What do a Buick Wildcat, Pringles Potato Crisps, an erupting volcano, and laser spectroscopy have in common?

The “gear-head” fix that is My Classic Car has been in production since 1996. It has appeared on many networks including TNN, Speedvision, Motor Trend, MavTV, and recently on Pluto.

The genuinely enthusiastic host, Dennis Gage corrals owners and their unique cars to present on each episode. The series has been running for more than 25 years. Suffice to say Dennis piques our interest and keeps us tuned in as he shows us some cars we may never own, ones that we may have once owned, and ones that we’ve never even heard of. Presenting that captivating showcase of surprise and nostalgia is what Dennis is so good at.

Dennis received the Lee Iacocca Award in 2014 and was inducted into the Specialty Equipment Market Association (SEMA) Hall of Fame in 2015. Dennis has served on the SEMA Board of Directors, as well as several academic and industry advisory boards. He’s also the executive producer of shows including Corbin’s Ride On, Trippin’ on Two Wheels, and the reality series Texas Hardtails.

In this issue, we are honored to have the opportunity to interview the man that spotlights automobile icons, and in turn, has become an icon himself.

When did you first remember being interested in cars?

I’m a farm boy from Illinois. My dad was a farmer with a small family farm. My mom ran a cafe in town. They both were into cars, fast cars.

I grew up in the sixties and so I think anybody that grew up in that era it couldn’t have escaped being into cars. We [consumers] were marketed to, I mean, people don’t realize that but we love cars, and muscle cars in particular because of Madison Avenue. It was manufactured desire.

The Big Three were just looking for a new market segment and that market segment was the youth. They’re always look for an unmet consumer need and in this instance, the need was the need for speed. And so they slapped big engines in grocery-getters and proof, they had muscle cars. And they marketed the crap out of them to us.

As long as I can remember I’ve been into cars. My dad had a this is a 1953 Buick Special with a straight eight car and it was pretty quick. I guess it might have been 1965 because I was born in 1953 so that would have made me about twelve or thirteen years. Somehow, and  I never understood this and I still don’t, but my dad convinced our small town Buick dealer to let him test drive… a brand new Wildcat.

Well, we drove it to Wyoming. I’m like, how did you pull that off? He drove us to Wyoming and back and then we didn’t buy the car. I never understood that.

But you know, that’s also where I saw the west and was absolutely blown away. And, you know, it led to my graduate school out in the west, and climbing and all that stuff including eventually living out there. All from a Wildcat test drive.

Your first of many cars was a ‘59 T-Bird. How old were you and how did owning that car affect your daily life?

Yeah I was fifteen. It was an incredible experience. I scraped a hundred bucks together and I bought the thing at twilight.

The next morning I woke up. I’m like, huh? I’m not sure what that thing is sitting out there… it was pink!

In 1959, Ford had a color called Flamingo, which was a light pink, that looked like white at twilight. But it was in fact, pink. I learned so much from that car and one of the things I learned was never buy a car at dusk.

I drove the hell out of it and threw a rod. Ended up, selling it for $25. It was in pretty bad shape. Once I hit a house with it. Before I even had my license, um, on the 4th of July. Yep, into a house, it jumped right out in front of me!

Which would you say is your favorite of the cars you own now and then tell us why?

In general, it’s the one with the four wheels and the internal combustion engine. It’s usually the car I just got out of.

I’m a coupe guy really. I think that the design is usually more complete with a coupe. Everybody wants a convertible, but I think coupes look better. Convertibles can look like hell with the top up, for the most part.

I got a ‘99 Jaguar XK8 Coupe, an ‘06, Mercedes CLS, which is a stunningly beautiful car, and ‘91 Lincoln Mark 7, “a Bankers hot rod”. I love those cars. And then, a newer Lincoln twin turbo all-wheel drive, a 425 horse MKZ, which is just an amazing car. And an F 150, and I have a couple of utilitarian things. So that’s kind of an array now.

I still have an older ‘67 T-Bird, and a ‘02 T-Bird . I’m a T-Bird guy.

Your younger years as a musician were highlighted with being in a band that opened for legends like Waylon Jennings and Charlie Daniels. Tell us what your instrument is and share one crazy backstage story.

I did that between getting my degrees. I did my undergrad but majored in both chemistry and physics. And I did award-winning research in quantum physics and I was just fried at the end of that. It was also the seventies, you know. So, I mean it was wild.

I remember it a bit foggy. So between all of that, and then the quantum physics, I was pretty crispy. I was slated to go right off to University of Wisconsin on to theoretical chemistry, but I’d always been a musician, having played in rock bands in high school and the coffee house circuit through college.

It was the end of my senior year and I went to an Eagles concert in Chicago and their warm-up band had this guy playing a pedal, steel guitar. I’d never even really seen one. The guy just blew me away. It was just unbelievable. I thought, damn, I got to get me one of those. And I literally the next day went out and bought one and then taught myself to play it.

I put this band together in the Chicago area, seven months later we were playing and I got picked up by a bigger band that led to this brief period of touring.

I did I play with bands for two years, but that was clearly going to shorten my life expectancy.

