leather heels, funky gray-blue plastic framed glasses, perfectly flipped short brown hair and a string of pearls, she not only knows how to sew on a button, but she knows how to use a CV boot clamp. Holben doesn’t stop to file down her perfect oval fingernails or worry about chipping her red polish as she rips apart her starter. She’ll worry about that later.
Just because her work in progress happens to be a bright pink 1970 Volkswagen bug, don’t discount the fact that she’s helped build it from the ground up. Holben is unique because she’s chick who knows cars – or at least Volkswagen bugs from 1964 to 1972.
So if it’s true you can tell a lot about a person by the car she drives, what does Emily Holben’s 1970 hot pink bug say about her? She knows her way around a crankshaft as well as a color palette.
Holben, a senior advertising major at UNL, knew she wanted a Volkswagen bug with a pink, sometimes purplish exterior.
“I said even if I was 99 years old I was going to have a pink bug,” said the 22 year old. “And I did.”
But it wasn’t as if Holben could wander down to any old used car lot in her hometown of Fremont and pick up her dream car. It took a few years, lots of rereading instructions and some help from her father to create the dream car she still drives today.
“As a little girl she was curious about things and wanted to know how they worked and it really didn’t surprise me that she wanted to fix up a car,” said her father, Steve Holben.
That curiosity spurred the bug project back when she was just 13 and her father surprised Emily with the car he had bought for just $200.
“Well, it was drivable, but barely,” she said. “The floor was all rusted, there was household carpet in it and the outside was spray-painted what I would call Dr Pepper red.”
But that didn’t discourage Emily from seeing the potential. Father and daughter dove right in.
Basics and body
The first step was to strip everything, the carpet, seats, everything. Then they put the basics back together and took it to Omaha to have the body of the car spruced up a bit and the now infamous paint job done.
“It was in really rough shape,” the father said. “You could be Flintstone and put your feet through the floorboard.”
“When we drove it to Omaha to the body shop, the speedometer was in the trunk, so dad didn’t know how fast we were going,” added the daughter. “I was kind of glad I was too young to drive it.”
Once the nearly $2,000 pearl paint job was completed, it was back to work on the bug, installing everything from new fenders to a new engine.
The Holbens had to special order most of the parts for the bug from Germany and that caused some trouble.
“Well, stuff would just come in a box with [packing] peanuts and that’s it. If we even got instructions they were either in German or Spanish and we didn’t know either,” she said.
Lack of instructions caused one particularly memorable moment. Steve was convinced he knew which way the bumpers were to be attached and Emily was certain they went another way.
“Most of the time she was right, I was wrong,” he said.
“He put the plate for the shifter on backwards even though I told him that’s not the way it went, so I was driving around with second gear as reverse for a while,” she said.
He admits the error of his ways now, but at the time, they butted heads over several different parts. Though they worked their way through some trying times, father and daughter devised a plan for one of the most difficult tasks: rewiring the bug.
The duo spent hours in the garage with Emily hunched over the engine, balancing on the bumper, as Steve sat in a lawn chair and read her the instructions. But their lack of professional experience made for some frustrating nights as they used the trial and error method.
“We’d put things together, try them out and we’d blow a fuse,” he said. “We’d switch it around and then blow another.”
This led to sticking with the bare minimum – at least for a while. For the first year Emily had to choose between blinkers and windshield wipers, because if she used both a fuse would blow. She decided turn signals were more important and avoided rain at all costs.
Down and dirty
Though Emily Holben wasn’t a pro when she and her father started working on the bug, she learned to figure it without the help of a man.
“It was the funniest thing because we looked out the window to see Emily with grease from head to toe from working on replacing her fuel pump and her boyfriend was just sitting there, watching,” he said.
Despite her obvious dedication, being taken seriously as a chic gear-head was just one battle. The second was being taken seriously at a car show with a bright pink Volkswagen bug.
“I remember at the first car show she was still in high school and they wanted to put her in the high school class. Well, Emily wanted to go with the other cars,” Steve said. “I told her she would be competing against Camaros, Firebirds, Mustangs, but she wouldn’t hear it.”
Emily got an honorable mention at that car show, even though her über-feminized car went against the norm of muscle cars.
Not only did people not take her car seriously in competition, they also assumed her father did most of the work.
“People don’t realize all the nights I spent working on it. Yeah, dad helped, but if anything we worked together,” she said.
After several car shows in which Emily placed, people began to not only take the car seriously but made it a point to park near it. “By the time we finally quit the car shows, as we were signing up, people said they wanted to park next to the bug because it’d always get a good crowd,” Steve said.
Steve Holben said though the car took years to complete, it turned out a lot better than he could have ever imagined it when Emily first mentioned that she wanted a bug. “You can’t really tell her she can’t so something,” he said. “She’ll just try harder to find a way to do it.”
And her rebuilt, classic car is just one example of that drive.