You said something about a backstage story. The easiest one for me is just to say that I made the decision to go to graduate school while staring down the barrel of a .45 in Selma Alabama, We had a dispute with a club owner and when he pulled out the gun. He won the dispute.

We found a surprising side of you that you own several patents, a Ph.D. in chemistry, and worked with Procter & Gamble on the Pringles line of snack chips. You were also lead in the development of Boost nutritional drink as Director of Global Product Development for Bristol-Myers Squibb.

Tell us more about how this became a part of your life.

I did ten years at Procter & Gamble and I was involved in Pringles, I was in Cincinnati and did pretty much all their food products in the in the ‘80s. I was in product development and  that was a really great experience.

Then after ten years of that, I was made an offer I just couldn’t refuse. I didn’t want to leave, but I just got this great offer by Bristol-Myers Squibb to be the Director of Global Product Development.

That’s how I got to Evansville, Indiana. I traveled all over the world as a sort of roving ambassador because I was a young age, the technical guy, but I’d spent ten years P&G, so I had a lot of marketing and consumer research background and I could speak both languages – so to speak.

I did a lot of products but the most well-known one is Boost nutritional drink (which I have for lunch two or three times a week still). Then in a weird twist of fate just fell into this TV thing.

What’s the wild fact that ties you to the Mount St Helens eruption in Washington state in 1980?

That’s what ended up being the basis of my Ph.D. dissertation. I went out there to grad school but it was really so that I could climb and winter mountaineer.

I was working away on my Ph.D. research when Mount Saint Helens erupted. We were in Moscow, Idaho, three hundred miles away, and still got two inches of ash. That was really a big deal and real big concern. What is this shit, you know, and are there any health implications? It turns out there were, due to the presence of a crystalline silica in the inhalable size particles which can lead to respiratory fibrosis called silicosis.

It’s an incredibly hard analysis to do. I mean, it’s hard to tell crystalline from amorphis silica, you know, blah, blah, blah. But I have been working around on the side with this obscure laser technique and I was just doing it because we had this instrument, but nobody knew how use it. And I thought it was cool because it had this big honkin’ argon ion laser on it.

So I’ve been playing with it and knew my way around it and it occurred to me that there was a way to do this. The technique is Laser Raman Spectroscopy, and it could in fact, do that differentiation. It was able to do that analysis and determine what was in that ash and what the health implications were.

I got national acclaim for all that. And obviously I’m one of the few people that can say that their Ph.D. dissertation project literally fell from the sky, because it did.

Your trademark mustache makes you so recognizable. When did you first decide to sport this style?

I was born with it! And you should see my baby pictures.

Actually the stash is a leftover from a ZZ Top-style beard and hair down to my belt back in 1975. I was tired of the beard so I cut the beard away but left the stash. I curled it up and I’ve had this stash since 1975. Now, it’s basically the only place on my head hair will grow, except my ears.

It must be quite a challenge to narrow down the cars on location to the ones you decide to feature on My Classic Car. Do you have a method?

We’ve shot in all 50 states, eight of the ten provinces in Canada, seven European countries, even Trinidad and Tobago. My philosophy is, everybody gets to play.

But I’ve absolutely been Cuda, Camaro and Mustang’d to death, you know? And not that I don’t love all those cars. I have owned all those cars but now I’m looking for something you don’t see everyday and that’s what the show has become known for.

You have such great facts and insights on the cars you spotlight. How are you able to be so detailed?

I have a near photographic memory. I know almost everything I’ve ever been told and I’ve learned from everybody. I’m just really observant and I ask good questions. I just want to learn about this car and who knows more about it than the person that owns it. My one skill is I’m easy to talk to. I can make people forget that there’s a camera.

So much of daily life was interrupted while the pandemic spread. How did Covid affect production of My Classic Car?

The beauty of my situation is I’ve got a quarter of a century deep library. We do twenty-six episodes a year. Nobody does twenty-six episodes a year. I mean, a season anymore is ten.

I have a shitload of stuff so what we’ve done is dug into that archive and  produce  a new variant of the show.

We’re 100% pure automotive entertainment. We launched this year with a new format of the show and are we are the number one show on the Motor Trend Network.

You seem to always be in motion. Tell us what you are up to these days.

I’m playing with my motorcycles and cars. I’m really looking to get a little bit more control of my life and get a little more of my actual life back for what little of it there actually is left.

I’ve flown over two-million miles on Delta alone throughout my career and have been gone a lot and now I’m looking forward to hanging out.

I’ve also got this cool collaboration with Fireball Tim Lawrence. He and I have teamed up to do a fun coloring book called Orphans and Oddballs.

I like his style. He is an exceptional person. He’s a car guy and he gets it. So he does fairly accurate renderings of automobiles with a little artistic license. He puts them in these fantasy environments which I just think is such a great, cool juxtaposition. And especially as a coloring book you can do all sorts of stuff to make it your own.

What is your spirit animal?

Eagle.

I strive to soar. I love high altitude. I love expansive perspective. Freedom. The freedom of flight.

Complete this sentence: I’m most happy when…

When I’m in the mountains in Oregon.

I will be at a summit on my 68th birthday in August.
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Thank you very much, Dennis. It’s been an honor. We wish you the best soaring of your life.

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